by Larry Tagg
McClellan had talked since September of a blow against the Confederate army still camped at Manassas. On his tours of the front lines in the autumn, he would halt his generals, point, and say, “We will strike them there.” The grand advance was scheduled for late November. The nation expected it, and the men in Washington, already impatient, demanded it—Zack Chandler told Lincoln that if the army didn’t fight a battle before going into winter quarters, he “was in favor of sending for Jeff Davis at once.” But as the jump-off date for the strike at Manassas approached, McClellan’s natural caution crept over him—he was outnumbered, he insisted—and in early December he hatched a new plan. Although the Young Napoleon would not reveal the details of it to Lincoln for many weeks, by his new scheme the army would board ships, sail 120 miles down Chesapeake Bay, and land east of Richmond at Urbanna on the Virginia shore, bypassing the rebel army. From there, by quick marches, he could reach Richmond before the enemy could arrive to defend it. Besides promising a flashy victory, this new movement, by avoiding a bloody battle at Manassas, would be brilliant strategy. It would be the splendid maneuver that would prove the superiority of the West Pointers and lift McClellan himself into the presidency. It would be so much more fitting for the savior of the Republic to take the enemy capital by sheer strategy, with no loss of life. A grateful nation, quickly reunified after the bloodless capture of the rebel seat of power, would light his way to the White House in 1864, perhaps sooner.
With December, however, came the winter rains. Day after day it poured, and Virginia roads turned into bottomless rivers of liquid mud, making campaigning impossible. McClellan was forced to put off his masterstroke until the spring. On December 12, the New York Tribune reported that the army was settling in for the winter in the comfort of its snug log huts.
* * *
Outraged Radicals rent their garments in frustration. They conceived a potent solution, one that would restore their lost Congressional ascension over the President as well as propel the army forward. The December session had barely begun before Zachary Chandler mounted the podium to propose an investigation to “lay the blame where it belongs” for the disasters at Bull Run and Ball’s Bluff. Within five days both Houses had overwhelmingly approved the formation of a “Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War,” giving it broad powers to investigate the war’s men and events. The Committee, composed of three senators and four congressmen, had Ben Wade at the head and Chandler at his right hand, and from the beginning it was an Inquisition. For the next three years, it would remain a persistent challenge to Lincoln’s direction of the war effort, and one of the Radicals’ most formidable weapons in their crusade to make the war revolutionary.
Since none of its members had any military experience, the Committee’s political purpose was painfully apparent to Lincoln, but Wade and Chandler were unfazed. Lincoln needed to know that if he had war powers, Congress had them too, and he would have to consult with them more closely from now on. Besides, Wade and Chandler pooh-poohed the very idea of military expertise. They rejected the West Pointers’ claim that military leadership was some specialized science, knowable only after years of rigorous Academy instruction. They held that the average American could learn all there was to learn in a few weeks. They snorted at the word “strategy”—wars, they believed, were won by hard fighting, by attacks followed by more attacks.
The Committee’s first target, of course, was Lincoln’s man, “Tardy George” McClellan. They were prepared to believe any treachery of this insolent, aristocratic, overcautious Democratic general. McClellan’s plan, according to Wade, was to prolong the war until both sides became so war-weary that they would call back the Democrats—the only party that still existed both North and South—to make a peace. On December 21 the Committee called McClellan himself in for an interview, but he had just taken to his sickbed, stricken with typhoid, and was too ill to rise.
The Committee, not to be deterred, turned its attention to the President. Countrymen everywhere were attacking Lincoln. The Chicago Tribune published demands for “an active war” and drastic measures against slavery. A new round of letters circulated denouncing the President and his Cabinet. “We want the President to kill somebody,” began one, summing up the general Radical feeling. “I greatly fear that the President is not up to the task and to the demands of the time,” went another from Boston. From Illinois came a warning: “ … I find that nearly a majority of the men who voted for Uncle Abe are beginning to come out against him … . They curse Lincoln and call him a Damed [sic] old traitor … .” Another Illinoisan complained that Republicans there were “nearly paralyzed by the imbecility of President Lincoln in the management of the war,” adding, “Nothing is more common than to hear men who did all in their power for the election of Abe Lincoln … say that Lincoln has done more to aid Secessia, than Jefferson Davis has done. Were the trial made to-day, Mr. Lincoln would not receive one in ten of the votes given him in Illinois at the late presidential election.” Thaddeus Stevens rose in the House to bellow that Congress, not the President, would run the war, and they would run it their own way.
Especially embarrassing to Lincoln was a lecture by Horace Greeley to a packed hall at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, where the President sat onstage with members of the Cabinet. To Lincoln’s discomfort, Greeley launched into fervent praise of Frémont’s recent efforts to free slaves in Missouri, and partisans in the crowd began jeering at Lincoln. Using the moment to full advantage, Greeley turned around and glared at Lincoln as he exclaimed that freeing slaves should be the war’s guiding purpose. The audience roared its approval, and Lincoln, the villain, was forced to sit and suffer the righteous indignation of the thousand people in the room.
