Rise to Greatness

by David Von Drehle

  The next day, believing he had Jackson pinned down near the old Bull Run battlefield, Pope put all he had into breaking the Rebel line. Reinforcements would have been welcome, but Franklin’s promised six A.M. departure from the Alexandria neighborhood turned into a one P.M. launch, and his trip to find the enemy quickly halted in peaceful Annandale, more than fifteen miles from the churning battle of Second Bull Run. McClellan explained to a flabbergasted Halleck that “it was not safe” to go any farther. Instead, Little Mac spent the day talking wildly of great hordes of Confederate troops in the vicinity of Washington; doubling reality, as he always seemed to do, he claimed that at least 120,000 Rebels lurked nearby. Rather than move Franklin and then Sumner’s corps aggressively to Pope’s support, McClellan gave orders to prepare the Chain Bridge over the Potomac for demolition in case Lee tried to cross into the capital.

  Finding no help from McClellan, Pope looked to Fitz John Porter, who had fought so well in the Seven Days battles, to join the attack on Jackson’s men. But Porter had grown strangely inert after his corps landed at Aquia Creek and was assigned to Pope’s army. As the days went by, McClellan’s pet managed to give many people the impression that he had no intention of helping the hated John Pope.

  Lincoln was beside himself. “What news from the direction of Manassas?” he cabled Haupt, the railroad man. “Any further news?” he asked Burnside. And to McClellan: “What news?”

  After more than five weeks of silence, Little Mac decided that now was a good time to resume communications with the president. And what the general chose to say on August 29 shocked Lincoln more deeply than any of McClellan’s previous reckless statements. Though armies were clashing within earshot of the White House, McClellan responded to the president with a lecture. Saying that “one of two courses should be adopted,” he advised the following: “Concentrate all our available forces to open communication with Pope,” or “leave Pope to get out of his scrape” while making “the Capital perfectly safe. No middle course will now answer.” In closing, Little Mac chirped: “Tell me what you wish me to do & I will do all in my power to accomplish it.”

  This was outrageous. For two and a half days, McClellan had been fending off orders precisely to concentrate his forces and open communications with Pope. How could he now claim he was keen to bend his powers in that direction? But if the general’s eagerness to pursue the first option was questionable, Lincoln could only conclude that he was entirely serious about the second: McClellan was willing to allow a Union army to fight the enemy unaided while tens of thousands of well-rested, well-equipped reinforcements sat watching nearby.

  * * *

  John Hay rode his horse from the White House to the Soldiers’ Home early the next morning and found Lincoln’s mount already saddled in the yard. Within moments, the president came down the stone steps and put a big boot in the stirrup. He was eager to give voice to his emotions, and the quiet road into town seemed like a good place to do it. Lincoln was “very outspoken in regard to McClellan’s present conduct,” Hay noted. That appalling line from the general’s telegram—“leave Pope to get out of his own scrape”—was seared in the president’s memory and he quoted it perfectly. Nor was that all. He told Hay about McClellan’s “dreadful panic” as he prepared to destroy the Chain Bridge (an order that the War Department had immediately reversed), and complained about “his incomprehensible interference with Franklin’s corps.”

  Some thirty miles distant from the two men on horseback, Pope directed his troops on the Manassas plain. He was confident that this day, August 30, would be his glory. After the pounding his men and guns had given Jackson the day before, the Rebels had to be weak. Now Pope’s Army of Virginia would stack its muscle on the right and deliver the decisive blow. He did not see the trouble to his left, where Longstreet was quietly emerging from behind the screen of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

  Lincoln, suffering a blind spot of his own, was unable to see that his cabinet was on the verge of revolt. McClellan’s poisonous return from the peninsula had catalyzed the grievances of these strong, frustrated, overworked men. Stanton was so furious when Little Mac halted Franklin’s modest advance that he stormed to Chase’s office and told him that McClellan must go. “He has long believed,” Chase recorded, “and so have I, that Genl. McClellan ought not to be trusted with the command of any army of the Union; and the events of the last few days have greatly strengthened our judgment.” But what could they do? It was pointless to complain to Abraham Lincoln. He listened and then did as he pleased. “Argument was useless,” as Chase put it. “It was like throwing water on a duck’s back.”

