Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2

by Michael Burlingame

  McClellan also denounced Radicals in Congress for their ideology as well as their meddlesome ways. A partisan Democrat, he had little sympathy for the anti-slavery cause or for blacks. He confided that he had “a prejudice in favor of my own race” and that he could not “learn to like the odor of either Billy goats or niggers.” Radicals insisting on immediate emancipation, he thought, “had only the negro in view” and “cared not for the results” of the war, “knew little or nothing of the subject to be dealt with, & merely wished to accomplish a political move for party profit, or from sentimental motives.” He told his wife, “I will not fight for the abolitionists.” Tactlessly, he made these views known to leading Radicals, including the influential Senator Charles Sumner, with whom he had an interview soon after arriving in Washington.48

  When the Radicals clamored for action, McClellan appealed to a Democratic leader in New York: “Help me to dodge the nigger—we want nothing to do with him. I am fighting to preserve the integrity of the Union & the power of the Govt—on no other issue. … As far as you can, keep the papers & the politicians from running over me.”49

  All Quiet on the Potomac

  The self-aggrandizing McClellan may have conquered Scott, but the Confederates in Virginia went virtually unmolested. At the end of September, when the enemy abandoned Munson’s Hill (within sight of the Capitol), Unionists were mortified to learn that the artillery posted there, which had intimidated McClellan, turned out to be “Quaker guns”—logs painted to resemble cannon. Confederates laughed while Northerners fumed. McClellan lamely consoled himself with the thought that the enemy “can no longer say that they are flaunting their dirty little flag in my face.”50

  This humiliating revelation did not keep McClellan from exaggerating Confederate strength, a mistake that affected all his decisions. A month later he submitted to Cameron a report (drafted by Edwin M. Stanton) stating that “all the information we have from spies, prisoners, &c., agrees in showing that the enemy have a force on the Potomac not less than 150,000 strong, well drilled and equipped, ably commanded, and strongly entrenched. It is plain, therefore, that to insure success, or to render it reasonably certain, the active army should not number less than 150,000 efficient troops, with 400 guns, unless some material change occurs in the force in front of us.” By his own peculiar accounting methods, his army was far smaller, and therefore he could not launch an offensive without significant reinforcements. If they were provided, he would attack no later than November 25.51 McClellan privately admitted that the Army of the Potomac was probably “condemned to a winter of inactivity.”52

  In actual fact, McClellan had between 85,000 and 100,000 effectives, while Joseph E. Johnston at Centreville and Manassas had only 30,000 to 35,000. The Young Napoleon could have assaulted Johnston, or Confederate positions on the south bank of the Potomac, or Winchester, or Leesburg, or Norfolk, all of which were vulnerable to a force as large as the Army of the Potomac. There was no excuse for the inactivity, which demoralized the North and encouraged the Confederates, whose contemptuous leaders began to refer sarcastically to McClellan as “the redoubtable McC.”53

  McClellan’s exaggeration of Confederate strength stemmed in part, but only in part, from faulty information supplied by Allan Pinkerton, the detective who had warned Lincoln about the Baltimore assassination plot in February 1861. Little Mac hired him as his chief of intelligence well after the general had grossly overestimated Confederate forces in August. McClellan’s central problem was not so much bad intelligence but a case of paranoia, which led him not only to see enemies everywhere but also to quarrel with superiors, mistrust most people, indulge in extreme secrecy, judge others harshly, cling to preconceived notions in the face of overwhelming evidence discrediting them, and refuse to acknowledge his own faults. Compounding his paranoia was a streak of narcissism, predisposing him to envy, arrogance, grandiosity, vanity, and hypersensitivity to criticism.

