Rise to Greatness

by David Von Drehle

  A more welcome breakthrough came at the Gilbert & Bennett factory in Georgetown, Connecticut, begun as a horsehide tannery in the early 1800s. Perplexed by the waste of hair stripped from hides, Benjamin Gilbert soon branched into the business of stuffing horsehair mattresses and seat cushions. Then he began weaving the hair into fine mesh to make sieves. As technology advanced and slender metal wire became widely available, Gilbert’s company developed longer-lasting wire-cloth sieves. When the war broke out and Gilbert & Bennett was suddenly unable to sell sieves in the South, the company found itself with piles of surplus metal mesh—until one clever employee thought to paint the stuff, stretch it on frames, and thus create the durable window screen.

  This invention had yet to reach Washington in July 1862, where it was sorely needed. “The gas lights over my desk are burning brightly and the windows of the room are open, and all bugdom outside seems to have organized a storming party to take the gas light, in numbers which seem to exceed the contending hosts at Richmond,” Nicolay wrote from the White House on the sultry night of July 20. “The air is swarming with them, they are on the ceiling, the walls and the furniture in countless numbers, they are buzzing about the room, and butting their heads against the window panes, they are on my clothes, in my hair, and on the sheet I am writing on.”

  It was to escape that buggy misery that the Lincolns had moved to the cottage at the Soldiers’ Home, where Mary found her new surroundings both therapeutic and depressing. “The drives and walks around here are delightful,” she wrote, and “each day brings its visitors.” But she couldn’t gaze on the lawns and pathways without thinking of “our idolised boy,” who would have had so much fun playing with Tad “in this sweet spot.” Writing to a friend, she confessed that the memories of Willie and the anguish of knowing that “he is not with us … oftentimes for days overcomes me.”

  To make matters worse, Bob, visiting from Harvard, announced that he wanted to join the army. He had been thinking hard about the matter since returning to school after Willie’s funeral; in March he had bought a book called Cadet Life at West Point. His father’s call for more troops undoubtedly fueled his desire, because Lincoln’s critics weren’t shy about suggesting that the president’s own able-bodied son should step to the head of the line. But Mary would not hear of it: “We have lost one son, and his loss is as much as I can bear.”

  Lincoln had good reason to worry about his wife, for she remained extremely fragile. A newspaper reporter called on her at the cottage that summer and was shocked when she “burst into a passion of tears … she could neither think nor talk of anything but Willie.” Lincoln approved of his son’s soldierly ambitions, but to keep the peace with Mary and bolster her shaky recovery, Lincoln supported her decision to forbid Bob to enlist.

  Because this family crisis took place in the midst of the greater calamities, Lincoln had little time to discuss the matter with his son. Young Tad’s needs were easy to meet: a hug, a lap, a toy. What Bob required, his father could not give. “Any great intimacy between us became impossible,” the younger Lincoln said years later. “I scarcely ever had ten minutes’ quiet talk with him during his Presidency, on account of his constant devotion to business.”

  * * *

  Early on Monday morning, July 21, Salmon Chase was pursuing one of his favorite hobbies: gossiping about Seward. His first visitor that day was the strange and voluble Adam de Gurowski, a Polish count who wore blue-tinted glasses and, occasionally, a blue veil to match. A man of the world, fluent in several languages, the count spent his days translating foreign newspaper articles for the State Department, his nights flitting from dinner party to salon to hotel lobby, and every free minute recording his thoughts and experiences in a diary written in ink and venom.

  Like most abolitionists, Gurowski blamed Seward for Lincoln’s cautious policy on slavery, so he was delighted to have some new intelligence for Chase. At dinner the previous night, Gurowski had heard Seward expounding on the virtues of a coup d’état. The other guests, many of them diplomats, “were very much disgusted,” reported the count. Chase knew Seward well enough not to take this very seriously: blustering at dinner was one of his trademarks. The secretary of state “loved to talk, was not above monopolizing the conversation,” a biographer wrote, “and had many moods, being by turns challenging, pontifical, a cynic, a raconteur, a mimic—altogether something of a show-off, and one whose words could not always be trusted.”

