The Battles that Made Abraham Lincoln

by Larry Tagg

  Once in the field, Pope continued to impress those who favored a sterner, harder war. He believed in fighting, not strategy, he boasted, and his soldiers would live off the enemy countryside. He advocated emancipation for the blacks freed by the progress of his army, and harsh treatment for rebels. He issued grandiose proclamations to his new army promising that they would see the backs of their enemies. Invigorated by the assurances of his Radical friends in Washington, he was sure that Halleck, his old boss in the West, would soon give him command of McClellan’s Army of the Potomac.

  During August 1862 Halleck showed more energy than he ever would thereafter, laboring to get McClellan to transfer his large army off the Peninsula and into the camps of Pope’s Army of Virginia “with all possible promptness.” McClellan dragged his feet every inch of the way. Always on guard against the Radicals, he suspected that every soldier he succeeded in transferring to Pope was a soldier he would never again command. Thus, even with Halleck pleading, “I beg of you, general, to hurry along this movement,” it was mid- August—two weeks after he received Halleck’s order—before he started his army toward the transports at Fort Monroe.

  In fact, McClellan’s slowness worked against him. Halleck, a Democrat who abhorred abolitionists and detested the Radical Republicans, would probably have installed Little Mac over Pope at the head of their combined armies, especially since McClellan had more experience against Lee. But by late August, when McClellan’s men finally reached their tardy rendezvous with Pope’s men, the climax of the campaign was only hours away. Pope, the man on the spot, would remain in command for the fight touted by Halleck as “the greatest battle of the century,” and whose stakes were, according to William Seward, “nothing less than this capital; and, as many think, the cause also.”

  * * *

  That is because Lee, as soon as he saw McClellan’s men leaving their camps on the Peninsula, had recognized an opportunity in the short period when McClellan would be in transit to the north, before the two Union armies’ strength would be combined. The Confederate commander had immediately moved part of his army northward to confront Pope in the sprawling countryside between Richmond and Washington, where there was plenty of room to maneuver. Pope soon realized that the Confederate army in his front was bigger than his own, and he fell back toward Washington—away from Lee’s army and nearer to McClellan’s arriving reinforcements. As Lee hove menacingly in front of Pope, a frantic Halleck sent flurries of telegrams to McClellan to hurry him along.

  On August 26, Halleck stationed McClellan on the wharves of Alexandria. From here, McClellan would act as a deputy, forwarding troops and supplies to Pope, who was now face-to-face with the enemy twenty-five miles away at the old battlefield of Bull Run. Disgusted at his supporting role, McClellan immediately began doing what he always did: he prepared for the worst. He decided that the safety of the capital was more important than the lives of his own men now cleaning their weapons for the imminent battle a few miles away. He determined, as he put it in a telegram to Lincoln, “To leave Pope to get out of his scrape&at once use all our means to make the Capital perfectly safe.” For four days, from August 27 to August 30, McClellan refused Halleck’s repeated orders to forward the last two corps of the Army of the Potomac—some 25,000 men—to help Pope fight Lee. He kept them instead in the Washington defenses.

  In the climactic Battle of Second Bull Run on August 29 and 30, Lee’s army crushed Pope’s Army of Virginia and sent it limping back to the security of Washington. Never had Northern morale sunk so low as in the days following the disaster. Near the end of June, the Army of the Potomac had been within sight of the church spires of Richmond, and the war had seemed all but won. Now, two months later, the situation was reversed. The rebels were at the outskirts of Washington, readying the killing blow. Lincoln, waiting for a victory to proclaim emancipation, instead found himself presiding over his army’s most spectacular failure.

  In the desperate uncertainty after the battle, everyone thought Washington was as good as captured. McClellan wrote to his wife that if he could slip into the city, he would send their silver off. Stanton gathered the War Department papers into bundles, ready to be shipped away. The Washington arsenal was ordered emptied and its guns and ammunition floated to New York. There were rumors that demoralized soldiers were surrendering so that they would be paroled and sent home.

  “The nation is rapidly sinking just now,” wrote George Templeton Strong in New York City. “Disgust with our present government is certainly universal.” As for Lincoln, he lamented, “Nobody believes in him any more.” A published sermon by Henry Ward Beecher laid the blame for the late disaster at Second Bull Run on “central imbecility” in Washington: “Certainly neither Mr. Lincoln nor his Cabinet have proved leaders… . Not a spark of genius has [Lincoln], not an element for leadership. Not one particle of heroic enthusiasm.” A friend of Secretary Chase reported from Brooklyn, “Many of our best citizens say the President should resign.”

