Rise to Greatness

by David Von Drehle

  The Confederate venture into the border states was a bold effort to win the war then and there. Had Maryland rallied to Lee, Washington, D.C., could have been cut off from the North. Had Kentucky flocked to Bragg, the Ohio River might have been closed. Either one of these outcomes would have been catastrophic for the Union; both together would likely have been fatal. But Lee and Bragg had succumbed to the same mistaken notions that hobbled the thinking of Lincoln and many of his advisers as they planned their southern invasion. Just as many Northerners trusted that a strong vein of Union loyalty ran through the South, so the Rebel generals were convinced that only the harsh hand of Lincoln choked off the border states’ true Southern sympathies. On both sides, leaders wrongly believed that their foes were extremists who ruled by oppression and lacked popular support.

  For the South, the implications of this error in judgment were profound. The Confederacy lacked the industrial might and the manpower necessary to maintain large armies for long periods in hostile territory. As a consequence, if the Confederacy could not win the contest for hearts and minds in the border states, the Rebels would be destined to fight for their independence primarily on their own territory, ravaging their own cities and their own lands.

  * * *

  Other influential audiences watched the Rebels advance, and their reactions also had the power to decide the war. Northern voters were preparing to choose the governors who would hear future calls for fresh troops, and the congressmen who would debate future war budgets. The first state to go to the polls was Maine, in early September, and the results were ominous for Lincoln: although the Republicans kept their grip on key offices, the party’s share of the vote for governor dropped from 62 percent in 1860 to 53 percent now. Because very few states were as solidly Republican as Maine, a similar drop in the remaining Northern states would spell disaster for the president. Were such erosion to occur, it would give the Democratic opposition control of the House of Representatives and a majority of the statehouses.

  Lee had these Northern voters in mind when he briefed Jefferson Davis after that disappointing reception in Frederick. Having failed to spark an uprising, he turned to a new strategy: he would “inflict injury” on the North in Pennsylvania, then offer a truce based on Southern independence. With that offer on the table, “the people of the United States [would] determine at their coming elections” whether to keep fighting or bring the war to an end. Lee understood—as his father’s friend George Washington had understood—that he didn’t have to conquer the enemy to be victorious. He only had to exhaust the enemy’s confidence and its appetite for war.

  A second attentive audience was, of course, Europe. The Union debacle at Bull Run and the Confederate advance into Kentucky at last persuaded Palmerston that it was time to intervene. He said as much in a letter to Russell, who was still on the Continent with the queen. The foreign minister felt the same; in his reply to Palmerston, he added that if the Union refused a mediated settlement, England should take the next step and recognize the Confederacy as an independent nation. At that point, Britain and France could supply the naval and industrial muscle the Confederates so desperately lacked. When that happened, the project of conquering the South—a project that was already staggering—would become impossible; the North would have to give up. Palmerston and Russell agreed to put the topic at the top of the cabinet’s agenda when they gathered again in October.

  The military and political terrain had shifted yet again, and these first two weeks of September determined much of Richmond’s strategy for the remainder of the war. The dream of sparking a pro-Confederacy uprising in the border states had fizzled, never to be seriously revived. With it died the South’s strategy for winning an outright victory through its own efforts. The Rebels were left to rely on help from outside forces: exhausted Northern voters, emboldened foreign powers, or some combination of the two. That this was a milestone in the course of the conflict was not immediately apparent; as the days went by, the Rebels continued northward and Union armies moved to meet them on fields that would soon be hot with blood and gunfire. But the reconfigured landscape did sharply raise the stakes of these impending battles, because the stars seemed perfectly aligned to bring those outside forces into play. Northern elections were at hand. The Europeans were poised for action. The Rebels would never see a better chance to win foreign support and flay the morale of the North. This was their moment.

  * * *

  On September 6, units of the reorganized Army of the Potomac paraded up Pennsylvania Avenue toward the White House, only to make a sharp right turn before they got there. More than 20,000 troops all made the same ostentatious right face, then took a left onto H Street, which brought them past McClellan’s house. The chesty little man in brass and blue basked in the music and salutes.

