The Battles that Made Abraham Lincoln

by Larry Tagg

  That storm broke immediately, spearheaded by bad-tempered ninety-day Union soldiers just then returning home from service after Bull Run. On August 8 a mob of newly-returned soldiers demolished the office of the anti-war Democratic Standard of Concord, New Hampshire, and threw the type, desks, and papers out the window and onto the sidewalk, where they set the whole pile on fire. On August 12, a mob in Bangor, Maine, pried open the offices of the Bangor Democrat with a crowbar, rushed in, threw the contents out the window, and made a bonfire of them in the town square. A week later, in Haverhill, Massachusetts, a crowd of angry ex-soldiers and their friends seized the editor of the Essex County Democrat, tarred and feathered him, and rode him out of town on a rail. In Easton, Pennsylvania, a rabble gutted the offices of the anti-war Sentinel. In West Chester, Pennsylvania, a mob destroyed the Jeffersonian’s subscription lists, threw the printing type out the window, and damaged the press. In the next week, the Stark County, Ohio, Democrat was burned, and the Bridgeport, Connecticut, Farmer was smashed. By the end of August, the anti-war movement was in retreat, and many of the planned Peace meetings were being cancelled. The fury against the anti-war presses threatened to spread from the small towns to the cities. In New York City, police were detailed to guard the entrances to the Daily News.

  There, however, the rage against the anti-war Democratic papers conjured no mobs. Instead, it percolated through the courts. On August 16, a New York grand jury asked formally whether “certain newspapers”—specifically the New York Daily News, Journal of Commerce, Day Book, Freeman’s Journal, and the Brooklyn Eagle—could be charged with a crime for their opposition to the war. Postmaster General Montgomery Blair twisted the grand jury’s question into an indictment, and on August 22 issued an order to bar the five newspapers from the mails. In the days when the better part of these big-city newspapers’ circulation was distributed by the mails to readers across the country, Blair’s order was a death sentence.

  On August 28, the New York Herald led with the headline “AN ACCOUNTING,” and listed the names of eighteen casualties in the Democratic press in the previous month: seven “Northern papers destroyed by mob,” two “Northern secession papers suppressed by civil authority,” two more “Northern secession papers died,” four “Northern secession papers denied transportation in the mails,” and three “Secession papers changed to Union.” A Cincinnati editor complained privately to Simon Cameron, “All who do not shout hosannas to Abe Lincoln and endorse his unconstitutional and unholy war upon the people of the South are denounced as tories… . The people behind Lincoln know perfectly well that it is not and never has been unlawful to discuss or to denounce the measures of the government in times of peace or war.”

  But the casualty list grew. On August 29, the New York Day Book closed. On August 31, the rural Pennsylvania Carbon Democrat was destroyed. On September 7, a Westchester, New York, grand jury named the local Yonkers Herald, the Highland Democrat, the Eastern State Journal, and the German language Staats Zeitung and National Zeitung as “disseminators of doctrines which, in the existing state of things, tend to give aid and comfort to the enemies of the Government.” Postmaster General Blair barred the Baltimore Exchange from the mails on September 10. Its editor, F. Key Howard, struck back in print the next day, crying, “The course which a despotic and foresworn administration has pursued towards us will not in the slightest degree influence our conduct… . As we have violated no law we can afford to despise Mr. Lincoln’s warnings or menaces.” By the time he wrote this, however, Howard was nearly alone in defying the Lincoln administration. By September, most Democratic editors feared for their livelihood, if they didn’t fear for their lives.

  Out of that fear, criticism of Lincoln’s administration went below ground in the States. The Toronto Globe commented on the crackdown, “This is not only an exceedingly foolish way of proceeding—it not only insures its own punishment by encouraging a race of journalists who will never speak the truth except when likely to please, but it does more than almost anything else to lower the American people in the estimation of all civilized nations.” Southern newspapers trumpeted the suppression of the Northern Democratic press as new evidence of Lincoln’s “reign of terror,” reporting that “journals are suppressed for denouncing the actions of the Government,” and that truthful Northern papers “are gutted and destroyed by Northern mobs, or suppressed by Northern officials, and their editors arrested or imprisoned without the privilege of a hearing or the hope of redress.” Here was proof that “no Neapolitan despotism or Spanish Inquisition ever exceeded in the measure of its cruelty, the present Dictatorship at Washington.”

