Rise to Greatness

by David Von Drehle

  Halleck was arguably in no position to criticize another general for begging reinforcements, not after his own endless calls for more men as he inched his way to Corinth. But Halleck’s mind was set against McClellan for other reasons. The disposition of Union troops in Virginia now violated basic principles of military science as laid out in Halleck’s own textbook. McClellan’s army was linked to the newly combined force under John Pope by “exterior lines”—military terminology for lines of communication longer and less compact than those of the enemy. Worse, the Confederates, with their “interior lines,” were poised between the two Union forces and thus in a strong position to concentrate first against one and then against the other. Given that the Federals still believed that the Rebels outnumbered them, this situation seemed extremely risky. To mitigate the danger, Halleck had already advised Lincoln by telegraph that the Virginia campaign must to be reorganized under a single general.

  As the two men talked strategy, McClellan suggested that he make an end run around Lee to cut Richmond’s supply line at Petersburg, but Halleck would not approve the idea. Instead, Little Mac promised Halleck that he would march up the north bank of the James and seize Richmond as soon as he received 25,000 fresh troops—but even so, McClellan continued to wring his hands over the superiority of the enemy. Somehow the populous North was unable to spare a man, but in McClellan’s mind the much-smaller South could add thousands to its Virginia army day after day.

  McClellan’s request for yet more reinforcements persuaded Halleck that the president was correct: Little Mac would never feel ready. On August 3, Halleck ordered the evacuation of the army, thus bringing the Peninsula Campaign—launched with such high hopes—to an ignominious end. Predictably, McClellan felt that this disaster was in no way his fault. As he assured his wife: “I cannot feel that I have any intentional error to reproach myself with.”

  * * *

  The rise of Henry Halleck and John Pope was a repudiation of George McClellan and the entire eastern command. And in case anyone missed that point, the victor at Island No. 10 ground his boot into the faces of the eastern generals with a pompous introduction to his new Army of Virginia. “I have come to you from the West, where we have always seen the backs of our enemies,” Pope declared. “I desire you to dismiss from your minds certain phrases, which I am sorry to find so much in vogue amongst you. I hear constantly of ‘taking strong positions and holding them,’ of ‘lines of retreat,’ and ‘bases of supplies.’ Let us discard such ideas. The strongest position a soldier should desire to occupy is one from which he can most easily advance against the enemy.” Pope didn’t stop there; he seemed not to want to stop at all. Every line, every word, was an attack: “Let us study the probable lines of retreat of our opponents, and leave our own to take care of themselves. Success and glory are in the advance, disaster and shame lurk in the rear.”

  Reading these words, McClellan seethed: this “paltry young man who wanted to teach me the art of war … [will] be badly whipped.” Boastful though he was, however, Pope gave voice to a growing desire in the North for a more aggressive approach to the war. He struck that chord again when he issued orders—following Lincoln’s lead—to take what his army needed from enemy territory and arrest disloyal civilians while confiscating their slaves. “The temper of the North has undergone another change,” John Dahlgren informed his diary. The Seven Days battles had forged a new “determination to persevere” and the public “will forbear less than before.”

  Ideas that had seemed far-fetched just weeks earlier were embraced with grim resolution. A week before he officially appointed Halleck general in chief, Lincoln had approved the first military draft in U.S. history, hoping to use the threat of conscription to inspire more voluntary enlistments. He also reopened the question of arming black troops; in particular, he explored the idea of an army of former slaves guarding the shores of the Mississippi, where Rebel snipers were routinely taking potshots at passing boats.

  “I shall not surrender this game leaving any available card unplayed,” Lincoln advised the former U.S. attorney general Reverdy Johnson. This distinguished statesman had journeyed to New Orleans on a mission to investigate complaints about the treatment of foreign consuls. When Johnson reported back that the leading men of the city were outraged by the Union occupation, he caught the full gale of Lincoln’s fresh determination: “It is their own fault, not mine, that they are annoyed by the presence” of Federal troops. To be rid of the troops all the people of New Orleans had to do was rejoin the Union. “If they will not do this, should they not receive harder blows rather than lighter ones?”

