Rise to Greatness

by David Von Drehle

  Lincoln certainly saw it that way. “I must have McClellan to reorganize the army and bring it out of chaos,” he said three days later. “There has been been a design, a purpose in breaking down Pope without regard of consequences to the country. It is shocking to see, and I know this, but there is no remedy at present. McClellan has the army with him.”

  Chase had vowed that either McClellan would go or the cabinet would collapse, but at least for the moment, both went wobbling forward. And then the stakes, higher than they had ever been, were raised again. Lee jabbed at Pope near Chantilly, and without warning anyone Pope pulled his men into the Washington fortifications, having seen the backs of no enemies whatsoever. In a flash, Lee was gone, northbound for Maryland, while in the West the Confederates invaded Kentucky. The Civil War reached its zero hour, and now Lincoln had no choice but to send the infuriating General George McClellan into the field in pursuit of Lee. John Dahlgren’s lament spoke for multitudes: “Oh, for our country! Who shall save it?”

  10

  SEPTEMBER

  Abraham Lincoln was not the sort of man who claimed to know the mind of God. “Probably it is to be my lot to go on in a twilight, feeling and reasoning my way through life,” he once said. As a young man, he was “perplexed” by “the debatable wrangles” of religion, and for a time he was a notoriously outspoken skeptic. Over the years, he grew into a fatalist of the most profound sort: one who believes in divine destiny but does not limply surrender to it, who instead seeks to live meaningfully in harmony with the guiding current of history. Walt Whitman, who moved to Washington when his brother was wounded in battle later in 1862, would watch Lincoln riding along Vermont Avenue and come to feel that he knew the man. In his sorrow following the president’s death, the great poet got close to an essential truth with his famous image of Lincoln as the captain of a storm-tossed ship. To steer a true course through violent seas, one must understand the wind and tides, despite being powerless to change them. So it was with Providence. “What is to be will be,” Lincoln once said. “I have found all my life, as Hamlet says, ‘There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.’”

  What was to be in that fateful September? The nation’s future hung in the balance, as Confederate armies moved into the border states and European leaders shifted forward in their seats, alert to the critical moment at hand. Just as he had struggled in the winter to find the meaning in his son’s death, Lincoln now tried to discern a divine purpose behind the string of failures and betrayals that made the summer of 1862 so miserable. At his desk one day in September, “his mind … burdened with the weightiest question of his life”—of slavery, the survival of the Union, and the role of each in the war—Lincoln took out a fresh sheet of lightly ruled paper and began writing down his thoughts. “The will of God prevails,” he started, slowly and carefully. This was true by definition: if God exists, and God wills a result, then the result must come to pass. That is the nature of infinite power. Lincoln added a second proposition: “In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God.”

  From these two ideas, Lincoln began methodically building his analysis, brick by brick, writing more quickly and fluidly as he went. “Both sides may be, and one must be wrong. God can not be for, and against the same thing at the same time,” he noted. “In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party.” The Almighty might favor the North or the South—or neither side: Providence chooses its own goals. But the players in this great drama—the generals, whether effective or incompetent; the soldiers, brave or cowardly; the politicians and opinion makers, wise or foolish; indeed, all the “human instrumentalities” of the struggle, as Lincoln put it—must somehow perform the roles they had been given by the directing spirit of God. When John Pope met mutiny rather than triumph on the road to Richmond, it must be because God had something other than immediate Union victory in mind.

  All this flowed logically from the first proposition: that the will of God prevails. Now Lincoln inserted a hedge. “I am almost ready to say that this is probably true”—almost, probably—“that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet.” If one believed in a divinity shaping history, then it followed that God could have saved or destroyed the Union short of war, or ended the war already, without this painful seesaw struggle. “Yet the contest proceeds.”

  He put down his pen. Perhaps he was interrupted, or ran out of time, because he seems to have stopped abruptly. The final period at the end of his meditation was jabbed with such velocity that it looked more like a dash. Clearly, he wasn’t finished, because the last sentence led so obviously, so irresistibly, to the next question: Why? Toward what end was this uncontrollable force moving? Nicolay and Hay, who discovered this unfinished rumination long after the president had folded it in half, and half again, observed that it had not been intended for others; it was Lincoln’s way of ordering his own thoughts.

  Yet these few lines suggest a first draft of what would become Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. In that magnificent speech, delivered two and a half years later, he completed the chain of his logic. The contest proceeds, the president declared then, because “American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove.” And because the offense was too large and too grave to be removed without suffering, God “gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came.” Slavery, Lincoln believed, was like a tumor on the neck of the American nation. Cutting it out might be fatal, but the patient would surely die if the cancer grew unchecked. Thus the president was led to conclude that God was prolonging and inflaming the war so that slavery could not survive the inferno. Providence had chosen to remove the cancer; Lincoln had no choice but to act accordingly.

