The Battles that Made Abraham Lincoln

by Larry Tagg

  Stanton had formed his poor opinion of Lincoln during the McCormick Reaper patent case in 1855. Lincoln had been hired by McCormick’s rival, the Manny Company, when the case was expected to be tried in Chicago. When the venue was changed to Cincinnati, Lincoln was not informed that he had become superfluous to the case, and, after making elaborate preparations, he came to Cincinnati only to be rudely snubbed by the more recently hired—and more professionally prominent—Edwin Stanton of Pittsburgh. Stanton, after seeing the gawky, poorly-dressed Illinoisan, wanted nothing to do with “that damned long-armed Ape,” and, according to one account, declared, “If that giraffe appeared in the case I would throw up my brief and leave.” Lincoln was of course deeply hurt, but he stayed on and watched with interest as the high-powered Eastern lawyers argued the case. Now, in his selection of a new Secretary of War, Lincoln remembered the sting of the incident, but he considered only Stanton’s expert performance in court.

  Stanton brought order and urgency to the War Department, but also contempt for his elected superior. A.K. McClure wrote that he himself heard Stanton scores of times speak of, and several times even speak to, Lincoln with “a withering sneer.” McClure continued:

  [Stanton] loved antagonism, and there was hardly a period during his remarkable service as a War Minister in which he was not, on some more or less important point, in positive antagonism with the President. In his antagonisms he was, as a rule, offensively despotic, and often pressed them upon Lincoln to the very utmost point of Lincoln’s forbearance … . He respected Lincoln’s authority because it was greater than his own, but he had little respect for Lincoln’s fitness for the responsible duties of the Presidency.

  The week Simon Cameron was dismissed, Stanton courted the Radicals’ support for his nomination by privately criticizing McClellan’s idleness. Characteristically, Stanton was at the same time snuggling up to the generalissimo himself, whispering warnings to McClellan of the President’s secret meetings with McDowell and Franklin. “My first inkling of [the meetings],” wrote McClellan, “came through Mr. Stanton, not yet Secretary of War, who said to me: ‘They are counting on your death, and are already dividing among themselves your military goods and chattels.’”

  Thus alerted, McClellan rose shakily from his sickbed on January 13 and slumped into a carriage that took him to the White House, where he made a dramatic entrance at a crowded war council that included President Lincoln, Secretaries Seward, Chase, and Blair, and Generals McDowell, Franklin, and Meigs. The overheated air of the room crackled with jealousies and resentments. McClellan was convinced that McDowell “was at the bottom of the affair … hoping to succeed me in command,” and that the purpose of the meeting was to “‘dispose of the military goods and chattels’ of the sick man so inopportunely restored to life.”

  When McClellan sat down, there was “a good deal of whispering among the others,” he remembered later, “especially between the President and Secretary Chase.” Lincoln rose and broke the ice by pointing to a map and asking McDowell and Franklin to explain again the plans in view. McClellan sat sullenly with his head down, mute. Meigs moved his chair next to the general and whispered, “The President evidently expects you to speak; can you not promise some movement towards Manassas? You are strong.” McClellan muttered that the rebels were strong also. Meigs persisted, “The President expects something from you.” McClellan whispered in reply, “If I tell him my plans they will be in the New York Herald tomorrow morning. He can’t keep a secret, he will tell them to [his eight-year-old son] Tad.”

  Chase finally brought the meeting to a head by asking McClellan—with “uncalled-for irritation,” and “in a very excited tone and manner,” according to the general’s memoir—exactly what he intended doing with his army, and when he intended doing it.

  McClellan allowed a long pause before answering. “No General fit to command an army will ever submit his plans to the judgment of such an assembly. There are many here entirely incompetent to pass judgment on them; … no plan made known to so many persons can be kept secret an hour… .”

  There was another uncomfortable pause while Lincoln and Chase whispered together. Finally Lincoln rose and asked, “Have you fixed upon a particular time for your advance?”

  McClellan replied yes, he had.

  “Well, on this assurance I will be satisfied, and I will adjourn this Council,” said the President, and everyone hurried gratefully for the door.