To this public humiliation was added the Committee’s private one. On New Year’s Eve a wary Lincoln met with the Committee on the Conduct of the War for ninety minutes, during which Wade bitterly accused the President of betraying the nation, saying, “You are murdering your country by inches in consequence of the inactivity of the military and want of a distinct policy in regard to slavery.” The balance of supremacy was shifting unmistakably toward the Capitol end of Pennsylvania Avenue. The Committee had demonstrated its ability to rouse fear and suspicion. “I am confident that Mr. Lincoln and Gen. McClelland [sic] are both afraid of it,” one Radical wrote confidently shortly afterward.
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Lincoln’s dressing-down by a hostile committee was a fitting way to see out the last hours of the Old Year. As 1861 drew to a close, there were no triumphs Lincoln could celebrate, and none he could foresee. Now that McClellan was down with typhoid fever, the Army of the Potomac was paralyzed. More, because McClellan was General-in-Chief, his silence meant that military operations everywhere were frozen. Meanwhile, the costs of raising, transporting, training, feeding, clothing, and sheltering the 700,000 men who had come into the Union ranks were bleeding the Treasury white. There had been nothing to cheer on the battlefield. Lincoln had not proven himself by dramatic actions or inspiring words. He presided over a party that had split into warring factions. His only success had been a retreat from a war with Britain. To millions across the North, the administration seemed to be drifting, and moderates shared the Radicals’ distrust of a President who seemed powerless to put things right. Neither he nor McClellan had been able to explain why the Army of the Potomac had not moved, and Lincoln himself did not know why. Ben Wade called the government “blundering, cowardly, and inefficient.” Count Gurowski’s summing-up at years’ end was, “If the new year shall be only the continuation of the faults, the mistakes, and the incapacities prevailing during 1861, then the worst is to be expected.”
Doubt was a virus that spread across the North and sapped its strength of purpose. It even infected the Cabinet. Edward Bates thought Lincoln was unequal to his duties, and in his diary entry for December 31st he described a Cabinet meeting during which he had lectured the President:
Many of the deficiencies ought be
fore now, to have been corrected… . [T]he dangerous fact exists, that the Sec of War and the Prest. are ignorant of the condition of the army and its intended operations!
If I were President, I would command in chief—not in detail, certainly—and I would know what army I had, and what the high generals (my Lieutenants) were doing with that army.
… It seemed as if all military operations were to stop, just because Genl McClellan is sick! … I … told the President that he was commander in chief, and that it was not his privilege but his duty to command; and that implied the necessity to know the true condition of things.
That if I were in his place, I would know; and if things were not done to my liking, I would order them otherwise. That I believed he could get along easier and much better by the free use of his power, than by this injurious deference to his subordinates[.]
Bates closed the year on a note of despair over Lincoln: “But I fear that I spoke in vain. The Prest. is an excellent man, and, in the main wise; but he lacks will and purpose, and, I greatly fear he has not the power to command.”
Lincoln’s despair was deeper than all the others’. After a melancholy conversation with John Dahlgren at the Navy Yard soon after the New Year, Dahlgren reported that “For the first time I heard the President speak of the bare possibility of our being two nations.” On January 10, at rock-bottom, Lincoln sought out Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs and moaned, “General, what shall I do? The people are impatient; Chase has no money and he tells me he can raise no more; the General of the Army has typhoid fever. The bottom is out of the tub. What shall I do?”
Chapter 20
Democrats Disappear
“All who do not shout hosannas to Abe Lincoln are denounced.”
The most remarkable thing about the crescendo of criticism of Lincoln in the last months of 1861 was that so little of it came from the Democratic press. With so much fault to be found with the administration’s prosecution of what many Democrats called “the present unholy war,” the silence of the anti- Lincoln editors was eerie.
The reason was fear. The Democratic press had gone to earth, driven underground by a season of violent repression. Lincoln—fearful for the fragility of what was still called “the democratic experiment,” breathing the atmosphere of suspicion that was thick across the whole of the North, and still suffering the special spike of terror from being surrounded in Washington the previous spring—had reacted in the summer and fall by presiding over a trampling of civil liberties.
In the beginning, even during the Uprising of the North after Lincoln’s call for troops, the Democratic editors had attacked Lincoln out of sheer force of habit. Some drew him in simple strokes as a bloodthirsty tyrant. The New York Evening Day Book declared, “Mr. Lincoln is evidently a believer in the savageries of old Europe, and thinks that the only way to ‘save the Union’ is to resort to the bayonet, just as Louis Napoleon ‘saves’ society in France!” The Bedford (Pa.) Gazette was another: “The so-called ‘peace policy’ of the Lincoln Administration,” it proclaimed, “has all at once been turned into one of blood and horror… . Mr. Lincoln and his partisans may learn to pray that the curse placed upon their political sins may be removed.” Maine’s Bangor Democrat protested that Lincoln “has undertaken to convert [the] Government into an instrument of tyranny,” and compared him to the hated Tories of 1776. “Abraham Lincoln,” it said, “a Tory from his birth, is putting forth all the powers of Government to crush out the spirit of American liberty. Surrounded by the gleaming swords and glistening bayonets at Washington, he sends forth fleets and armies to overawe and subdue that gallant little State [South Carolina] which was the first to raise its voice against British oppression.”