  The foreign press could throw brickbats from a safe distance; but, as the serpent of suspicion coiled around the North, few there dared to oppose the mob violence that Lincoln silently endorsed, and few dared to question Lincoln’s grim doctrine that, since without the government there could be no freedoms, citizens now must give up their freedom to oppose the government.

  * * *

  During the gagging of the Democratic press and the earlier political arrests, Lincoln himself had remained completely in shadow. The active part was always taken by mobs, by local officials, or by Cabinet members. Lincoln was obscured, too, by the chaos of the crackdown, with orders flying in all directions from Federal marshals, district attorneys, city police, even private citizens. In September, however, there was a fresh, very ugly, very public slew of political arrests in Maryland, and in that episode Lincoln was briefly glimpsed.

  As the summer of 1861 had waned, fears for the safety of Washington had waxed. General McClellan, newly installed, was convinced that waves of rebels would overwhelm Washington at any moment. In this atmosphere of dread, a sensational document surfaced and made the rounds of high offices in early September—a copy of what was purported to be Jeff Davis’ personal plan to “cross two columns over the Potomac” and invade Maryland. According to this document, the signal for the attack would be the passage of an ordinance of secession by the Maryland legislature, scheduled to convene on September 17. Secretary Seward’s son Frederick described a carriage ride he took about this time with his father, Lincoln, and McClellan. The official purpose of the ride was to inspect the military camps in Georgetown, but young Seward reported that the party’s carriage rattled ten miles past Georgetown to General Banks’ headquarters in Rockville. There the President and his small party withdrew to an isolated grove of trees, where they made plans to intercept the Maryland lawmakers’ approach to the legislative session on the 17th and have secessionist members “quietly turned back toward their homes.” Since each legislator’s views were already well known, Seward remembered Lincoln remarking that there would be little difficulty “separating the sheep from the goats.”

  Lincoln then faded from view, and in the following days, the plan to “quietly turn back” the secessionist legislators grew harsher. On September 11, Secretary of War Cameron sent two orders. One was to General Banks to arrest any or all of the members of the Maryland legislature to prevent an act of secession. The second was to General Dix in Baltimore to arrest conspicuous secessionists there.

  At midnight the next night, police fanned out across Baltimore and dragged fifteen men from their beds and locked them up in Fort McHenry, including Mayor Brown, Congressman Henry May, ten members of the Maryland legislature, and three newspaper editors, including the defiant F. Key Howard. Less than a week later, when the legislature convened in Frederick, Maryland, twenty-one more state legislators, secretaries, clerks, and printers were rounded up and thrown in jail.

  The teeming prisoners were all Democrats. They were all held without charges in Federal prisons. If ever there were a time for protest by the press, this was it. Instead, Democratic editors applauded politely in editorials like this one from the Chicago Times:

  The action of the government in the matter of the arrests in Maryland is right, and that it has been taken will reanimate the courage of loyal citizens everywhere. It indicates tha
t the day of trifling is past, and that rebels wherever found, and whatever their position, are to be treated as rebels. No doubt the Legislature of Maryland were bent on mischief… . The action of the government has nipped the scheme in the bud, and proclaimed to all other Maryland rebels what sort of a rod is in pickle for them. The government should continue to go forward after this same fashion. It is the only right thing to do wherever the Federal power is omnipotent.