  Blunders in the East

  Public pressure for action led to a humiliating fiasco on October 21 at Ball’s Bluff, Virginia, 40 miles from the capital, where Union forces under General Charles P. Stone, acting on vague orders from McClellan, crossed the Potomac to conduct a reconnaissance in force. During the Union repulse, the president’s close friend, Colonel Edward D. Baker, was killed, along with dozens of others. A few weeks earlier, when Baker predicted that he would die in battle, the president tried to get him to dismiss such thoughts. Awaiting reports from the front, Lincoln prophetically said of Baker, “I am afraid his impetuous daring will endanger his life,” and when this fear proved justified, he was devastated.54 Emerging from the telegraph office with his head bowed down in grief and his ashen face streaked with tears, he failed to return the salute of the sentinel guarding the door. That night, unable to sleep, he paced back and forth in profound sorrow. At the funeral, he wept uncontrollably. A member of Baker’s regiment, who attended that service and described the battle to Lincoln, said that the “President thought as much of Baker as a Brother.”55 William O. Stoddard also noted that Lincoln “loved him like a brother, and mourned his untimely death bitterly.”56 While listening to Colonel Charles Devens narrate the sad tale of Baker’s demise, Lincoln interrupted repeatedly to ask: “When will this terrible war be over? Is there no way of stopping this shedding of blood?”57 George Gibbs reported that things “certainly look very blue” at the capital and that Lincoln was so sure that Baker had been needlessly sacrificed that he “made a fuss” about it until shown evidence that the colonel had disobeyed orders.58 The president later deemed Baker’s death the “keenest blow” he suffered in the entire war.59

  Occurring three months to the day after Bull Run, the disaster at Ball’s Bluff demoralized the North badly. “The effect of the last Battle is more depressing than all other reverses,” Thurlow Weed observed. “I was beset by hundreds in N.Y. asking unanswerable questions.”60 The commissary general of the Empire State declared the administration “an utter and palpable failure” and concluded that Lincoln “is not fitted for an emergency like this.”61 To Edwin M. Stanton, the administration’s prospects “have never appeared more dark & gloomy than now.” In Washington, he wrote, “[m]urmurs of discontent are heard on all sides.”62

  Frémont in Missouri

  October was an unusually bad month for Lincoln. In the East, Baker’s death, the ignominy of Ball’s Bluff, the unseemly intrigue of McClellan against Scott, and Little Mac’s failure to do much with his large army all combined to depress the president’s spirits. On October 7, Stoddard reported from the White House that for the past few weeks Lincoln “has been looking pale and careworn, as if the perpetual wear-and-tear of the load which presses upon him were becoming too much even for his iron frame and elastic mind.”63

  That load was becoming oppressive indeed, especially since innumerable callers gave Lincoln little peace. He said “the importunities of the office seekers trouble him more than the rebellion of the secessionists.”64 In mid-October, Stoddard observed that “[n]ot a day passes but appeals are made to the Executive for action, on his part, that would be all but impossible if he were an absolute monarch, and many honest people doubtless feel themselves aggrieved that the President does not exercise, in their behalf, prerogatives which any crowned head of Europe would hesitate to assume.”65 Others pestered him with advice so often that he declared “that those who have the responsibility of managing the war, know how to conduct it as well as outsiders, and that he prefers not to be troubled with their counsels.”66

  Lincoln was especially upset by developments in the West. He said that there everything “military & financial is in hopeless confusion.” Chase despaired because the government was within eleven days of exhausting the money raised by recent loans, its credit was gone at St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Springfield, and Congress had to audit immense claims. Events in Missouri were particularly distressing. That state, Lincoln remarked, was “virtually seized” by the Confederates, and “instead of having a force ready
to descend the Mississippi” from Missouri, “the probability is that the army of the West will be compelled to defend St. Louis.”67 In September, the impulsive, flamboyant, grandiose John C. Frémont, commander of forces there, had predicted that the Confederates would take St. Louis within a few weeks.

