Rise to Greatness

by David Von Drehle

  By the fall of 1862, McClernand was itching to have his own army. When the governor of Illinois invited him along on a trip to Washington in October, McClernand quickly accepted. Washington was a place where he knew how to make things happen. Once there, he pursued Lincoln relentlessly. Whenever he had a moment alone with the president, he pressed his desire to recruit and train a new army of men from Illinois and surrounding states, then take that force down the Mississippi from Memphis to capture Vicksburg. It was a big job for an inexperienced soldier, but considering the moment when McClernand had Lincoln’s ear, it’s not surprising that the president would listen to such a plan. After all, Lincoln was in search of aggressive generals, Vicksburg was a prize he very much coveted, and during a difficult election season he did not need John McClernand mad at him.

  When McClernand left Washington late that month, he carried the orders he coveted. Signed by Stanton, endorsed by Lincoln, and marked “Confidential,” the papers authorized McClernand to collect troops from Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa for his mission to open the Mississippi. Within days, however, the newspapers caught wind of McClernand’s secret campaign, which is how Grant learned shortly after setting out on his campaign that his special problem was about to get much worse. “Two commanders on the same field are always one too many,” Grant later wrote, “and in this case I did not think the general selected had either the experience or the qualifications for so important a position. I feared for the safety of the troops entrusted to him.” On November 10, when Grant learned that fresh regiments were being told to report to McClernand, he telegraphed Halleck. “Am I to … lay still here while an Expedition is fitted out from Memphis?” he asked. And what about the troops from his army already stationed in Memphis under Sherman: were they to be part of this new “Expedition”?

  Grant was relieved when he heard back from the general in chief the next day. “You have command of all troops sent to your Dep[artment],” Halleck wrote, “and have permission to fight the enemy when you please.” Thus encouraged, Grant promptly sent his cavalry toward Holly Springs, which they cleared of Rebels and occupied on November 13.

  The next few weeks were highly confusing. Halleck continued to reassure Grant that he had sole command, even as Lincoln and Stanton expressed support for McClernand and his expedition. Worried about losing the upper hand, McClernand sought and received help from his political friends. Grant, trying to thwart McClernand, decided the best strategy was to launch his own river-based Vicksburg campaign under Sherman before McClernand arrived in Memphis to claim his command. It was a mystery: was Lincoln playing a double game, allowing an important politician to cherish a little longer his fantasy that he would be entrusted with one of the most important military objectives of the war? When Lincoln authorized the Illinois congressman’s mission in October, he didn’t know that Grant was about to take the initiative. In urging McClernand forward, he was simply trying to light a fire. Now the pot was boiling, but the president seemed to have little desire to interfere further.

  * * *

  John Pope, once one of Lincoln’s favorite generals, had been banished to Minnesota in early September. By the time he arrived, the crisis was over. On October 9, Pope wired the War Department to report: “The Sioux War may be considered at an end.” Little Crow, reluctant leader of what had become the deadliest uprising by Native Americans in U.S. history, had predicted the outcome: “The white men are like the locusts,” he said; no matter how many settlers the Sioux killed, “ten times ten will come to kill you.” But it was not just the white men; it was their rifles and most of all their cannon that scattered the chief and his warriors.

  After being routed at the battle of Wood Lake, Little Crow and some of his men fled into the empty plains of Canada. But hundreds of Sioux left behind were taken prisoner, and Pope reported that he was “anxious to execute a number of them.” Not a small number, either, but every Indian involved in the fighting. Furthermore, Pope found it difficult to determine which of the Sioux had actually been involved: “I don’t know how you can discriminate now between Indians who say they … have been friendly, and those who have not.” In Minnesota, the press and public, too, wanted revenge on the Sioux.

  A military tribunal was established to sort through the prisoners, and Pope admonished its members not to “allow any false sympathy for the Indians to prevent you from acting with the utmost rigor.” On November 7, Pope sent Lincoln the names of more than three hundred Sioux prisoners who had been found guilty by the tribunal and sentenced to hang. In all of American history there had never been a mass execution on any comparable scale. Only Lincoln stood in the way.