  What was at work was something more than a survival instinct on the part of the Democratic editors. They had heard rumors of Lincoln’s distaste for the Confiscation Act on August 6, and they had read with glee Lincoln’s repudiation of Frémont’s emancipation proclamation in Missouri. They were seduced by the illusion that Lincoln might be one of them after all. There was, for a time, the strange sound of wooing from the Democratic press. On November 22, the Chicago Times dropped to a knee and blurted out a proposal:

  Mr. Lincoln will, before the lapse of much more time, have to choose between political parties, and depend upon the party which he shall choose for the support of his administration. And the parties between which he will have to choose are the democratic and abolition parties… . If Mr. Lincoln has not already chosen, he will choose the democratic party… . He may rely on its support, and it is a reliance that has never failed any President.

  * * *

  Lincoln would disappoint them, of course. His first duty had been to uphold the Constitution, and to that end he had courted the support of Northern conservatives—the Democrats, the Border State men, and the conservative Republicans. But the conservatives could only prevail, and the old institutions could only remain intact, if the war were short.

  When victory receded over the coming months, Lincoln would cast them off and embrace a hard, relentless war. Then the Democratic editors would see Lincoln in a harsh, new light, and they would be twice as loud in denouncing political arrests, which by the end of the war would total at least 14,400. (Translated into the population of the present day, the number of arrests would be nearly 150,000 citizens.) The Democrats would anoint themselves the “habeas corpus party,” and in the elections of 1862 and 1864 the outcry over the loss of civil liberties would harden into one of their bitterest and most persistent indictments of Lincoln’s term.

  Chapter 21

  A Military House Divided

  “Heaven save a country governed by such counsels!”

  It has been said that one bad general is better than two good ones; and the saying is true, if taken to mean no more than that an army is better directed by a single mind, though inferior, than by two superior ones, at variance, and cross-purposes with each other.

  So said Lincoln in his Message to Congress in December of 1861. It proved he knew something important about leadership. In the first six months of 1862, however, he showed that he had not learned it. He fashioned an army that was hydra-headed—commanded by not one, nor even two, but by one or two dozen generals and bureau chiefs. This was Lincoln’s most meddlesome period of the war as a Commander-in-Chief, and at its culmination in July, the mighty Union drive to win the war—the Peninsula Campaign—collapsed.

  The story of the ruin of the war’s most controversial campaign began on the winter evening of January 6, 1862. The Committee on the Conduct of the War had called Lincoln to appear before them that evening, and they were bristling. In the course of the meeting, the committee was stunned by the revelation that Lincoln did not know McClellan’s plans for the army. Indeed, wrote committee member George Julian, “We were greatly surprised to learn that Mr. Lincoln himself did not think he had the right to know.” Lincoln said he simply trusted McClellan’s judgment and didn’t intend to interfere, provoking Wade into a long, vicious tirade (Julian, a witness, euphemistically termed it “remarkably bold and vigorous,” with “undiplomatic plainness of speech”) against McClellan and Lincoln’s do-nothing administration. The President was stung. Coming on the heels of the December 31 Cabinet meeting during which Edward Bates had lectured him on his duties, and the Committee meeting that evening when Wade had accused Lincoln of betraying the nation, this was the third time in a week that Lincoln had been blistered face-to-face for his military neglect.

  He was still subdued two days later when, at a ceremonial dinner, he was uncharacteristically silent. One man at the table noted of the conversation, “Mr. Lincoln took no part in it. Neither the lively sallies of [author and poet] N. P. Willis nor the inciting remarks of some of the ladies could distract him from his inner reflections, or lighten the moral or physical fatigue to which he visibly yielded.”

  Lincoln could not have learned McClellan’s plans even if he had wanted to. The general had been sick in bed with typhoid for three weeks. Lincoln was worried that he might die while his plans were still unknown and that the war effort might be paralyzed for months. The President went to McClellan’s house, but he was sent away. Lincoln’s depression worsened until he sought out Montgomery Meigs on January 10, sat at his fireplace, and moaned, “The bottom is out of the tub.”