  In a handful of days, the general had done an extraordinary job of putting the army back on its feet. This was, in the words of James McPherson, “perhaps his finest hour.” Still, it wasn’t clear what McClellan was up to. “There was design” in that detour, fretted Gideon Welles, whose own home was catty-corner from Little Mac’s. From his front walk, Welles could look across H Street and over the heads of the marching men to see the proud McClellan in the foreground and—a block away, across Lafayette Square—the Executive Mansion. There was something ominous, something conspiratorial, about that scene. “They cheered the General lustily, instead of passing by the White House and honoring the President,” Welles reported. Then, to the west of McClellan’s place, the column turned right again to start up the hill toward Tennallytown and onward along the Rockville Pike into Maryland. They were off to hunt the invaders.

  If Lincoln noticed the slight, he kept it to himself. What mattered most was that the troops were going after Lee rather than coming for his own head. The army was “becoming reckless and untameable,” in the words of one close observer, and word was circulating at high levels in Washington “of a conspiracy on foot among certain generals for a revolution.” Similar talk was rampant in New York. Lincoln took such threats in stride, but they strengthened his judgment that McClellan’s clique did too much talking and too little fighting. Lee’s foray into Union territory provided an opportunity to change that equation. The Rebels were sticking their necks out; where others saw only menace in the Confederate initiative, Lincoln saw an excellent chance to isolate them, cut them off, and crush them.

  But for now all was uncertainty, and the pressure of the situation burst the weak seams holding Lincoln’s cabinet together. Chase was furious at Welles for refusing to sign the demand for McClellan’s ouster, and he blamed the navy secretary for the fact that “everything was going wrong [and] the country was ruined.” Welles suspected Stanton of planting stories in the New York press to make the navy look bad whenever the army was in a bind. Caleb Smith of Interior turned on Seward as the source of all “misfortune and mismanagement.” Montgomery Blair set on Stanton, spreading accusations that the war secretary was taking bribes. According to Welles, Blair began recruiting colleagues to help him force Stanton from office; it was time, Blair said, to “get this black terrier out of his kennel.”

  By this point, the bitter feelings had spread well beyond the cabinet itself. Blair, for instance, was the target, along with Seward, of a committee of abolitionists that called on Lincoln on September 10. The committee’s spokesman, a distinguished New York lawyer named James Hamilton—a son of Alexander Hamilton—was Chase’s houseguest while in Washington. Over breakfast before the meeting with Lincoln, Chase and Hamilton discussed Seward’s supposed resistance to emancipation. In Chase’s diary entry describing the conversation, he portrayed himself as Seward’s stalwart defender. But that wasn’t the message Hamilton heard. He left Chase’s house so infected with anti-Seward feeling that the president sensed it from the moment the meeting began. As Hamilton launched into his presentation, Lincoln cut him off angrily. “It’s plain enough what you want—you want to get Seward out of the Cabinet. There is not one of you
who would not see the country ruined if you could turn out Seward.”

  Stanton, meanwhile, reserved his greatest frustration for Lincoln himself, who continued to display what he called “humiliating submissiveness” to McClellan. The president’s latest notion was that he should ride out to the Maryland countryside for a chat with the general, whose army was creeping forward across a wide front in hopes of bumping into the Rebels.

  As usual, McClellan was calling for reinforcements as he went. He grossly exaggerated the strength of the enemy, making himself the outnumbered underdog even though he actually led more than twice as many men as Lee. He again gave credence to mistaken reports that multitudes of Rebels were on their way from the West to make the odds against him still longer. In sum, the same calamitous thinking that crippled McClellan on the peninsula set in as soon as he marched away from the fortifications of Washington. The Rebels, he told Henry Halleck, “consist of their oldest regiments, and are commanded by their best Generals … their forces are numerically superior to ours by at least twenty-five percent. This, with the prestige of their recent successes, will, without doubt, inspire them with a confidence which will cause them to fight well.” Therefore, McClellan continued, “at the risk of being considered slow and overcautious,” he was calling for at least 25,000 additional troops. He certainly hoped to win the coming battle, but “if we should be so unfortunate as to meet with defeat, our country is at their mercy.”