  * * *

  In this dark hour, Treasury Secretary Chase was, indeed, working out his own formula for regime change. Now that Congress had adjourned, it had fallen to him and Secretary Stanton, the two Radical ministers of the Cabinet, to carry on the Jacobin fight in the capital. In late August, the two plotted a coup against Lincoln in an attempt to oust McClellan. With the air full of rumors that McClellan was out to undo Pope and cause the defeat of the Union army, and knowing from experience that verbal arguments with Lincoln were, as Chase put it, “like throwing water on a duck’s back,” Stanton and Chase composed a blunt manifesto. It insisted that Lincoln remove McClellan, and told him that the undersigned Cabinet heads were “unwilling to be accessory to the waste of natural resources, the protraction of the war, the destruction of our armies, and the imperiling of the Union which we believe must result from the continuance of George B. McClellan in command.” The document was an ultimatum: Fire McClellan or find a new Cabinet. It was him or them.

  Stanton and Chase signed the protest themselves, and then set out to enlist the other Secretaries to add their signatures. Interior Secretary Smith signed willingly, but Navy Secretary Welles refused, seeing it for what it was—an attempt by the Radical ministers to wrest control of the administration away from the President.

  Thus thwarted, Stanton and Chase retreated and enlisted Secretary Bates to compose another, gentler version of the manifesto. Stanton, Chase, Bates, and Smith signed the new paper, and Stanton went again to Welles, arguing hotly that “he [Stanton] knew of no obligation he was under to the President, who had called him to a difficult position and imposed upon him labors and responsibilities which no man could carry.” Again, however, Welles refused to comply, still unwilling to put his signature to an attempt to topple the elected leader of the Republic and inaugurate a scramble for control. His principled stand brought the coup attempt to an end. Lincoln would never know of it.

  * * *

  On the morning of September 2, while the plot of the two Judases unraveled, at the height of the hysteria over the latest disaster at Bull Run, at a time when everyone in the capital expected a battle in front of the capital that would decide the fate of the nation, Lincoln held the tensest Cabinet meeting of the Civil War. There was a tempest even before Lincoln arrived. Stanton was at the highest pitch of fury, speaking “in a suppressed voice, trembling with excitement” with news that McClellan had been restored to command of the Army of the Potomac! Lincoln entered, and confirmed that he had just been to McClellan’s house and had ordered him to take command of the demoralized army now streaming into the defenses of Washington. Under the glares of Stanton and Chase, Lincoln admitted that McClellan had the “slows,” but maintained, “McClellan knows this whole ground,” and “can be trusted to act on the defensive.” There was “no better organizer.”

  Though most listened in stunned silence, Chase spoke up, protesting that he “could not but feel that giving the command to McClellan is equivalent to giving Washington to the reb
els.” Lincoln put an end to the discussion, in Chase’s account, by saying “it distressed him exceedingly to find himself differing on such a point from the Secretary of War and Secretary of the Treasury,” but that events would vindicate his judgment.

  Welles recorded that “there was a more disturbed and desponding feeling than I have ever witnessed in council; the President was greatly distressed.” Montgomery Blair reported, “The bitterness of Stanton on the reinstatement of McClellan you can scarcely conceive.” Of this, Lincoln was painfully aware. According to Bates, the President “seemed wrung by the bitterest anguish—- said he felt almost ready to hang himself.” The President himself had privately called McClellan’s recent conduct “unpardonable,” but he believed also that McClellan was the only general who could restore the morale of the defeated army.

  It was from these depths that Lincoln penned his most desolate document, a private “Meditation on the Divine Will”:

  The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong. God can not be for, and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party—-and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose. I am almost ready to say this is probably true—-that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By his mere quiet power, on the minds of the now contestants, He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And having begun He could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds.

  Lincoln’s agony was shared by millions in the North, magnified, among Radicals, by resentment that McClellan was once again—even after his rank treason!—in charge of the army at Washington. Zack Chandler was frantic with indignation. “Are mutinous traitorous Generals now controlling our destiny?” he raved to Chase. “If so! What are we fighting for? … For God’s sake let us save the Government. Treason is raising its hideous head all over the land.” He wrote to Senator Trumbull in disgust, “Your president is as unstable as water, if he has as I suspect been bullied by those traitor generals. How long will it be before he will by them be set aside & a military dictatorship set up… . For God & country’s sake, send someone to stay with the President who will controll [sic] & hold him.”

  In the national emergency, a thunderhead formed on the horizon—a gathering of governors. Rumor had it that the governors together might remove the President. Governor Andrew of Massachusetts told Count Gurowski that he was organizing a movement “to save the Prest. from the infamy of ruining his country.” The New York Herald speculated that “a vast conspiracy has been set on foot by the radicals … to depose the present administration, and place Frémont at the head of a provisional government; in other words, to make him military dictator.” The governors’ purpose, reported the Herald, was “to request Lincoln to resign, to enable them to carry out their scheme.”

  The mails to Washington were clogged with screeds. One wondered, “What does it mean that at such a time of darkness … there comes not from Washington a stirring word or courageous utterance … ?” Senator John Sherman, too, asked, “Shall the country crumble into dissolution for the want of one great man?” Joseph Medill expressed the feeling of the country with a newspaperman’s directness:

  The Union cause is in a dismal plight. It is enough to make the strongest men despair and weep tears of blood… . Unless a new leaf is turned over the Republic is gone forever, and Mr Lincoln … and every leading Republican, before two years, will be in exile, or dangling at the end of a rope.