  Chase had barely said farewell to the count when he received a note from one of Seward’s messengers announcing that the president had called a meeting of the cabinet for ten A.M. Chase was surprised; as he put it in his diary, “It has been so long since any consultation has been held that it struck me as a novelty.” Upon arriving at the White House, the Treasury secretary found Lincoln in a stern mood, “profoundly concerned” and “determined.”

  The time had come, the president announced to his cabinet, to harden the administration’s policies on the war and the related institution of slavery. He had drafted four orders and wanted to have the reactions of those present. The first would give Union armies permission to confiscate whatever supplies they could find in the Southern regions where they camped and fought. Long supply lines, easily cut by Rebel cavalry raids, were killing the momentum of Federal forces from the Shenandoah to the Mississippi. No longer would hungry men in blue march past crops and livestock being grown to feed the rebellion; they would eat the food themselves. Not a word of dissent came from the cabinet.

  Lincoln’s second order, which authorized the use of contrabands as army laborers, also met unanimous approval. Order number three attempted to protect whatever pro-Union sentiment might exist in the South: Federal commanders would be instructed to keep records of confiscated supplies and laborers so that Southerners able to prove their loyalty could be compensated for their losses. Chase had serious doubts: How practical would it be to keep scrupulous track of every bushel of corn and every slaughtered hog gathered by armies numbering in the tens of thousands? It seemed an enormous waste of effort “for the benefit of the inhabitants of rebel States,” he said. Others in the cabinet agreed.

  Lincoln’s fourth order was designed to push the colonization project along. But the cabinet had no appetite for this problematic topic; the discussion quickly stalled.

  Edwin Stanton got the meeting restarted with his own related agenda item. Several thousand troops had recently been withdrawn from David Hunter’s command on the Southern coast and sent to McClellan. Now Hunter was reporting that he was too weak to defend the Sea Island cotton plantations in the event that the Rebels tried to take them back. The general wanted permission to arm and train 5,000 contrabands to help him hold his position. Stanton felt the step was necessary, and both Chase and Seward agreed. This time the president was the lone dissenter. As Chase put it, Lincoln “was not prepared to decide the question.”

  * * *

  Still on that tightrope, Lincoln was acutely aware that tensions were rising across the country in response to the blizzard of abolitionist activity in Congress. Some of those who objected responded with violence: recent days had seen arson in Brooklyn, beatings in Chicago, riots in Indiana and Ohio. The proslavery congressman Clement Vallandigham, of Ohio, warned a crowd of white workers in Dayton that the abolitionists, “having brought on the war, were now trying to bring a horde of negroes into Ohio to take the bread out of their mouths.” In Washington, the Evening Star echoed the alarm: “The real object” of employing black men in the army, the paper claimed, was “to aid the scheme of forcing negro social and industrial equality upon the white laborers of the country.” Even in Massachusetts, disgruntled Republicans were trying to mount an election challenge to Senator Sumner, whose term was ending. The mayor of Boston warned Lincoln that the abolitionists of his state, though loud, were small in number, and did not represent the man on the street.

  In the face of such intense resistance, would the president press ahead or turn back? The cabin
et got its answer the next day, July 22, when Lincoln called the council together again. Before the appointed hour, Chase briefed the president on Union finances. The Treasury was having trouble selling bonds in the wake of the peninsula retreat, and was now some $10 million behind in paying bills. The markets must be reassured of the Union’s will to win, Chase asserted, and he suggested sending this signal by firing McClellan and arming black soldiers. “The President came to no conclusion,” Chase noted.