  He was almost ready to say this. But how could he be sure? As the Army of the Potomac, under the unreliable George McClellan, prepared to set out from Washington, Robert E. Lee was marching northward through the gentle Maryland countryside, where the first hint of yellow touched the dark green of the trees. Abraham Lincoln made an unspoken accommodation to this power beyond his own. It wasn’t a bargain, exactly, because one cannot bargain with the wind. In making his commitment, he was more akin to a captain checking his position by a fixed star: if his calculations were correct, he would know which way to steer. He promised himself, as would later become clear, that if God willed a way for the Union to drive Lee back across the river, Lincoln would interpret the news as confirmation that the Almighty sought freedom for the slaves. And he, Abraham Lincoln, would be the human instrumentality of that divine will, making the war for the Union into an emancipating force unlike any the world had seen. He would follow that path to its end, in the conviction that God would have his way in his good time. And woe to all of them by whom the offense came, the blue as well as the gray.

  * * *

  As September began and stories flew of Confederate columns surging unchecked across Kentucky toward the Ohio River, it was Cincinnati’s turn to panic. The governors of Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania called for able-bodied men to grab their shotguns and squirrel rifles and join the home guard militia. Old Thomas Ewing rushed a request to the War Department for proper guns; back came a scrawled note from Henry Halleck: “We have no carbines and cannot get them immediately.”

  Washington, according to Gideon Welles, was “full of exciting, vague, and absurd rumors.” Events were outpacing the capacity of wire and type to communicate them; the large gaps between slivers of fact were filled with fear and recrimination. “There are McClellan parties, and Pope parties and McDowell parties, and after their wranglings come thoughts of the bleeding country requiring every arm and train to save her from ruin and defeat,” wrote one prominent Washingtonian. For his part, Lincoln decided that the quality of information in the capital was
so poor that he would simply ignore most of it. One September day, his Illinois friend Leonard Swett appeared at his office door. The president asked how long Swett had been in town. When his friend replied that he had arrived the previous day, Lincoln brightened: “Sit down; I want to consult you. If you had been here a week I would not give a cent for your opinions.”

  When Seward returned from Auburn on September 3, the president spent three hours trading information with him, finally adjourning at midnight. No known account exists of their conversation, but afterward Seward sketched a grim picture for Adams in London. “Our late campaign in Virginia has failed,” he wrote. The Rebels “seem to be threatening alike Washington, Baltimore,” and Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania. “The insurgents are equally bold” in the West, and “new energies are necessary to save the States of Tennessee and Kentucky for the Union, if not to prevent inroads in Ohio.” Seward understood perfectly well that this catalog would incline the Europeans toward intervention, so he reminded Adams to let them know that such action would only drag them into the war. The North, it must be made clear, would not capitulate.

  Others with whom Lincoln spoke in early September did record his views. Welles, for example, wrote that although the president was second-guessing himself about the decision to recall McClellan’s army from Berkeley plantation, he also accepted that “wise or not … these things, right or wrong, had been done.” And the plan could have worked, Lincoln added, if not for “military jealousies.” Speaking of the second battle of Bull Run, Lincoln said: “We had the enemy in the hollow of our hands on Friday, if our generals, who are vexed with Pope, had done their duty.” Instead, “these personal and professional quarrels came in.” Now Pope would have to go, and McClellan was in charge again, because he “has the Army with him.”

  And what about that army? The ranks were in disarray. Soldiers who had signed up expecting a short war were leaking from their units in every direction. Fewer than half of the troops dispatched to Pope were still present and accounted for; McClellan, too, could find only about half of his army. Trying to fill the Federal ranks and keep them filled was “like shoveling fleas across a barnyard,” Lincoln complained in his office one day. “There was no doubt that some of our men permitted themselves to be captured,” in hopes that they would be paroled by the Rebels and sent home, the president concluded.

  McClellan’s reappearance in the capital was almost surreal. He “returned to his old Head Quarters, as if the disastrous expedition of near eight months had been only an absence of a few days,” Chase wrote disgustedly. “He went out, as of old, to visit the fortifications and the troops,” astride his dark steed, twirling his cap, basking in the cheers of his loyal soldiers. A furious John Pope asked for an audience with Lincoln on September 4, during which the scorned general presented a report of his ill-starred campaign that was less a battlefield account than “a manifesto, a narrative, tinged with wounded pride,” as Welles described it. Pope asked permission to give his report to the newspapers. Instead, with the cabinet’s agreement, Lincoln suppressed the blistering indictment, then reassigned his old friend to lead an army against the warring Sioux in far-off Minnesota. Pope’s blundering leadership around Manassas had certainly earned him a demotion; still, this was hard treatment, especially unjust when compared with McClellan’s. But in this instance justice was a luxury Lincoln could not afford. For the Union, the way ahead was simply too hazardous.

  * * *

  In Lexington, Kentucky, a mere eighty miles south of Cincinnati, the Rebel raider John Hunt Morgan had by now combined his troops with the army of Edmund Kirby Smith. On September 5, the overall Confederate commander in the West, Braxton Bragg, announced his own entry into the Bluegrass State. “The enemy is in full retreat, with consternation and demoralization devastating his ranks,” Bragg boasted. “Kentuckians! The first great blow has been struck for your freedom.”