  Lincoln also let loose a furious blast in a letter to a loyal Louisiana businessman named Cuthbert Bullitt, who passed along complaints from other supposed loyalists. “This class of men,” the president seethed, “touch neither a sail nor a pump,” but want to be “carried snug and dry, throughout the storm, and safely landed right side up.” If they disliked war, Lincoln argued, they should stand tall and throw off the influence of their secessionist neighbors. “What would you do in my position?” he asked Bullitt. “Would you drop the war where it is? Or would you prosecute it in the future with elder-stalk squirts, charged with rose water?” No, he answered himself. He would deliver “heavier [blows]”—though “nothing in malice. What I deal with is too vast for malicious dealing.”

  Lincoln, it was now plain, had staked everything on victory, and he would force the Confederates to stake everything as well. “Those enemies must understand that they cannot experiment for ten years trying to destroy the government, and if they fail still come back into the Union unhurt.”

  9

  AUGUST

  Frequently that summer, a man arrived at the White House whose role in the Civil War was little known at the time and has long since been nearly forgotten. But it mattered enough in those dark months for Lincoln to welcome the man and close the door—always close the door. The president was seen in every mood and variety of transaction in 1862: laughing, crying, raging, despairing, seasick, poetic, calculating, robust, exhausted, pleading, commanding. But these closed-door meetings went unseen and unrecorded because, like the magician who hides the workings of his art, Lincoln preferred to obscure the machinations behind his political victories. His rise from washed-up congressman and frontier lawyer to head of the Republican Party in six short years was a masterpiece of apparent levitation. The work that went into it—the letter writing, the anonymous editorials, the cultivation of powerful men and influential writers, the occasional cunning trick—as much as possible, he kept all these hidden.

  Lincoln’s visitor was James M. Edmunds, a wealthy lumberyard owner from Michigan and the principal builder of that state’s Republican Party. One observer wrote that Edmunds was “said to be one of the best informed and most capable politicians in the country” and among “the shrewdest of long, hawk-nosed, twinkle-eyed, sharp, smiling old men.” He bore a passing resemblance to Lincoln—the same high forehead, narrow face, and deep-set eyes capable of flashing from merriment to sorrow in a moment—and, like Lincoln, he was a master organizer. In 1855, when Edmunds was elected chairman of the state Republicans, every member of the Michigan congressional delegation was a Democrat. By 1860, Edmunds’s party had captured all six seats. As president, Lincoln chose Edmunds for one of the most politically sensitive jobs in Washington, a job he himself had once dreamed of holding: he named Edmunds commissioner of the General Land Office, a nerve center of patronage and favor trading and feathering of nests. Edmunds, in other words, applied the grease that kept the cogs of government humming.

  In most respects during that difficult summer, the president was feeling his way forward one day at a time. As one senator recalled, “Lincoln used to tell us that when he got up in the morning it was his purpose and endeavor to do the very best he could and knew how for that day—not being able to foresee, or devise or determine … what was best to be done for the morrow.” His meetings with Edmunds were an exception t
o that rule. The two men were looking ahead to autumn, when Americans would go to the polls for the first time since the war began. Given the sharp drop in Northern morale, Lincoln expected the Democrats to do well, and he needed to prepare for that likelihood. So how could he offset, at least partly, the effect of an opposition victory?

  From those meetings with Edmunds came a plan for a new organization, one that seemed to be above politics and independent of the two rival parties. Its purpose was to maintain support for the original, bipartisan cause of the North: saving the Union. A nationwide network of patriotic Unionists, Democrats as well as Republicans, could more effectively rally the public behind Lincoln’s war aims than the soon-to-be-diminished Republican Party could do by itself. Lincoln, as one biographer put it, developed an “intelligent political strategy” to make his policies synonymous with “inclusive ‘large-tent’ patriotism, and [dress] the opponents of the administration in the clothes of narrow, illegitimate faction.” And who better to create a network of outwardly nonpartisan Unionist organizations than a couple of master politicians with offices on Pennsylvania Avenue?