  In the overwrought atmosphere of the crisis, one observer wrote that the country seemed “trembling on the brink of the precipice.”

  * * *

  As the country trembled, Lee’s tattered soldiers crossed the Potomac River and McClellan marched his hastily re-formed divisions out from the Washington forts to confront them. Sped forward by a Providential gift—a found copy of Lee’s plans, discovered in a Maryland field wrapped around three cigars—McClellan attacked Lee’s under strength army along Antietam Creek on September 17, the bloodiest day in American history. By the time the sun fell, 3,650 were dead and 19,000 more were wounded or missing. The next day, like two stunned rams, both armies stood in their places. That night, Lee’s men began crossing back into Virginia, leaving McClellan in possession of the field. The rebel invasion had been turned back. The Army of the Potomac claimed a triumph.

  When Lee’s army had stepped onto Maryland soil, Lincoln told his Cabinet later, he had made a promise to himself and his Maker that “as soon as it shall be driven out,” he would issue the Proclamation of Emancipation. Now the moment had come to redeem the pledge.

  Chapter 24

  Emancipation Promised

  “A Death Blow to the Hope of Union.”

  “In the Faul of 1856, I showed my show in Utiky, a trooly grate sitty in the State of New York.

  “The people gave me a cordyal recepshun. The press was loud in her prases.

  “1 day as I was givin a descripshun of my Beests and Snaiks in my usual flowry stile what was my skorn & disgust to see a big burly feller walk up to the cage containin my wax figgers of the Lord’s Last Supper, and cease Judas Iscarrot by the feet and drag him out on the ground. He then commenced fur to pound him as hard as he cood.

  “ ‘What under the son are you about?’ cried I.

  “Sez he, ‘What did you bring this pussylanermus cuss here fur?’ & he hit the wax figger another tremenjis blow on the hed.

  “Sez I, ‘You egrejus ass, that air’s a wax figger—a representashun of the false ’Postle.’

  “Sez he, ‘That’s all very well fur you to say, but I tell you, old man, that Judas Iscarrot can’t show hisself in Utiky with impunerty by a darn site!’ with which observashun he kaved in Judassis hed. The young man belonged to 1 of the first famerlies in Utiky. I sood him, and the Joory brawt in a verdick of Arson in the 3d degree.”

  Cabinet members had arrived at the meeting of September 22, 1862, with a full sense of its weighty portent. Lincoln, who was allergic to weighty portent, broke the ice by reading the above, humorist Artemus Ward’s “High- Handed Outrage at Utica,” and laughing tremendously. He then grew solemn. He told them he had thought much “about the relation of this war to slavery,” and made an admission:

  I know very well that others might, in this matter, as in others, do better than I can; and if I were satisfied that the public confidence was more fully possessed by any one of them than by me, and knew of any Constitutional way in which he could be put in my place, he should have it. I would gladly yield it to him. But though I believe that I have not so much of the confidence of the people as I had some time since, I do not know that … any other person has more; and, however this may be, there is no way in which I can have any other man put where I am. I am here. I must do the best I can, and bear the responsibility of taking the course which I feel I ought to take.

  For the past year, Radicals had tried to paint him as a slavery apologist, and Lincoln had sat still for the portrait. During that time, however, he had thought so deeply and so long about emancipation that his conclusions had come with a sense of Divine purpose. His mind was made up.

  “I have got you together,” he told his Cabinet, “to hear what I have written down. I do not wish your advice about the main matter—for that I have determined for myself.” He then read his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. The third paragraph contained its essence:

  That on [January 1, 1863], all persons held as slaves within any State, or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or
acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.

  * * *

  The preliminary Emancipation Proclamation is a document more admired than read. The popular image of Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, striking the shackles from the limbs of four million black slaves by a stroke of his pen is false. The document did not deliver emancipation, but the promise of emancipation; not then, but in one hundred days; not in the loyal states (where slaves would remain bound), but in rebellious states where Union armies had not yet gone. The proclamation drew its authority not from an appeal to human liberty, but from the Commander-in-Chief’s war powers. It stated that the object of the war was not freedom for all, but reunion. It spoke not with high phrases to future generations, but with cold legality to a present enemy. And there were hedges: Lincoln recommended that ex-slaves not be made soldiers, and preferred that they be shipped abroad. The proclamation was not eloquent, nor did it say anything about the moral wrong of slavery. “The proclamation is written in the meanest and the most dry routine style,” Count Gurowski wrote with deep regret in his diary. He continued:

  Not a word to evoke a generous thrill, not a word reflecting the warm and lofty … feelings of … the people. Nothing for humanity; nothing to humanity… . [I]t is clear that the writer was not in it either with his heart or with his soul; it is clear that it was done under moral duress, under the throttling pressure of events.