  Moreover, Frémont was on the verge of rebelling. According to Norman B. Judd, the general had “concluded that the Union was definitely destroyed and that he should set up an independent Government as soon as he took Memphis and organized his army.”68 In August, one of his division commanders, John Pope, speculated that Lincoln “will do in a different manner what Jeff Davis is doing directly—I mean that by neglect, corruption, & outrage, the States of the West will be driven to join together & act without reference to the authority of Gen[eral] Gov[ernmen]t.”69

  In Missouri, Frémont’s impetuosity, tactlessness, poor judgment, egomania, ethical insensitivity, and administrative and military incompetence unfitted him for his heavy responsibilities. As one of his supporters ruefully noted, the “defect in Frémont was that he was a dreamer. Impractical, visionary things went a long way with him. He was a poor judge of men and formed strange associations. He surrounded himself with foreigners, especially Hungarians, most of whom were adventurers and some of whom were swindlers.”70 He would not have received such an important post if the Blair family, which had been friendly with him and his wife, had not lobbied vigorously on his behalf. As head of the Department of the West (encompassing Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Arkansas, western Kentucky, and the territories of Nebraska, Colorado, and Dakota), his most pressing task was to thwart Confederate attempts to conquer Missouri. He was then to raise an army and move on Memphis, thus helping to secure the Mississippi River, a goal that General Scott had originally proposed and that Lincoln endorsed heartily.

  Shortly after his belated arrival at St. Louis on July 25, Frémont had to decide whether to reinforce the threatened Union position at Cairo, Illinois, or Nathaniel Lyon’s small army in southwest Missouri. When he sensibly chose the former course, the impulsive, willful Lyon recklessly hurled his men against a much larger Confederate army at Wilson’s Creek on August 10 and suffered a predictable defeat in which he was killed. Coming a scant three weeks after Bull Run, this setback further demoralized the public. A prominent journalist declared that “since the death of Lyon all confidence is gone.”71 Making matters worse still, in September, Confederates captured the 3,500-man Union garrison at Lexington, Missouri. Thus, in his first two months at St. Louis, Frémont had lost almost half the state. Through General Scott, Lincoln instructed the Pathfinder “to repair the disaster at Lexington without loss of time.”72

  Frémont’s political blundering upset Lincoln more than his military ineptitude. On August 30, the Pathfinder issued a proclamation establishing martial law throughout Missouri, condemning to death civilians caught with weapons behind Union lines, and freeing the slaves and seizing the property of rebels. Before issuing this fateful decree, he had consulted his wife and a Quaker abolitionist but no one in the administration.

  While the Northern press generally lauded the Pathfinder’s emancipation edict, Kentuckians indignantly denounced it as “an abominable, atrocious, and infamous usurpation.”73 Joshua Speed, a devoted Unionist, told his good friend Lincoln that the proclamation “will hurt us in Ky—The war should be waged upon high points and no State law be interfered with—Our Constitution & law both prohibit the emancipation of slaves among us—even in small numbers—If a Military Commander can turn them loose by the thousand by mere proclamation—It will be a most difficult matter to get our people to submit to it. All of us who live in Slave states whether Union or loyal have great fear of insurrection—Will not such a proclamation read by the slaves incline them to assert their freedom? And the owner whether loyal or not & the whole community suffer? I think the proclamation [goes] directly against the spirit of the law.” So upset that he could neither eat nor sleep, Speed predicted that Frémont’s decree “will crush out every vestage of a union party in the state— … So fixed is public sentiment in this state against freeing negroes & allowing negroes to be emancipated & remain among us—That you had as well attack the freedom of worship in the north or the right of a parent to teach his child to read—as to wage war in a slave state on such a principle.”74 Any man who tried to buck the opposition to emancipation in Kentucky, Speed colorfully explained, “had as well attempt to ascend the falls of Niagara in a canoe as to meet it, brave it, or change it.”75

  Robert Anderson, military commander in Kentucky, also warned Lincoln that Frémont’s proclamation “is producing most disastrous results in this State, and that it is the opinion of many of our wisest and soundest men that if this is not immediately disavowed, and annulled, Kentucky will be lost to the Union. I have already heard that on the reception of the news from Missouri, this morning, a company which was ready to be sworn into the service was disbanded.”76 Kentuckians seemed to agree with the English newspaper that termed Frémont’s proclamation a call for “negro insurrection, servile war, outrages and horrors without number and without name.”77 Montgomery Blair skewered the Pathfinder, acidly remarking that “with Frémont’s surroundings, the set of scoundrels who alone have control of him, this proclamation setting up the higher law was like a painted woman quoting Scripture.”78