  At Meigs’ suggestion, Lincoln summoned two of McClellan’s subordinates, Generals Irwin McDowell and William Franklin, to the White House, along with Secretaries Seward and Chase and Assistant Secretary of War Thomas Scott. At this meeting, Lincoln gave the first indication that he was breaking the hands-off rule that he had followed toward the military since just after the Baltimore uprising the previous April. He had recently checked out The Science of War from the Library of Congress and was attempting to learn strategy. Now, he told McDowell and Franklin that “if General McClellan did not want to use the army, he would like to ‘borrow it.’” When Lincoln asked for their opinions on what should be done, McDowell put forward the favorite plan of his Radical backers, which was the same as it had been in June: hit the Rebel army where they were, at Manassas. Franklin, being a protégé of McClellan, hinted at McClellan’s still-undisclosed strategy: a descent by water to the Virginia coast east of Richmond, behind the rebel army and close to their capital. Balked by lack of a consensus, Lincoln adjourned the meeting. The same group held inconclusive meetings again the next day and the next.

  * * *

  Conspicuously missing from these war councils was Secretary of War Simon Cameron. The Cabinet had always been a prime target of Lincoln’s critics. Instead of attacking the President, who was proof against removal until the next election and who was assumed to be dependent for his policies on the counsels of his betters, Lincoln’s foes attacked his Cabinet, hoping to install new advisers who more nearly shared their views. For months now, politicians and the press had been demanding the shakeup of the incompetent administration that had presided over such a spectacular mismanagement of the war. Confidence in Lincoln’s main advisor, William Seward, was at low ebb—the only good thing anyone could say for Seward was that he was not as bad as Simon Cameron.

  Cameron’s very presence in the Cabinet was owing to a backroom deal made at the nominating convention. When war came, the War Secretary suddenly became the most crucial member of the Cabinet, and swiftly proved his incompetence. Cameron kept no apparent records, and according to one Representative, “in any official matter he would ask you to give its status and what he had last said about it.” After being reminded, “he would look about, find a scrap of paper, borrow your pencil, make a note, put the paper in one pocket of his trousers and your pencil in the other.” This bungling style had resulted in army contracts so wasteful—and so profitable to his friends—that by the end of 1861 Cameron was the despair of patriots of every stripe. At the same time, he was “openly discourteous to the President,” according to the notes of Lincoln’s secretary John Nicolay. The final straw had been Cameron’s official War Department report in late November, a public break with Lincoln’s policy against arming the slaves, which had embarrassed Lincoln just as he was about to deliver his Annual Message to Congress.

  Now, on January 11, 1862, in the middle of his series of conferences with the generals, Lincoln reassigne
d Cameron, naming him Minister to Russia—or, as a Vanity Fair cartoon lampooned the President’s backwoods mispronunciations, to “the Court of the Kezzar.” Cameron left for St. Petersburg with a final slap at Lincoln: “We want a great man and have not got him—but I ought not to have said that.”

  For his replacement as Secretary of War, one candidate stood out. Edwin McMasters Stanton had achieved the impossible. Not only had William Seward recommended him, but also Seward’s opposite, Salmon Chase. Not only did George McClellan approve him, but also McClellan’s enemies, Ben Wade and Zack Chandler. Stanton’s approval by both extremes of the political spectrum was a testament to his reputation, his ability, and his forked tongue.

  As Attorney General during the previous Secession Winter, Stanton had secretly reported the doings in the Buchanan Cabinet to Seward, their Republican foe. Turning about, he remained in Washington during the first months of the Lincoln administration and wrote private letters to Buchanan telling him of Lincoln’s “imbecility” at every new development. When McClellan became the new power in August 1861, Stanton “did his best to ingratiate himself with me, and professed the warmest friendship and devotion,” McClellan wrote later, and continued,

  The most disagreeable thing about [Stanton] was the extreme virulence with which he abused the President, the administration, and the Republican party. He carried this to such an extent that I was often shocked by it. He never spoke of the President in any other way than as the “original gorilla,” and often said that Du Chaillu [famous as the first white man to have seen a gorilla] was a fool to wander all the way to Africa in search of what he could so easily have found at Springfield, Illinois… . He often advocated the propriety of my seizing the government and taking affairs into my own hands.