  The January 13 gathering was a watershed in the relations between Lincoln and McClellan. It was the unsure President’s first break with his top general and with his own rule against divided counsels, and it begat McClellan’s break with him. McClellan saw the episode as a conspiracy against him, and he would never again fully trust the President. Further, as the breach widened, and as McClellan grew more openly distrustful, his entourage of young, conservative, upper-class Democratic officers would become an anti-Lincoln cabal, convinced that the President was in league with the abolitionists in the Committee on the Conduct of the War, and that Lincoln and the abolitionists were determined to undo their plans. After the awkward war council of January 13, McClellan’s relations with Lincoln would become more and more strained at the most unfortunate time—just as he was readying the war-winning campaign the North had awaited ever since Bull Run.

  McClellan’s distrust of Lincoln, however, was exceeded by the Radicals’. For, during these months of indecision, while Lincoln sometimes acted under the sway of their Committee, he also continued to back his General-in-Chief. So fixed were the Radicals in their purpose to destroy McClellan that Lincoln’s faithfulness to him was gall and wormwood to them. Wade called Lincoln’s administration “weak and wicked.” Count Gurowski was convinced that McClellan’s men inside the Cabinet were Seward and Blair—“And Lincoln is in their clutches,” he hissed.

  As McClellan sulked and kept his plans secret from Lincoln following the January 13 council, Stanton and the Radicals met day after day for hours, making savage rumblings aimed at McClellan’s undoing. On January 24, Lincoln had his first meeting with Secretary Stanton, and both men were pleased to find that, though each had been counted a friend of McClellan, they were in full agreement that his army must move—that, in Stanton’s phrase, “the champagne and oysters on the Potomac must be stopped.” So, finally, on the strong urging of Stanton, McClellan met with the President in late January and sketched his scheme to float the army to the Virginia coast and march into Richmond before the rebel army could arrive from Manassas. Lincoln disapproved it, for two reasons. First, it would take too long to prepare. And, more importantly, it removed the Army of the Potomac from its protective position between the rebels and Washington.

  * * *

  Lincoln by now had taught himself just enough military theory to be dangerous. His intellectual arrogance was a habit, and, not surprisingly in a time when people thought anybody could be a general, he wanted to try his hand at being one. He had told Orville Browning on January 12 that “he was thinking of taking the field himself,” and on January 26 he told Navy Assistant Secretary Gustavus Fox that he believed “he must take these army matters into his own hands.” His new resolve was crowned on January 27, when he issued “President’s General War Order No. 1,” which directed a general movement of land and sea forces go forward on February 22—a date chosen for no other reasons than that it was soon and it was Washington’s Birthday.

  Lincoln appeared to be taking on the role of the active Commander-in- Chief as Bates had suggested; yet, as Lincoln himself admitted later to Ulysses Grant, the War Order was a mistake. It brought nothing but new ridicule upon him. It had never been the business of Presidents to order armies into motion, and no general took it seriously—in fact, no movement was ever started in obedience to General War Order No. 1. The military men saw the absurdity of scheduling an advance so soon and without any thought to the weather, logistics, or the movements of the enemy.

  On January 31, four days after General War Orde
r No. 1, Lincoln put a finer point on it by issuing Special War Order No. 1, which specified an attack on the enemy at Manassas, which was the only attack that could be mounted before Washington’s Birthday. McClellan immediately wrote to Lincoln and asked if he might write his objections to the President’s plan and reasons for preferring his own. Here Lincoln’s War Orders had their reward: McClellan finally revealed his own plans in full detail. On February 3, McClellan placed on Stanton’s desk a complete report, page after page on his plan to descend the Potomac and the Chesapeake by a fleet of transports and land the army on the Virginia coast east of Richmond at Urbanna, at the mouth of the Rappahannock River, then move southwest by rapid marches to Richmond.