  Even before he had heard from Speed and Anderson, Lincoln gently but firmly urged Frémont to rescind the emancipation order, which went beyond the Confiscation Act passed by Congress in early August, freeing only those slaves directly supporting Confederate military efforts. The president advised Frémont that “the liberating slaves of traiterous owners, will alarm our Southern Union friends, and turn them against us—perhaps ruin our rather fair prospect for Kentucky.” Tactfully, “in a spirit of caution and not of censure,” Lincoln asked the general to modify his order to conform to the new law; he should do so as if it were his own idea, not as a grudging capitulation to a superior’s order. Lincoln also instructed the Pathfinder to execute no one without presidential approval.79

  The quarrelsome Frémont, who was temperamentally reluctant to follow orders and predisposed to ignore others’ feelings, rashly declined to modify his decree voluntarily. He argued that if “I were to retract [the proclamation] of my own accord it would imply that I myself thought it wrong and that I had acted without the reflection which the gravity of the point demanded. But I did not do so. I acted with full deliberation and upon the certain conviction that it was a measure right and necessary, and I think so still.”80 Frémont defiantly ordered thousands of copies of the original proclamation distributed after the president had demanded its modification.

  Reluctantly, Lincoln complied with Frémont’s request for a direct order, and thus ignited a firestorm of protest. The White House mailbag overflowed with letters denouncing the revocation. Pro-secession Missourians took heart. One Illinois observer reckoned that the president’s action “gave more ‘aid and comfort to the enemy’ in that State than if he had made the rebel commander, Sterling Price, a present of fifty pieces of rifled cannon.”81 A New York friend of the Pathfinder told Lincoln that “if he did not sustain the proclamation, Hamlin would take his place and would sustain it.”82 A similar threat appeared in an Auburn, New York, newspaper: “If he [Lincoln] will not regard the rights and will of his constituents, … we shall not be long in availing ourselves of all constitutional means to put one in his place who will do it.”83 Frederick Douglass condemned the “weakness, imbecility and absurdity” of the administration’s action. “Many blunders have been committed by the Government at Washington,” Douglass declared, “but this, we think, is the biggest of them all.”84 William Lloyd Garrison ridiculed Lincoln’s “timid, depressing, suicidal” letter to Frémont.85 The National Anti-Slavery Standard called the president’s action “one of those blunders which are worse than crimes.”86 Asking a question that preyed on many people’s minds, James Russell Lowell wanted to kno
w: “How many times we are to save Kentucky and lose our self-respect?”87 The poet thought “an ounce of Frémont is worth a pound of long Abraham. Mr. L. seems to have a theory of carrying on war without hurting the enemy. He is incapable, apparently, of understanding that they ought to be hurt.”88 A Quaker abolitionist declared: “Better lose Kentucky, than keep her, at such a price. She will cheat us, in the end, unless we do with her, as with Missouri & Maryland—teach her submission, by the bayonet.”89

  Senators joined the chorus of criticism. William P. Fessenden of Maine called Lincoln’s letter “very foolish,” a “most weak and unjustifiable concession to the Union men of the border States,” and reported that his constituents “are all for the proclamation, and the President has lost ground amazingly.”90 Fessenden added that “the intense selfishness of the President & Cabinet” had “disgusted every body.”91 Benjamin F. Wade scouted Lincoln’s action, sneering that the president’s attitude toward slavery “could only have come of one, born of ‘poor white trash’ and educated in a slave State.”92 Similarly, Gerrit Smith declared that Lincoln was “sadly perverted by his pro-slavery training.”93 Charles Sumner denounced the president as “a dictator, Imperator,—what you will; but how vain to have the power of a God if not to use it God-like.”94