  For this plan to work, Lincoln’s fingerprints must not be visible. Once the strategy was fully hatched, therefore, Edmunds convened a secret meeting away from the White House. One summer evening after working hours, about a dozen handpicked men gathered at his office in the Interior Department building, not far from Willard’s Hotel. Among them was William O. Stoddard, the land office clerk currently on loan to the president. From his desk at the White House, Stoddard had watched Edmunds go into Lincoln’s office day after day, and it was no great leap to surmise that the two men were cooking up something of a political flavor. Yet when Edmunds invited the young clerk to the after-hours meeting, he ordered Stoddard not to breathe a word to the president. At first Stoddard found this odd: “I half wondered why Mr. Lincoln should send me on an errand which he wished to conceal even from himself.” But the clerk soon concluded that this was “something with which he did not wish to appear connected in any way.”

  The invited men had been chosen to organize the Union League, a “voluntary” association that would, with great efficiency, rally the national spirit while serving to ostracize anyone who dared not to join. As one Union League history explained: “The problem was how to weed out the disloyal element in society with the least friction.” The beauty of the Union League was that it neatly classified the North’s influential citizens through the simple device of a public invitation. By “declining to join or countenance this movement the stay-aways would be showing their true colors.” The idea worked perfectly in Washington, where the founders quickly organized a dozen clubs. Edmunds presided over the first and Stoddard was elected president of the second, holding weekly meetings of “congressmen, senators, Cabinet officers, their assistants, department clerks and army officers.” The next phase of the project called for spreading the movement across the country; this required money, and lots of it. Commissioner Edmunds knew where to look. “A number of army contractors became members of our Washington councils, and they speedily became liberal contributors,” Stoddard later wrote. After all, the war was making the contractors rich.

  Although Lincoln was prepared to cede some ground to the Democrats in the elections, he was also working to minimize the loss. Paradoxically, the new tax law handed him a weapon. A robust tax code requires a multitude of tax collectors, plum jobs that Lincoln could use to strengthen his battered political network in every loyal state. Throughout August, the president spent many hours with Treasury Secretary Chase and key Unionists from across the country, painstakingly distributing these fruits. Chase juggled recommendations from congressmen, governors, and other influential figures. State by state, he forwarded lists of nominees to Lincoln, who vigorously second-guessed them.

  Lincoln also canvassed the North for strong candidates to hold the Union line in the fall elections, and in doing so he took aim at a few of his most prominent critics. One such adversary was Congressman Daniel W. Voorhees of Indiana—“the Sycamore of the Wabash,” a towering man at least as big as Lincoln himself—who regularly and vehemently denounced Lincoln’s use of his war powers to arrest and jail suspected traitors without regard to their constitutional right of habeas corpus. In one typically bombastic pronouncement, Voorhees declared that history would judge the president and his cabinet harshly, “execrat[ing] the prostitution which they have made of their high offices to the overthrow of the Constitution!” Lincoln had little patience with men like Voorhees, who cherished each brick of the nation’s founding document but weren’t willing to fight to save the edifice from destruction.

  The political wiring of the Union coalition was not the only urgent renovation project; with the Army of the Potomac packing its tents to leave the peninsula near Richmond, almost every aspect of the Northern effort had to be restarted and renewed. Turning his attention overseas, Lincoln engaged in some direct diplomacy. After reassuring the Russian ambassador that plenty of fresh troops were on the way, he dictated a long letter to an influential pro-Union writer in Switzerland. In response to an oft-repeated warning that the North needed to make fresh military progress, Lincoln acknowledged the point, with this reservation: “Yet it seems unreasonable that a series of successes, extending through half-a-year, and clearing more than a hundred thousand square miles of country, should help us so little, while a single half-defeat should hurt us so much. But let us be patient.”