  Stanton was enraged by McClellan’s endless predictions of a withering battle against a mighty, if largely imaginary, host. And the president’s continued efforts to inspire the general merely led to the fruitless pleading that the war secretary found so demeaning. Even now, Lincoln could pry scarcely a morsel of definitive information from McClellan—and this while being bombarded with frantic pleas for help from Kentucky and Pennsylvania, where authorities were packing up the state archives and Treasury for safekeeping in New York. By the rainy, sleepless night of September 12, the president was desperate for news from the front. “How does it look now?” he cabled Little Mac. The message, written at four A.M., never received an answer.

  * * *

  Later that morning, Salmon Chase began a difficult day by losing a rolled-up sheaf of embarrassing documents—an anti-McClellan memo and several pages of his gossipy journal—while on his way to work. “What if it should fall into the hands of somebody who will make public what is not designed for publication?” he agonized. At his office in the Treasury building, he found a mountain of unpaid bills waiting for him. Funding the war effort was as lonely as it was daunting. “Expenses are enormous, increasing instead of diminishing,” he confided to his diary, “but neither the president, his counselors nor his commanding generals seem to care. They rush on from expense to expense and from defeat to defeat, heedless of the abyss of bankruptcy and ruin which yawns before us.” Chase’s lost papers were soon picked up in the street and returned, much to his relief, but any good feeling was erased by a summons to a cabinet meeting.

  The president and his colleagues proved to be in moods as dark as Chase’s. Lincoln’s irritation, especially with McClellan, was apparent from the start. In the words of one participant, the cabinet engaged in “a long and free discussion of the condition of the army,” during which the president lamented the fact that Ambrose Burnside had refused to take command. McClellan, Lincoln complained, “can’t go ahead. He can’t strike a blow. He got to Rockville, for instance, last Sunday night, and in four days he advanced to Middlebrook—ten miles, in pursuit of an invading enemy. This is rapid movement for him.”

  Others joined the grumbling. Welles theorized that the Union’s problem was too many West Point graduates at the head of the armies. The well-trained engineers excelled at building fortifications, but they just weren’t aggressive. This was a stale observation; people had been complaining about West Point generals for months. But Blair took the chance to defend his alma mater and criticize Stanton at the same time. There were plenty of good West Pointers, he said. The problem was a War Department that failed to find and promote them. “There was bluster,” Blair asserted, “but not competency.”

  This sour meeting broke up having accomplished nothing, and Chase went to Stanton’s office to commiserate. Why couldn’t Lincoln be stronger? they asked each other. Why couldn’t he dismiss the conniving Democrats from their field commands; why couldn’t he free the slaves and enlist them as soldiers? It was obvious what needed to be done. Chase blamed Lincoln’s “negrophobic” friends and advisers for leading him astray.

  Seward, of course, was one of the advisers Chase had in mind. Two months ago, Lincoln had been on the cusp of emancipation; now, with McClellan and Buell once again ascendant, it seemed that the conservative Democrats were, if anything, stronger. And the critical voice at the key moment had been Seward’s—it was he who had persuaded Lincoln to wait for a victory to issue an emancipation decree. That was the point, Chase felt, when the president seemed to lose his nerve.

  The conflict between Chase and Seward was now so open and damaging that Seward’s mentor—and Lincoln’s frequent sounding board—Thurlow Weed decided to undertake a mission of peace. He called on Chase for “a long talk,” during which Chase expressed his frustration that Seward was encouraging “the irresolution and inaction of the President.” Weed implored Chase to mend fences with Seward and “agree on a definite line” that the two men could support together. The rumors of Seward’s supposed resistance to emancipation were hurting him with his New York political base, Weed revealed. Hoping to play the mediator, Weed promised to relay Chase’s complaints to Seward.