  Lincoln was not convinced that McClellan’s plan was better than his own, yet he yielded. It would prove to be one of Lincoln’s most far-reaching blunders of the war. For he still mistakenly supposed that the next battle would end the war, and his own plan to attack the rebels at Manassas brought that battle sooner and closer to the Army of the Potomac’s Washington base than some future battle around Richmond. Fewer things could go wrong. It would have been better by far if he had either insisted on his own plan and fired McClellan if he had been unwilling to follow it faithfully, or given McClellan full rein and supported the general’s sea-going plan. Instead, in an outward show of the division within himself about what strategy to pursue, Lincoln proceeded to divide his support for his general, divide the army, and divide military responsibility, with disastrous consequences for the country.

  Even in his social life, Lincoln was not immune from widespread resentment over the listless war effort. On February 6, the Lincolns hosted a gala ball to show off Mary’s newly-restored White House, an affair which many considered unseemly in view of the country’s calamity. Eighty notes of regret came in response to the Lincolns’ invitations. Ben Wade and his wife, for example, responded, “Are the President and Mrs. Lincoln aware that there is a civil war? If they are not, Mr. and Mrs. Wade are, and for that reason decline to participate in feasting and dancing.” Far worse, the White House ball marked the beginning of a terrible personal tragedy for the Lincolns. During the festivities, they slipped away frequently to go upstairs and hold the hand of their gentle, animated, intelligent eleven-year-old son Willie, who was stricken with a fever. It turned out to be typhoid. Willie lingered for two weeks, then died on February 20, staggering Lincoln with the unsurpassed grief of a father for his favorite son.

  While Lincoln anguished at Willie’s bedside, the Radicals of the Committee on the Conduct of the War fulminated in private meetings with Secretary Stanton. They respected the President’s privacy until Willie’s funeral on February 24, but they were back at him the next day.

  The Radicals pointed out that Washington’s Birthday had come and gone, and still the army had not stirred. To establish a lodgment inside the army command, they wanted the Army of the Potomac divided into four corps, each under a general who would report directly to the War Department. At this, Lincoln stalled. He had not thought about it, he said, and he was sure McClellan would oppose it, perhaps even resign. The Committee persisted, returning to the White House on March 3 with fresh demands for the army corps. This time the meeting collapsed into an argument between Lincoln and Wade, who wanted McClellan removed. If McClellan were removed, Lincoln asked, who would command the army? “Well, anybody!” Wade exploded. “Wade,” Lincoln replied, “anybody will do for you but I must have somebody.” He concluded, “I must use the tool I have.”

  Lincoln went from offending the Radicals to offending McClellan. On the morning of March 8, Lincoln met with the general and broached the subject of treason. There was “an ugly matter” they had to discuss, he said. He confronted McClellan with the charge that the general’s design in removing the army from Washington was so the enemy could seize it. The general jumped up and roughly demanded that Lincoln take it back, whereupon the President backpedaled, saying he was merely repeating what others had said. McClellan told Lincoln he had called a meeting of his twelve division commanders for later that day, and that he would put them to a vote between Lincoln’s overland plan and his own sea-borne scheme. This satisfied the President, who was grateful for yet another war council to deliver him from the responsibility of a decision.

  Lincoln was naïve in thinking the army’s council of generals would decide the issue on its merits. McClellan certainly knew better. The Army of the Potomac was the most politicized army in the world, and McClellan was keenly aware that personal jealousies and party politics had divided the twelve division commanders into two factions. The senior generals—McDowell, Sumner, Heintzelman, Keyes, and Chief Engineer Barnard—were Republicans. They had spent their lives in the army, and resented McClellan’s sudden vault from civilian life to army command. They also resented the other seven generals, McClellan’s “pets,” the young Democrats who owed their positions to McClellan, the men he kept around him and consulted in all things. These young generals were conservative like their commander and patron, and they detested the elder generals for their liberal leanings.