  But if Lincoln could ignore cabinet members one by one, he could not ignore them all at once. Stanton and Chase hatched a plan to gather signatures on a petition for McClellan’s firing. Either the general must go, or the cabinet would collapse.

  Even as Pope was throwing his roundhouse right at Jackson’s entrenched lines, Stanton and Chase were drafting the petition, with help from Stanton’s assistant secretary Peter Watson. When they finished, Chase carried the paper, written in Stanton’s unmistakable hand, to the office of Gideon Welles, hoping to collect his signature. Welles was unpredictable. A former Hartford newspaper editor and a Democrat turned abolitionist Republican, he was perhaps the most unusual member of Lincoln’s singular cabinet. With his flowing white beard and elaborate wig of curls, Welles was an easy man to ridicule. He also carried a large chip on his shoulder: he believed, not without justification, that his navy accomplished more than the army, and did it with far less, yet never received proper credit. Welles was therefore extremely skeptical of the army’s tempestuous boss, Edwin Stanton. This was one reason why he began to smell a rat almost as soon as Chase opened his mouth.

  To begin with, Welles said to Chase, the petition he was being asked to sign was intemperate, charging not just dereliction but treason. Welles agreed that McClellan should probably be fired, but he wasn’t ready to insist on it. Why couldn’t they just talk to Lincoln about this? he asked. Chase responded with surprising vehemence: “The time had arrived when the Cabinet must act with energy,” he told Welles, “for either the Government or McClellan must go down.” Chase detailed a string of offenses by the general, some of which were new to Welles; still, “this method of getting signatures … was repugnant” to the navy man. What about the others in the cabinet? Welles asked. Chase answered that the interior secretary, Caleb Smith, was ready to sign. Welles persisted: How about Attorney General Bates and Postmaster General Blair? “Not yet,” Chase replied. “Their turn had not come.”

  As if on cue, Montgomery Blair walked in. Chase went pale. Noting the Treasury secretary’s distress, Welles said nothing about the petition until the cabinet’s most conservative member had finished his errand and gone away. Shouldn’t we call him back? Welles now asked Chase. After all, Blair was the only member of the group who had military training. “No, not now,” Chase blurted as he collected the unsigned letter from Welles. “It is best he should for the present know nothing of it.” Chase strode from the room, then stepped back inside. He had a “special request”: that the navy secretary tell no one about this meeting.

  Lincoln, none the wiser, spent the day foraging for news from the front. Things seemed well enough. Colonel Haupt provided a steady stream of encouraging updates as Union supply trains pushed into Manassas and telegraph lines were repaired. Lincoln was waiting with Hay at Halleck’s office when Stanton poked his head in and invited the pair to have lunch at his home. During the meal, the war secretary vented his anger about McClellan—though he never breathed a word about the circulating petition. When this fight was over, he declared, there should be a court-martial, for “nothing but foul play could lose us this battle.” Afterward, Lincoln and Hay returned to Halleck’s office to find the general in chief quietly confident that “the greatest battle of the Century” was under way and would yield a Union triumph. At about five P.M., hopes for a victory rose still higher when Haupt p
assed along a premature report that Jackson had surrendered.

  Stanton, meanwhile, returned to the War Department, where he was not surprised to receive a visit from a very curious Gideon Welles. Caleb Smith of Interior was already there, and Stanton, still angry, treated his colleagues to a lengthy recitation of McClellan’s offenses and his own manifold woes, dating back to his first day in the cabinet. He spoke of the chaos of Simon Cameron’s mismanaged department; of $20 million in unpaid bills piled on his desk; and of this secretive, unstable, double-dealing general who “did nothing, but talked always vaguely and indefinitely and of various matters,” though never of the matters that really counted. Stanton proceeded through the litany of the canal boats, the confusion over troops left behind to defend Washington, and the squelchy slog up the peninsula, where McClellan had promised the ground was always dry. The secretary retold the whole saga all the way up to the present moment when, “for twenty-four hours [Franklin’s] large force remained stationary, hearing the whole time the guns of the battle.”