  Weed’s mission was doomed from the start. That Seward and Chase had legitimate differences concerning policy and strategy made the relationship challenging enough; worse, they were opposites in personality while being identical in scope of ambition. Conflict between them was inevitable. Welles summed up their differences nicely: “Seward was supple and dexterous; Chase was clumsy and strong. Seward made constant mistakes, but recovered with a facility that was wonderful and almost always without injury to himself; Chase committed fewer blunders, but persevered in them … often to his own serious detriment.”

  Chase resented Seward’s easy relationship with Lincoln. Seward, in turn, took too much pleasure from tweaking the pompous Chase. For example on September 12, after Chase finished commiserating with Stanton, he paid a call on the secretary of state to dispose of a routine matter. Seward, ignoring Chase’s businesslike demeanor, chose this moment to make a joke about emancipation. He knew that Chase was not a joking man, especially when it came to issues about which he was passionate, yet Seward quipped that if the Rebels invaded Pennsylvania, “the President should make a Proclamation … freeing all the apprentices in the state.” Recounting this in his diary, Chase commented icily: “I thought the jest ill-timed.”

  Backbiting and squabbling were but symptoms of the disease of helplessness: as Little Mac plodded forward in search of the Rebels, there was little to do in Washington but wait. “Alas! Poor country,” wrote Charles Sumner, capturing the mood of mid-September. “A vigorous ruler might have saved it.”

  * * *

  A young artist for Harper’s Weekly, Thomas Nast, was traveling with McClellan’s staff that same September 12 when the general entered Frederick, Maryland, on his favorite horse, Dan Webster. Later Nast sketched the triumphal scene: American flags decking the buildings; cheering citizens filling the streets and waving from balconies; bouquets raining down on the soldiers; a mother thrusting her baby toward Little Mac, who gave his hat the trademark wave revealing cow-licked hair. The general enjoyed every moment. “I was nearly overwhelmed and pulled to pieces,” McClellan reported to his wife, and he enclosed in his letter a “little flag that some enthusiastic lady thrust into or upon Dan’s bridle. As to flowers!!—they came in crowds! In truth I was seldom more affected than by the scenes I saw [and] the reception I met with.”

  The general ordered his men to make camp in t
he farmlands outside town, which they were happy to do after months of hiking and camping in the hostile environs of Virginia. Tubs of lemonade and fresh-baked pies awaited them at nearly every farmhouse, and the women and children wore smiles on their faces. McClellan was taken with the beauty of the countryside: “one of the most lovely regions I have ever seen—quite broken with lovely valleys in all directions, & some fine mountains in the distance.” Lee and his army lay beyond those mountains, gone somewhere to the west. Exactly where was a mystery, and in fact a few reports suggested that the Rebels had recrossed the Potomac to return to Virginia, greatly distressing Lincoln. “Please do not let him get off without being hurt,” he telegraphed McClellan.

  And how strong was Lee? Governor Andrew Curtin of Pennsylvania deployed a network of spies to find the answer, and his latest estimate was ludicrously high: as many as 190,000 Rebels in Maryland, plus 250,000 south of the river in Virginia, for a total of 440,000 men. The habit of exaggerating enemy forces had finally reached a peak; this was nearly ten times the actual number. Eyes rolled in Washington, but the hyperbole still did damage. This overstatement of Lee’s strength by a factor of ten made McClellan’s own inflated estimates seem modest. The truth—that Union forces greatly outnumbered Confederates in the East—could gain little traction.

  Saturday, September 13, found the Army of the Potomac resting happily along the Monocacy River outside the welcoming town of Frederick. Its general gazed at the fine, long ridge known as South Mountain and imagined legions of Rebel soldiers—unquestionably more men than McClellan was leading—on the other side, perhaps poised to spring a trap. But his side of the mountain could not be more pleasant, and this was enough to make a man reluctant to cross over. McClellan decided to wait for Lee to make the next move, and he therefore convened a meeting with leading citizens of Frederick to arrange what might be an extended stay for his army. In a wire to Halleck, McClellan promised: “Should the enemy go towards Penn[sylvania] I shall follow him.”