* * *
The Democratic press, however, was soon quieted by the example of the New York Herald, the lion of the pro-slavery Democratic journals in the North. On April 12, the Herald had made its sympathies visible by blazoning the new Confederate flag over its coverage of the Sumter battle. Three days later, on the afternoon of Lincoln’s call for troops, an angry mob gathered outside the Herald office, threatening to destroy the building and everyone inside unless it made a patriotic show. Panicked Herald employees sent an office boy running to buy a Union flag, and only after editor James Gordon Bennett himself unfurled it from an upper-story window and bowed repeatedly to the crowd below did the mob disperse. Bennett had made his fortune with a talent for telling which way the wind was blowing, and the experience instantaneously converted him. He was now a devoted defender of the Union, proclaiming the next day, “there will now be but one party, one question, one issue, one purpose in the Northern States—that of sustaining the government.”
In the spread-eagled fervor of these early days of the war, Northern mobs imposed their own ironclad censorship not only on the press but on free speech. One private citizen wrote that in New York it was not safe “for a man to express … doubt of the duty of northern men to march in obedience to Lincoln’s call,” and another, after twice being threatened for criticizing Lincoln, resolved to be more “prudent.”
The official crackdown followed within a month of Sumter on the evening of May 13, 1861, when Major General Benjamin Butler marched back into Baltimore with the same thousand men of the Sixth Massachusetts who had been stoned and shot at on their way through town three weeks earlier, and declared martial law. In the next few days, the first civilian prisoners—including John Merryman—were dragged off without charges to Fort McHenry. The treachery of Baltimore remained a popular theme in the Republican press in the coming weeks, and in June, Worthington G. Snethen, a columnist for the New York Tribune who had fed his readers a steady diet of “secessionist Baltimore” stories and was convinced of further plots there, arranged a private meeting with Secretary of War Simon Cameron. A few days later, Cameron gave a secret order to “seize at once and securely hold the four members of the Baltimore police board … together with their chief of police,” and at midnight on June 27, one thousand blue-coated soldiers marched out of Fort McHenry and, silent except for the crunch of their boots on the paving stones, marched through the darkened streets of Baltimore, picking up any policemen along the way who might spread word of their approach. When they reached police chief George Kane’s house at three in the morning, they rousted Kane out of bed, marched him back to the fort, and threw him in a cell with Merryman. Four days later the other members of the Baltimore police board joined him in prison, arrested on suspicion of disloyalty.
The incident was reported closely, with healthy outrage, by the Democratic press. The August 1, 1861, issue of the Democratic Brooklyn Eagle shone a harsh light on the removal of the “State Prisoners” from Fort McHenry to Fort Hamilton in New York—eleven men “against whom no charges have been preferred.” This item was followed by a righteous attack on Lincoln reprinted from the Cincinnati Enquirer:
The Old Constitution has been superseded by a new one, and … we are now under the new Republican Constitution. The Old Constitution was a noble, liberty protecting instrument—a shield to the citizen against arbitrary and unwarrantable searches and seizures.
It contains no provision authorizing the President to suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus;
No provision authorizing the President to proclaim martial law when and where he pleases;
No provision empowering the President to increase the standing army at his pleasure;
No provision to authorize the President to violate the right of the people to be secure in their persons, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures;
No authority to arrest the citizen for circulation petitions relating to the peace and welfare of the country;
No license to military officers to stop the publication of Newspapers at their will and pleasure.
All that was reserved for the new Republican Constitution, under which the President is acting. It is under this new Constitution the propositions are made in Congress by Republicans … . Thi
s fact will be a sufficient explanation in the future for a great many other curious and startling things it may see performed by Republican officials.
The fury over the presidential excesses of the spring and early summer deepened in the discouragement after the defeat at Bull Run, which inspired new blasts at Lincoln from Democratic journals demanding peace and an end to the “effusion of blood.” By the middle of August 1861, a peace movement was in full flower, and peace meetings were held all over the North. They were thronged by Democrats stirred by sympathy for their Southern brothers, resentment of Lincoln and his party for starting the war, and belief that the South could be won back by appeal to the time-honored principles of the party of Jefferson and Jackson, with “the Constitution as it is, and the Union as it was.”
These anti-war Democrats, however, felt keenly the flimsiness of their civil rights in such days of distrust. A meeting of the Association of the Democratic Editors of the State of New York on June 27 was a grim war council. The editors published a warning against any “attempt to muzzle the Democratic press by mobs and terrorism, to prevent citizens from expressing their honest opinions.”
The monster the Democratic editors feared was soon shocked into life by the passage of the Confiscation Act on August 6. It stated that any person supporting the rebellion was liable to the seizure of any property used for that aim. Zealots could now contend that any anti-Lincoln newspaper in the North was a tool of the rebellion, and its type, press, office, and paper could therefore be seized or destroyed. Within days of the passage of the Confiscation Act, the anti-Lincoln New York Daily News published a list of 154 papers opposed to “this unholy war.” It was a defiant roll call of the ranks of “peace” papers in anticipation of the coming storm against them.