  The president had heard enough from Pope to know that a number of horrific crimes had been committed against innocent men, women, and children, but he strongly suspected that many of those now condemned had been railroaded and did not deserve to die. A plea from Minnesota’s governor, Alexander Ramsey, only added to the sense that the state authorities intended to sacrifice the prisoners to satisfy a mob. “I hope the execution of every Sioux Indian condemned by the military court will be at once ordered,” Ramsey wrote Lincoln. “It would be wrong upon principle and policy to refuse this. Private revenge would … take the place of official judgment” if the executions were delayed.

  On November 10, as McClellan was bidding farewell to the Army of the Potomac, the president replied that he would take the risk. He was not willing to sanction a massacre masquerading as justice. In a telegram to Pope, Lincoln wrote: “Please forward, as soon as possible, the full and complete record of these convictions. And if the record does not fully indicate the more guilty and influential … please have a careful statement made on these points and forwarded to me.”

  No doubt Pope considered this terse rebuke a further humiliation, for his pique showed in his reply. “The only distinction between the culprits is … which of them murdered most people or violated most young girls,” Pope wrote. “All of them are guilty,” and “the people … are exasperated … and if the guilty are not all executed I think it nearly impossible to prevent the indiscriminate massacre of all the Indians—old men, women, and children.” The irritated Pope sent the court records to Washington.

  When the documents arrived, Lincoln assigned two lawyers from the attorney general’s office to review each case. It was time-consuming work: the names of the Sioux were strange and confusing, and the events described were chaotic. The examination was still under way when Pope again wired Lincoln to warn of possible lynch mobs. “Organizations of Inhabitants are being rapidly made with the purpose of massacring these Indians,” he reported.

  Still, Lincoln refused to be rushed, so Governor Ramsey tried another tack a few days later. Would Lincoln lift his stay of execution if Ramsey took responsibility for the hangings? “Nothing but the Speedy execution of the tried and convicted Sioux Indians will save us here from Scenes of outrage,” he declared. “If you prefer it turn them over to me & I will order their Execution.” On November 28, two members of Congress from Minnesota arrived in Washington to plead with Lincoln in person. A bloodbath was about to take place, they urged. He must stop it by allowing the executions to proceed.

  Lincoln was hard at work that day on his annual message to Congress, which was due two days later. In Lincoln’s time, this report was a vitally important document, a long and detailed accounting of government operations, as well as the president’s blueprint for the future. Weeks of preparation went into each one. With the nation in the midst of a devouring civil war, Lincoln’s 1862 message had to be perfectly calibrated in every word, phrase, and echo. The president told his visitors he could not put the message aside to deal with the Sioux prisoners—nor would he wash his hands of their fates. The people of Minnesota must wait a bit longer for his answer.

  * * *

  During her trip to New York and Boston earlier that same month, Mary Lincoln became annoyed because her husband had made no effort to communicate with her. “I have waited in vain to hear f
rom you,” she wrote on November 2, “yet as you are not given to letter writing, will be charitable enough to impute your silence, to the right cause.”

  Mary reported that she was doing what she loved to do—shopping, and receiving homage from “all the distinguished in the land.” She mentioned that her trip had nearly been spoiled by “one of my severe attacks,” but now she was herself again, dragging nine-year-old Tad to the tailor for a fitting, and in search of just the right “fur wrappings for the coachman’s carriage trappings.” She summarized the political intelligence she had gathered—people wanted action from the army—and passed along the news that Tad had lost a tooth. Most importantly, she could not understand why her husband wouldn’t take time to jot a note. Perfect “strangers come up from [Washington] & tell me you are well,” but she had heard nothing from the man himself. “One line, to say that we are occasionally remembered will be gratefully received,” she wrote, and then closed by passing along a request that the president find a job for a friend of a favorite department store owner.

  On November 9, Lincoln finally replied, writing that it had grown so chilly at the cottage that he was once again residing at the White House. The presidential retreat wasn’t built for winter. When the season’s first cold front had rattled the windows and seeped under the doors, the president’s cook suggested it was time to move back to the thick-walled Executive Mansion.