  When the cabinet reconvened—meeting in the White House library rather than in the president’s office—Lincoln greeted them with startling news. In his hand he held two pages, the result of many hours of drafting over several weeks. The president said he wanted the cabinet’s opinion of what he had written; he let them know, however, that his decision in this matter was final. There would be no vote. With that, he launched into the first known reading of his Emancipation Proclamation. Dry, legalistic, and dispassionate, the style of the document gave little hint of the grandeur or boldness of its purpose. The last few words, however, rang bell-like: As of January 1, 1863, “all persons held as slaves” in places where the rebellion continued “shall then, thenceforward, and forever, be free.” Freighted with millions of lives and born from decades of struggle, those final words pointed the war, the Union, and American history in a new direction.

  Lincoln would be criticized for the proclamation’s failure to address slavery in the loyal border states, but in this he was hemmed in by Taney and by his own sense of constitutional limits. He had no war powers where there was no insurrection. And as the seven men in the room with him well understood, the president was taking a tremendous step by liberating the entire slave population of the South. As the historian Allen Guelzo has put it, Lincoln was speaking “not just of slaves used in Confederate war service or the slaves of disloyal masters but of all the slaves, without exception, in all rebellious areas. And not merely seized as contraband, or vaguely ‘free,’ but permanently free, ‘thenceforward, and forever.’”

  After Lincoln’s reading of the explosive document, Attorney General Bates was the first to find his voice. He offered his endorsement, with one extraordinary reservation: the proclamation ought to be accompanied by an executive order for the immediate forced deportation, not just of former slaves, but of all blacks from the United States. Bates sought the end of slavery, but he could not imagine a multiracial nation, for he was “fully convinced that the two races could not live and thrive” together. Lincoln did not respond to this proposal.

  Postmaster General Montgomery Blair spoke next, focusing on the political dangers of emancipation. The proclamation would “cost the Administration the fall elections,” he warned. Bates and Blair were on the conservative end of Lincoln’s cabinet, but Chase, who sat at the other end of the spectrum, had concerns as well. The Treasury secretary wondered whether the proclamation was too extreme: “Emancipation could be much better and more quietly accomplished by allowing Generals to organize and arm the slaves.” That would begin the process of emancipation without stirring up an insurrection by slaves too impatient to await the arrival of liberating Union troops.

  But it was Seward who offered the most persuasive objection. Though he didn’t say it, Seward believed that a proclamation was unnecessary. As he later explained his thinking, the “death knell” of slavery “was tolled when Abraham Lincoln was elected president”; the passage of time and the friction of war would do the rest. But now he confined his concerns to a single point: he told the president and his fellow cabinet members that the timing was wrong. “The depression of the public mind, consequent upon our repeated reverses, is so great that I fear the effect of so important a step,” Seward declared. To issue this extreme statement when the Union had been set on its heels could wreck American foreign policy. Europe would read Lincoln’s words as encouraging an uprising of slaves against their masters. England and France would fear the destruction of the cotton industry for years to come. Moreover, Europe would scoff at the notion that the commander in chief of a retreating army could claim dominion over his enemy’s slaves. “It may be viewed as the last measure of an exhausted government, a cry for help … [a] last shriek on the retreat,” he predicted, and foreign intervention would likely result. Seward suggested waiting “until you can give it to the country supported by military success.”

  For all his reflection, Lincoln had not thought of this angle. As he later recalled, “the wisdom of the view of the Secretary of State struck me with very great force.” He decided to wait for a battlefield victory, which he hoped to achieve as soon as he straightened out the deployment of forces in Virginia.

  * * *

  Lincoln had all but ignored McClellan since their conversations at Harrison’s Landing. As the days passed in silence, the general gradually deduced that an ill wind was blowing. The president’s failure to answer his treatise on war policy almost certainly meant that Lincoln’s thinking was moving in a very different direction. His paranoia rising, McClellan suspected a new conspiracy to deny him reinforcements and then fire him for failing to advance. “I am confident that [Lincoln] would relieve me tomorrow if he dared to do so,” Little Mac wrote to this wife. “His cowardice alone prevents it. I can never regard him with other feelings than those of thorough contempt—for his mind, heart & morality.” To his political friend Samuel Barlow, he complained, “I know nothing, absolutely nothing as to the plans and intentions of the Gov[ernmen]t.” What he did know, he added, was “that the rascals will get rid of me as soon as they dare—they all know my opinion of them. They are aware that I have seen through their villainous schemes & that if I succeed my foot will be on their necks.”