  It was no surprise to McClellan, then, that later that day, by a vote of eight to four, the generals agreed with his own plan. Lincoln was forced to go along with the decision, for he saw the madness in disregarding the judgment of a panel of generals—if he insisted on his attack on Manassas and things went wrong, he would be crucified. Instead, he countered with a blunt use of his power as Commander-in-Chief later the same day. Observing that the senior generals agreed with his own plan, he issued President’s General War Order No. 2, which divided the Army of the Potomac into four corps, with the older, Republican generals commanding them—accomplishing the Radical scheme. General War Order No. 2 also delighted the Radicals by putting General James Wadsworth, an abolitionist Republican, in command of the Washington defenses. On the same day, Lincoln added President’s General War Order No. 3, which insisted that McClellan’s proposed change of base from Washington to the Virginia coast could not be made without providing enough troops for the defense of the capital, and that the newly-named corps commanders would be consulted in deciding the size of “such force as … shall leave [Washington] entirely secure.” The Republican generals responded that a force of 40,000 to 50,000 defenders would be enough to keep the capital safe.

  The next day, however, events intervened. The rebel army at Manassas suddenly retreated thirty miles south to the Rappahannock River. Lincoln saw the rebel move as proof that his plan to strike them at Manassas had been the right one—hadn’t the rebels seen their mortal danger, and withdrawn before the fatal blow could fall? Immediately came another, more bitter, confirmation. When McClellan marched his army to Manassas, he discovered that the Confederate earthworks had been occupied by a fraction of what he had supposed. Even the rebel cannon were mere stagecraft—logs painted black and stuck through crude embrasures. Lincoln, gripped by the idea that the war could have been ended in Napoleonic style by one climactic battle, was tortured, convinced that he had been right all along about the correct strategy and that he had squandered the chance to annihilate the rebels while they were both exposed and close at hand.

  The revelations in the abandoned enemy camps at Manassas worked a mighty change in the normally tender-hearted Lincoln. His despair turned to rage—“He surprised and delighted the committee by completely losing his temper,” according to member George Julian—and on March 11 he issued another War Order, relieving McClellan of command as General-in-Chief of all the nation’s armies, and limiting him to command of the Army of the Potomac. From now on, all army commanders would report, not to McClellan, but to the War Department, where Lincoln and Secretary Stanton would direct operations from the telegraph room.

  The clumsiness of the War Order had evil consequences. At the moment when McClellan was finally ready to meet the enemy, when all the Union armies in Virginia were most in need of a single guiding hand, Lincoln’s new order had the effect of splintering command among a handful of ge
nerals at the head of a half-dozen armies dotting the landscape. The generals would now answer to Lincoln and Stanton, two lawyers with no knowledge of how to write a military order, much less conceive or carry out complicated military plans.

  In his reply to Lincoln, McClellan acquiesced graciously—for the record. Privately, he seethed. He saw Lincoln as a man in league with his enemies, the Republicans who were unwilling to let him, McClellan, win the war because they realized he would reunite the old Union—with its Democratic majority and slavery intact—and be elected its next President. As McClellan saw it, the purpose of the War Order removing him from overall command was “to tie my hands in order to secure the failure of the approaching campaign.”

  Little Mac had a bad habit of exaggerating enemy strength, but his estimate of his political enemies in Washington was right on. He wrote to his wife, “The rascals are after me again… . If I can get out of this scrape you will never catch me in the power of such a set again.” He then dodged the furor by disappearing into his work. With the Urbanna landing rendered obsolete by the rebels’ retreat from Manassas, he now prepared to sail his army farther south, to Fort Monroe at the tip of the Yorktown Peninsula, a thumb of land jutting southeast into Chesapeake Bay with Richmond at its base. While McClellan herded his divisions toward the Alexandria wharves to embark for the Peninsula, the Radicals stepped up their campaign to remove him.

  For, while Lincoln had alienated McClellan by removing him as Generalin- Chief, he had still failed to satisfy the Radicals. After the humiliation of the wooden guns and empty camps at Manassas, a majority of the Committee on the Conduct of the War, according to one, “strongly suspected that McClellan was a traitor” and begged the President to sack him. When Lincoln would not, the Radicals attacked Lincoln. “It is no longer doubtful that General McClellan is utterly unfit for his position… . And yet the President will keep him in command,” wrote Senator Fessenden in a froth. “We went in for a railsplitter, and we have got one.”