  Lincoln’s return to the White House brought a change to the friendship he had forged over the previous two months with David Derickson, a volunteer captain from Pennsylvania. In civilian life, Derickson was a businessman from Meadville, near the Ohio border, and when the Union restarted its recruiting efforts in late June, he and his teenage son Charles answered the call. Their unit, Company K of the 150th Pennsylvania Volunteer Regiment, reached Washington in late summer during the panicky days after Pope’s defeat at Bull Run. The company was assigned to the grounds of the Soldiers’ Home with orders to protect the president and his family. Lincoln had always resisted being surrounded by bodyguards, but with Lee in the vicinity there was no room for debate.

  Company K was a godsend for the wounded Lincoln family. Alone and in pain after the death of his brother and the subsequent banishment of the Taft boys, Tad was much in need of friends. During his mother’s breakdown, the boy’s emotional requirements were met mainly by his overtaxed father, who gave Tad free rein to interrupt meetings, pester official visitors, and roam the White House until he fell asleep on the floor of the president’s office or on a nearby sofa. Late at night, Lincoln would hoist the sleeping boy onto his shoulder and carry him to bed.

  Once the family moved out to the cottage for the summer, Tad’s life brightened. Then, when Company K arrived on the grounds in the early fall, he made the soldiers’ camp his own. Several of the young Pennsylvanians welcomed him as a kid brother and mascot. He rode his pony to daily drill, fell in line at chow time for plates of beans, and drafted soldiers to join him on adventures. One day a teamster got in trouble for leaving camp in Tad’s company without permission, and the young Lincoln went directly to his father to obtain a permanent pass.

  Lincoln sometimes joined Tad with his newfound pals for a game of checkers or a chat about army life. Now and then the president would walk over to a campfire for a cup of strong coffee; one day he watched with delight as two brothers in the company donned a blanket and pretended to be an elephant. At night, he would occasionally pace up and down at the edge of the camp, lost in thought until something caused a swell of rising voices or a burst of laughter. “Whenever he heard loud talking, he would send in and inquire of its cause,” one soldier recalled.

  Lincoln met David Derickson shortly after Company K’s arrival and was immediately drawn to him. Impulsively, he invited the stocky, square-jawed captain to ride with him into Washington on the morning they met, and he stopped along the way to introduce the new recruit to Henry Halleck. As autumn went on, the friendship deepened, especially after Mary and Tad left on their trip to the Northeast. “The Captain and I are getting quite thick,” Lincoln joked to Derickson’s commanding officer. Another captain assigned to the Soldiers’ Home guard, Henry W. Crotzer, often joined the pair for breakfast or dinner, but Crotzer reported that it was Derickson who “advanced … [furthest] in the President’s confidence and esteem.” Derickson earned an invitation to join Lincoln’s entourage on the trip to Antietam, and sometimes, the two men stayed up so late talking at the cottage that Lincoln invited Derickson to sleep “in the same bed with him and—it is said—[make] use of His Excellency’s nightshirt!”

  Some historians have speculated that the relationship was sexually intimate, but the question will likely never be resolved. What is clear is that Orville Browning’s departure from Washington in July had left Lincoln in need of a companion with whom he could laugh, read poetry, and give voice to his darkest forebodings. Derickson stepped into the lonely void in Lincoln’s late-night lamplight.

  Early in November, the army proposed to reassign Company K, but Lincoln intervened to keep Tad’s friends and his own nearby. Derickson and his troops were “very agreeable to me,” he wrote. Still, the move back to the White House meant that Lincoln and his bodyguards would no longer be as close. By springtime, Captain Derickson would be on to other duties.

  John Dahlgren continued to be a friend. On November 15, he arranged for Lincoln to observe the test firing of a new rocket designed by the inventor Joshua Hyde. The notion of killing enemy troops with shrapnel from exploding rockets had originated in Asia; Europeans adopted rocketry during the Napoleonic Wars, and Winfield Scott took rockets to Mexico. What remained to be figured out was how to make a rocket fly straight and explode on cue: that was the riddle Hyde claimed to have solved.