  McClellan’s belief that the war could be contained and civilized was unshaken by the ordeal of the Seven Days battles. This genteel fantasy led him to send an apologetic letter to the proprietor of the large tobacco plantation where Robert E. Lee’s mother had grown up. Located not far from McClellan’s Berkeley headquarters, Shirley was the oldest plantation in the country; the current owner, one of Lee’s cousins, was complaining that the recent battles had damaged the estate and cost him eighteen runaway slaves. McClellan replied: “I have done my best to secure protection to private property, but I confess that circumstances beyond my control have often defeated my purposes.” Though Little Mac opposed the rebellion, he was decidedly in favor of the culture that spawned it. Writing to his wife, he indulged himself in a reverie of a golden age, an era “when abolitionists were not dreamed of [and] … psalm singing yankees were animals as rare as camelopards & black swans. I suspect [the Southerners] had a pretty good time, interrupted only by chills & fever, bad luck in gambling [and] the trouble of providing for their woolly headed dependents.”

  McClellan also took dangerous comfort in “letters from the North urging me to march on Washington” and seize control of the government. Leading antiwar Democrats, including former mayor Fernando Wood of New York, sailed to Harrison’s Landing for long talks with the disgruntled general, and a foul climate of conspiracy settled over Berkeley plantation. When Ambrose Burnside, a friend of McClellan’s and the hero of Albemarle Sound, went to Harrison’s Landing to get a firsthand look at the army, he was shocked at what he heard. A group of division commanders, important men with stars on their shoulders, spoke openly one evening about turning on Washington and toppling the government. “I don’t know what you fellows call this talk, but I call it flat Treason, by God!” Burnside scolded.

  McClellan seemed to enjoy flirting with the idea of an insurrection of his own. “If they leave me here neglected much longer I shall feel like taking my rather large military family to Wash[ington] to seek an explanation,” he wrote his wife. And later: “I do not believe that any nation was ever accursed with such a set of people as those who now rule in Wash[ington].” Mary Ellen McClellan only encouraged him: “I almost wish you would march up to Washington & frighten those people a little. I long to have the time come when you can have your revenge.” />
  The general only partly understood his own situation. He was correct that Lincoln had decided to be rid of him, but he was wrong about what was causing the delay. It wasn’t cowardice; Lincoln was waiting on the travel plans of Henry Halleck. The day after the president left McClellan at Harrison’s Landing, he secretly elevated Halleck to the vacant post of general in chief. Halleck was delayed in reaching Washington, however, by Morgan’s cavalry raid in Kentucky. When he finally arrived, on July 23, Lincoln steered him straight to Berkeley plantation, and at the same time made Halleck’s promotion public.

  McClellan’s meeting with the new commander was predictably awkward. Little Mac considered the appointment a “slap in the face” and resented being placed under “a man whom I know by experience to be my inferior.” For the moment, Halleck’s assignment was merely to size up the situation and decide what to do next. He could restart the campaign with a realistic number of reinforcements, or he could pull the Army of the Potomac back from the peninsula. The president had also told him that he could keep McClellan or fire him, “as he pleased.” Lincoln had at long last concluded that this general would never be the man to win a hard war. To Orville Browning, he said: “If by magic [I] could reinforce [McClellan] with 100,000 men today he would be in an ecstasy over it, thank [me] for it, and tell [me] that he would go to Richmond tomorrow,” but “when tomorrow came he would telegraph that he had certain information that the enemy had 400,000 men, and that he could not advance without reinforcements.”