  Bragg’s mission in Kentucky was both military and political. The military objective was to recover the Confederacy’s losses from Grant’s campaign on the Southern rivers. With every northbound mile secured by the Rebels, pursuing Union forces were pulled farther away from the territory secured in Alabama and Tennessee. Indeed, Buell was chasing Bragg away from Dixie with far more speed than he ever managed when he was moving south, and his goal was to get all the way to Louisville in time to prevent that crucial prize from falling to the enemy. Just like that, thousands of square miles gained for the Union in late winter were abandoned, along with the freedom of thousands of contrabands left behind. As for the political aspect of Bragg’s plan, the general hoped to inspire an uprising of oppressed Kentucky citizens against the “Abolition tyrant” Lincoln. Bragg entered the state with wagons full of precious rifles to arm the legions of volunteers he expected to rally to his banner. Traveling behind him was Richard Hawes, the Confederate provisional governor of Kentucky. Bragg intended to oust the loyalist government when he reached the state capital, Frankfort, and install Hawes instead.

  That same day, word reached Lincoln that Lee was crossing the upper Potomac into Maryland. Lee had significant concerns about his troops: the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, he advised Jefferson Davis, was “not properly equipped for an invasion of an enemy’s territory.” The spoils of Manassas were all eaten up, and now the Rebels, subsisting on a diet of green corn, were ravenous. In addition, their uniforms were ragged and at least a quarter of them were barefoot. Like Bragg, however, Lee hoped for a warm welcome from the citizens of this slave state, and he counted on their help “in throwing off this foreign yoke” of Federal domination. As Lee’s men splashed across the ford, his regimental bands struck up a fiercely anti-Lincoln anthem, “Maryland, My Maryland”:

  She is not dead, nor deaf, nor dumb—

  Huzza! She spurns the Northern scum!

  But Maryland apparently wanted nothing to do with these lean and battle-hardened men. When Stonewall Jackson led the Confederate columns down a gentle slope into the town of Frederick in the wide Monocacy Valley, he found the streets empty, the houses closed, and the shops shuttered. Lee was stoic about this cold-shoulder greeting but he banned enlisted men from the city in hopes of coaxing the locals to soften their resistance. “Overrun” by the Confederate army, “the citizens of Fredericktown … [are] unwilling to open their stores,” his order conceded. Therefore, no soldier could enter the town without written permission from his division commander. This gesture accomplished little: the inhabitants continued to spurn their would-be liberators, and Lee was able to scrape up only about fifteen hundred pairs of shoes (roughly a tenth as many as he urgently needed) and as many barrels of flour from western Maryland. “The supply of beef has been very small, and we have been able to procure no bacon.” Among farmers and mill operators, there was “reluctance … to commit themselves in our favor,” he told Davis.

  As news of the Rebels’ chilly reception spread to Washington and points north, it became a source of pride for the battered Union. Legends of defiance soon wrapped themselves around the simple facts. The poet John Greenleaf Whittier composed a ballad celebrating one such story, and generations of schoolchildren would eventually have to memorize it. Supposedly an elderly Frederick resident named Barbara Frietchie waved the Stars and Stripes defiantly as Jackson passed beneath her attic window: “‘Shoot, if you must, this old gray head / But spare your country’s flag,’ she said.”

  Jefferson Davis would later explain away the tepid response in the border states by saying that their citizens were cowed, and that they needed to see a victory by the Southern armies before they dared rise up against Lincoln. But the truth was more complex, and far more damaging to Southern hopes of independence. As summer had turned to autumn, the loyal slave states, which once wavered between South and North, had become emphatically more loyal than slave. “I may not have made as great a president as some other men,” Lincoln said of his success in holding on to this crucial territory, “but I believe I have kept these discordant eleme
nts together as well as anyone could.”

  The people of Kentucky, for example, had elected a loyalist state government, and nine of the state’s ten congressional seats were filled by Unionists. Kentucky was on its way to sending 100,000 men to the Federal army. In part, this rejection of the Confederate cause reflected the thickly rooted patriotism of the birthplace of Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln. It also revealed a clear understanding of Kentucky’s future interests. To side with the South would at best leave Kentucky as the eternally tense frontier between two fundamentally incompatible nations. If the South won the war, the planters of deep Dixie could presumably go back to growing their cotton in peace. Kentucky, however, would suffer the friction of inevitable grinding between the two countries as they clashed over such issues as runaway slaves, access to waterways, and ownership of western lands. But if Kentucky aided the successful restoration of the Union, the state could enjoy a prosperous future at the heart of a single, stable nation.

  As for Maryland, Lee’s reception there might have been friendlier had he taken his troops into the eastern part of the state, where the old aristocratic families still worked slaves on plantations. But geography made it difficult for Lee to head east, because the Army of Northern Virginia depended on the Shenandoah Valley as its lifeline for supplies and communication; a move toward eastern Maryland would have exposed this artery to be cut by Federal troops. Instead, Lee encountered the farmers of western Maryland, who had more in common—culturally, economically, and politically—with their Pennsylvania neighbors than they ever would have with the planters of the South.