  Most important, the ranks of fighting men had to be replenished. After a slow start, a combination of carrot and stick had begun to fill the recruiting offices. Cities across the North pooled public funds with private donations to pay bounties for new soldiers. In Philadelphia, for example, the City Bounty Fund was on its way to raising some $700,000. At the same time, the fact of the new conscription law made these incentives doubly attractive: better to enlist and collect a bounty than to be drafted and receive nothing. True, some men skedaddled across the Canadian border to escape the draft, but far more concluded that this was still a war worth fighting. Fifty-three men signed up at a single meeting in the little town of Holton, in the Flint Hills of northeastern Kansas. The surprised recruiter reported that they were “men of the first character and intelligence,” lawyers, merchants, ministers, all “going in as privates.” Enough volunteered from the villages and cities of the North that Washington was once again thronged with new recruits, as many as eighteen thousand per week. Yet Lincoln pleaded for more troops, and faster.

  Many of the fresh soldiers marched off to war singing one or another version of a poem by James Sloan Gibbons that had first appeared in the New York Evening Post the previous month. Like Julia Ward Howe’s battle hymn six months earlier, this rousing song wrapped the Union cause in a biblical cloak. Now, however, the North’s soldiers were trampling the grapes of wrath in service not just of God, but of the president himself. Though his critics were many and loud, these singing legions provided a stirring reply. In the furnace of the war, Lincoln was being transformed into the patriarch of men actually willing to fight and die at the struggle’s spear tip.

  We are coming, Father Abraham, 300,000 more,

  From Mississippi’s winding stream and from New England’s shore.

  We leave our plows and workshops, our wives and children dear,

  With hearts too full for utterance, with but a silent tear.

  We dare not look behind us but steadfastly before.

  We are coming, Father Abraham, 300,000 more!

  * * *

  By now the battle between McClellan and Stanton was painfully public, as Northern newspapers fanned the flame. Lincoln needed to make a fresh start in this regard, too, and he found a novel opportunity on August 6. Union rallies had been organized on short notice in cities across the country, including Washington. Brisk band music summoned the citizenry through the humid evening to the East Lawn of the Capitol, where they gathered in numbers that surprised and delighted the administration. Longtime Washingtonia
ns called it the biggest crowd in the city’s history, apart from presidential inaugurations. The rally chairman, Benjamin French, surveyed the throng and felt a surge of hope that he might actually be able to produce the full $300,000 that he had been assigned to raise for bounties. Chase and Bates sat with Lincoln on the dais, where the president gazed, careworn but relieved, at the “immense” congregation. Lincoln listened patiently to one passionate speech after another. At last, during a lull between orators, he turned to Chase and said: “Well! Hadn’t I better say a few words and get rid of myself?”

  The crowd cheered as Lincoln stepped to the front of the stage. “Fellow citizens!” he began in his high, piercing voice. “I believe there is no precedent for my appearing before you on this occasion.” It was true: the idea of a president appearing at a popular rally, let alone delivering a speech, was a clear break from aloof tradition, and Lincoln’s audience was delighted by it. They burst into applause, and added laughter when he went on to say: “It is also true that there is no precedent for your being here yourselves.”

  A voice called out: “Go on: tar and feather the Rebels!” But Lincoln had other ideas; he told the audience that he preferred not to say anything “unless I hope to produce some good by it. The only thing I think of just now,” Lincoln continued, his voice turning serious, “is a matter in which we have heard some other people blamed for what I did myself.”

  Here was a twist no one had expected. Several voices called out, “What is it?”

  “There has been a very wide-spread attempt to have a quarrel between General McClellan and the Secretary of War,” Lincoln answered. Taking on such a divisive topic at a rally about unity was undeniably risky, but Lincoln could probably have found no more favorable audience for his response to the furor. “Now, I occupy a position that enables me to observe, at least, these two gentlemen are not nearly so deep in the quarrel as some pretending to be their friends.” Lincoln assured the crowd that the general and the secretary shared a desire to be successful, which was his only desire as well: “If the military commanders in the field cannot be successful,” both Stanton and he himself “would be failures.” Under the pressure of battle, he acknowledged disputes sometimes arose over the number of troops available to McClellan; further, he said, “McClellan has sometimes asked for things that the Secretary of War did not give him, and the Secretary of War is not to blame for not giving when he had none to give.” This brought a roar of laughter and applause. Then the president declared: “And I say here: as far as I know, the Secretary of War has withheld no one thing at any time in my power to give him!”