  Lincoln, joined by Seward and Chase, drove to the navy yard and down to the water’s edge. There they found officers huddled around a cast-iron launching tube, preparing the test.

  What the presidential party expected to see and hear was a whoosh, a red glare, a burst in the air, and a rain of shrapnel on the gray surface of the Anacostia River. What they actually saw, after the fuse was set and everyone took a step back from the tube, was “a blast and puff of fire” as the rocket detonated without launching.

  When the smoke cleared and Lincoln was still standing with Seward and Chase unbloodied, the relief must have been intense. After all, these were men who could remember clearly what history has largely forgotten: that a failed weapons test in 1844 killed two members of John Tyler’s cabinet and, but for luck, might have killed the president as well.

  * * *

  Browning returned to Washington from Illinois late in November and called at the White House on November 29. Lincoln “was apparently very glad to see me, and received me with much cordiality,” he recorded. “We had a long familiar talk.” But things were different between them now: not only had Browning been passed over for the Supreme Court, he had lost his Senate seat, and he blamed his election defeat on Lincoln’s emancipation policy and the suspension of habeas corpus. Browning spoke to his friend at great length about the harmful effect of these decrees. “I told him that his proclamations had been disastrous to us. That prior to issuing them all loyal people were united in support of the war and the administration. That the masses of the democratic party were satisfied with him, and warmly supporting him” until he took those controversial steps.

  This was surely not the way Lincoln remembered the dark days of summer, but he didn’t interrupt to argue. Browning concluded by telling him that “the proclamations had revived old party issues” and had given the Democrats “a rallying cry.” Then, at last, he paused for Lincoln’s reaction. “He made no reply,” Browning reported.

  Lincoln evidently agreed with Browning that the decision on habeas corpus was badly handled—the subsequent widespread abuses of the power to detain people without charge had provoked much anger among the American public. Lincoln had recently responded to the criticism: on November 22, with his cons
ent, Secretary of War Stanton had ordered the release of nearly all the federal prisoners held under the September proclamation.

  As to Browning’s other charge, had Lincoln chosen to answer he would certainly have pleaded not guilty. He had already said that he “would rather die than take back a word” of his emancipation decree. And although Browning’s personal cause may have been hurt by the proclamation, the cause of the Union had survived at the polls.

  After Browning aired his complaints, the two friends moved to less divisive topics. Lincoln caught Browning up on the military intrigue he had missed, describing Pope’s campaign, the demoralization of the army, and McClellan’s brief success and subsequent fatal inertia. When Browning asked about Burnside, the president replied that he had just missed seeing the general, who had earlier met with Lincoln and Halleck to discuss strategy. Then the president brought Browning up to date on Burnside’s recent progress.

  In the three weeks since assuming command, Burnside had moved the Army of the Potomac off the road blocked by Stonewall Jackson—the same route John Pope had preferred as a pathway to Richmond—and onto the route Irwin McDowell had planned to take back in May. This led the army once again to Fredericksburg, where Burnside camped his men across the Rappahannock from the picturesque town and sent a surrender demand to the mayor. With Lee’s army coming to his rescue, the mayor felt emboldened to refuse.

  This standoff had prompted Lincoln to cruise down the Potomac to Aquia Creek so that he could discuss alternatives with Burnside. The options were fairly simple: the Federal army could go through Fredericksburg or go around it. As he had shown during his single-minded assault on the bridge at Antietam, Burnside was a straight-ahead sort of thinker. He told Lincoln that he intended to string pontoon boats into a bridge, march across, take the town, and keep going. As the discussion between the two men continued into the next day and then reconvened in Washington, Lincoln showed his own tendency to err in the opposite direction, toward too much complexity. He advocated a complicated maneuver that would require three columns to converge on the Confederate position from three directions. Burnside conceded that his own plan was “somewhat risky.” Lincoln acknowledged that his would require a delay for additional preparations.