  Smith, already convinced, excused himself as soon as Stanton finished. Alone with Welles, Stanton lowered his voice conspiratorially. He had heard from Chase that Welles had “declined to sign the protest.” How could Welles “not think we ought to get rid of him?” When Welles answered that the petition was “discourteous and disrespectful to the President,” the war secretary almost shouted in reply. What did he, Edwin Stanton, owe the president? “He knew of no particular obligations he was under to” Abraham Lincoln, “who had called him to a difficult position and imposed upon him labors and responsibilities which no man could carry”—burdens made much heavier by the added weight of McClellan, “a commander who was constantly striving to embarrass him.” Enough was enough, Stanton spat. “He would not submit to a continuance of this state of things.”

  * * *

  That evening, Lincoln still thought victory was at hand—for Pope, and thus for himself. “Everything seemed to be going well and hilarious on Saturday & we went to bed expecting glad tidings at sunrise,” Hay reported. In fact, the fight on the Bull Run battlefield was not going well at all: in the gloaming, just as Jackson’s line began to crack, Longstreet unleashed his men on Pope’s neglected left flank and upended the Union army.

  The reversal happened so suddenly, so violently, that word rippled back to Washington in jumbled surges, and a full report came together only the next morning. At eight, as Hay was getting dressed in his tiny room off the president’s office, Lincoln called out: “Well, John, we are whipped again, I’m afraid. The enemy reinforced on Pope and drove back his left wing and he has retired to Centerville, where he says he will be able to hold his men. I don’t like that expression. I don’t like to hear him admit that his men need holding.”

  As the streets of Washington began to fill with stragglers and runaways from the direction of the battlefield, Stanton’s War Department issued orders to prepare all city churches to receive the wounded, and a call went out for government clerks willing to go to the front as nurses. Plans were announced to seize the mansion of the Washington banker and art collector W. W. Corcoran—a Confederate sympathizer—for use as a hospital. (“Malice,” sniffed Corcoran’s neighbor Gideon Welles. “Vandalism.”) McClellan promised his wife he would try to rescue the family silver from their Washington home, lest it fall into the hands of Confederate invaders. Reports of roads jammed with fleeing soldiers brought back memories of the first defeat at Bull Run the previous summer, leading Lincoln to quip mordantly: “I’ve heard of ‘knocking a person into the middle of next week,’ but the rebels have knocked us into the middle of last year.”

  There was a difference, though, between that summer and this: by now Lincoln had seen too much of panic to tolerate any more. With Robert E. Lee’s entire army somewhere near the capital, the president spent much of August 31 holed up in his office with Chase, diligently resolving the remaining squabbles over patronage plums under the new tax law. As the day wore on, word arrived from Centerville that Pope had organized a strong defense; emotions subsided a bit and Lincoln adopted, in Hay’s words, “a singularly defiant tone of mind.” Several times, he said: “We must hurt this enemy before it gets away.” Many in the government had difficulty seeing this latest debacle as an opportunity; Hay, for one, thought the Union’s situation looked bad, but when he tried to say so, Lincoln scolded him. “No, Mr. Hay. We must whip these people now. Pope must fight them [and] if they are too strong for him he can gradually retire to these fortifications” in Washington. Otherwise, “we may as well stop fighting.”

  The president still had heard nothing of the brewing cabinet revolt. Chase and Stanton had managed to bring Bates into their scheme by having him write a new version of their petition. They also had a new count to add to their indictment of McClellan: he had refused to send ammunition to the embattled Army of Virginia unless Pope pulled a sufficient force out of action to serve as guards for the supply train. “McClellan ought to be shot,” Chase told Welles on September 1, when he went again to plead for the navy secretary’s signature.

  Despite that sentiment, the Bates draft was more measured and careful than Stanton’s original. Welles was surprised that Bates would join the cabal, for his own view of the petition had only darkened since Saturday. “Reflection had more fully satisfied me that this method of conspiring to influence or control the President was repugnant … it was unusual, would be disrespectful, and would justly be deemed offensive.” Chase’s entreaties got him nowhere, for Welles was adamant. Further, as he studied the document and noticed a blank spot where William Seward’s signature might go, Welles realized that he had no idea what had become of the secretary of state. He wasn’t in Washington. Why? The more he pondered that question, the more Welles suspected that Seward was “purposely absent” precisely to avoid taking sides.

  * * *

  It was indeed an odd time for a vacation, but with Europe relatively quiet as aristocrats took their holidays, the secretary of state had traveled to Auburn, New York, for a brief visit home. The news that rivalries and resentments had poisoned Pope’s offensive hit him hard. Before his departure, Seward had gone to Alexandria to see the Army of the Potomac arriving, and he believed that the Union’s most perilous hours were past: those Federal legions seemed “invincible.” After a lifetime of politics, Seward thought he knew what pettiness men were capable of, but this episode had left him genuinely disillusioned. Encountering John Hay on a Washington sidewalk after his return from New York, Seward asked glumly: “Mr. Hay, what is the use of growing old? You learn something of men and things but never until too late to use it. I have only just now found out what military jealousy is.… It never had occurred to me that any jealousy could prevent these generals from acting for their common fame and the welfare of the country.”

  Hay agreed, saying that it had not seemed possible that one American leader could all but abandon another in the heat of battle. “I don’t see why you should have expected it,” Seward countered. “You are not old. I should have known it.”

  Henry Halleck was likewise badly shaken. According to Lincoln, “he broke down—nerve and pluck all gone,” reduced almost overnight from a general to “a first-rate clerk.” At wit’s end, Halleck pleaded with McClellan to come to Washington and tell him what to do. “I beg of you to assist me in this crisis with your ability and experience,” he cabled to Alexandria late the night of August 31. “I am utterly tired out.” Making matters worse, Halleck was suffering from acutely painful hemorrhoids, inflamed by the stress, and was treating his discomfort with a tincture of opium.

  Like his unsteady general in chief, Lincoln saw no alternative but to work with the tools at hand. Reluctantly, he turned to the man who knew more about the defenses of Washington than any other: George McClellan. “Pope should have been sustained, but he was not,” Lincoln later explained. “It was humiliating … to reward McClellan” by giving him command of the capital. However, “personal considerations must be sacrific
ed for the public good.” On the morning of September 2, Lincoln once again placed McClellan at the head of the army in Washington.

  As rumors began to spread that Little Mac was in authority rather than in disgrace, the cabinet uprising reached a dead end. Welles refused to sign the revised petition; Blair was apparently never even asked. Instead, the cabinet gathered at ten A.M. in Lincoln’s office. While they were waiting for the president, Stanton hurried in. In a low and trembling voice, he confirmed that McClellan was back on top. Everyone began talking at once, and then into the room walked Lincoln.

  Welles later confided to his diary that Lincoln began the meeting by saying he had “done what seemed to him best, and would be responsible for what he had done to the country.” Looking at the shocked faces, the president quickly added that the appointment was only temporary. “McClellan knows this whole ground,” Lincoln said. “He is a good engineer … there is no better organizer; he can be trusted to act on the defensive.” True, McClellan suffered from “the slows,” but that would not matter in this case.

  The reaction was intense. Never, according to Welles, had the fractious cabinet been so “disturbed and desponding.” Having given his explanation, Lincoln sat “greatly distressed” as Stanton, Chase, and the others loosed their anger and fears. “Giving the command to [McClellan] was equivalent to giving Washington to the rebels,” Chase said finally. Only Blair agreed with Lincoln, and the postmaster general’s reasoning was characteristic of his cool political calculation. They had all just seen how venomous army politics had become, and now tens of thousands of armed men—the partisans in that rivalry—were in and around the capital. Unless they believed in the general who led them, they would be an unreliable, even threatening, force. As Blair put it, McClellan “had beyond any [other] officer the confidence of the army.”