Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2

by Michael Burlingame

  Lincoln may have considered firing McClellan. According to Senator Henry Wilson, there was “evidence on file in the Department in the President’s own hand-writing proving that his visit to Fort Monroe convinced him of the entire incapacity of Gen. McClelland, and that he had made up his mind to remove him, and would have done so in three days had not [Congressman Owen] Lovejoy’s unfortunate resolution inspired by Forney, interposed.” (Lovejoy’s resolution, which passed the House on May 9, praised Little Mac’s “high military qualities which secure important results with but little sacrifice of human life.”) According to journalist Adams S. Hill, Lincoln stated “that had it not been for Lovejoy’s resolution he would have removed McClellan.”203

  In mid-May, McClellan clamored once again for reinforcements, alleging that he had only 80,000 effective troops while the enemy had double that number (a characteristically gross overestimate of Confederate forces). Earlier, when Lincoln offered to send McDowell’s corps to him from Fredericksburg with the understanding that McDowell would remain in charge of those troops, Little Mac refused to accept them on those terms. Now he backed down and expressed willingness to take reinforcements under any arrangement, though he wanted them shipped via water. Lincoln agreed to direct McDowell to McClellan, but overland in order to screen Washington.

  On May 22–23, Lincoln again visited the troops, this time McDowell’s corps at Fredericksburg. Stanton and Dahlgren accompanied him. Since it had been decided to forward those troops to McClellan, the president wanted to expedite that transfer, just as he had facilitated the capture of Norfolk a few days earlier. While proceeding from the landing at Aquia Creek to the general’s headquarters, he admired the new railroad bridge across Potomac Creek, an immense structure 400 feet long and 100 feet high, which, he said wonderingly, contained nothing but “beanpoles and cornstalks.” He reviewed the troops and consulted their commander, who declared he could be ready to march south on Sunday the 25th. But Lincoln suggested that he “take a good ready” that Sabbath and start out on Monday.204 While inspecting the troops, he was within view of Confederates across the river who could have shot him. Commented one journalist, “Mr. Lincoln is certainly devoid of personal timidity.”205

  When the president returned to Washington, he became quite agitated by news that on the previous day, May 23, Stonewall Jackson had captured Colonel John R. Kenly, cut his regiment at Front Royal to pieces, routed Nathaniel P. Banks’s other forces, and had begun driving them down the Shenandoah Valley toward the Potomac. Deeply affected by Colonel Kenly’s fate, Lincoln suffered intense anxiety at word of Banks’s pell-mell retreat, which resembled the disgraceful flight from the Bull Run battlefield. To Charles Sumner he vividly described how “Banks’ men were running & flinging away their arms, routed & demoralized.”206 The Confederates seized so much material that General J. E. B. Stuart deemed Banks the best supply officer in Jackson’s corps. George William Curtis voiced the dismay of many Northerners when he exclaimed: “how we have been out Generaled!”207

  Panic gripped the capital, which seemed in danger of being taken by the enemy. Some residents fled northward. “We have been ‘stampeded’ all day with news from Gen. Banks’ army,” Nicolay wrote from the White House. “Only a few minutes ago, a woman came up here from Willards to see me to ascertain if she had not better leave the city as soon as possible.”208

  Lincoln accepted responsibility for the debacle. By sending Shields’s division to McDowell, he made Banks’s diminished force of 4,000 a tempting target for Jackson’s corps, which was four times as strong. Whenever anyone tried to blame Stanton or others for that fateful decision, Lincoln quickly interjected: “I did it!”209

  Word that Banks had escaped across the Potomac greatly relieved the president. “I then determined to capture his pursuers,” to “entrap Jackson in the Valley,” he recalled.210 Boldly directing that effort, he spent long hours at the War Department firing off telegrams. One of them altered McDowell’s orders: instead of marching south from the Rappahannock with all his men to join McClellan, he was to send 20,000 of them west to block Jackson’s line of retreat. The president told McDowell: “Every thing now depends upon the celerity and vigor of your movement.”211 McDowell assigned James Shields’s division to carry out Lincoln’s order. (When told that Shields was crazy, the president said he was reminded “that George III had been told the same of one of his generals, namely, that he was mad. The King replied he wished he would bite his other generals.”)212 Lincoln directed Frémont’s 17,000 men to move 30 miles east from Franklin to Harrisonburg on the Valley Turnpike, Jackson’s escape route. “Do not lose a minute,” Lincoln warned the Pathfinder.213 He urged McClellan to support that portion of McDowell’s corps which was to keep marching south. In addition, the battered remnants of Banks’s army were ordered to regroup and pursue Jackson from the north, a directive that they were slow to obey. To prevent the Confederates from entering Maryland, the president sent a force from Baltimore to occupy Harper’s Ferry.

  With significant help from Stanton, Lincoln was now acting as general-in-chief as well as commander-in-chief. To assist those two civilians, 63-year-old Ethan Allen Hitchcock reluctantly agreed to come out of retirement. On March 15, Lincoln conferred with that general and asked him to serve as an advisor, for the president admitted frankly that he himself “had no military knowledge.” (In February, Lincoln had told Governor Richard Yates of Illinois that “he knew but little of military matters” and therefore “he must trust to the Commander in Chief.”)214 The president read Hitchcock an anonymous letter severely condemning McClellan and calling for his removal. That missive, explained Lincoln, gave some indication of the pressure he faced.

  Meanwhile in the West, Henry W. Halleck appealed for reinforcements. In response, Lincoln patiently explained his inability to comply. “I beg you,” wrote the president on that busy May 24, “to be assured we do the best we can. I mean to cast no blame when I tell you each of our commanders along our line from Richmond to Corinth supposes himself to be confronted by numbers superior to his own. Under this pressure we thinned the line on the upper Potomac until yesterday it was broken, at heavy loss to us, and Gen. Banks put in great peril, out of which he is not yet extricated, and may be actually captured. We need men to repair this breach, and have them not at hand.”215 He advised Halleck to be cautious while approaching Corinth, Mississippi.

  To cheer up the badly disappointed McDowell, who regarded the altered plans as a “crushing blow,” Lincoln on May 24 told him: “The change was as painful to me as it can possibly be to you or to any one.”216 The next day he wired McDowell’s patron, Treasury Secretary Chase, who was visiting the general at Fredericksburg: “I think it not improbable that [Confederate generals Richard] Ewell [Stonewall] Jackson and [Edward] Johnson, are pouring through the gap they made day-before yesterday at Front-Royal, making a dash Northward. It will be a very valuable, and very honorable service for Gen. McDowell to cut them off. I hope he will put all possible energy and speed into the effort.”217

  Between them, Banks, Frémont, and McDowell might be able to block Jackson’s retreat. Lincoln knew that the Confederates intended “by constant alarms [to] keep three or four times as many of our troops away from Richmond as his own force amounts to.”218 Even so, he decided to take a gamble: if McDowell, Frémont, and Banks moved quickly and cooperated with each other, their 40,000 combined troops could bag Jackson’s 17,000. There was a reasonable chance that the plan would work, if those troops moved quickly.

  For the next month, the president continued to supervise Union forces in the Valley. On May 25, he concluded that Jackson’s move was “a general and concentrated one,” not a feint. Therefore he wired McClellan: “I think the time is near when you must either attack Richmond or give up the job and come to the defence of Washington.” After explaining how Banks had been routed by Jackson and was fleeing toward Harper’s Ferry, Lincoln assured Little Mac: “If McDowell’s force was now beyond our reach, we should b
e utterly helpless. Apprehension of something like this, and no unwillingness to sustain you, has always been my reason for withholding McDowell’s force from you. Please understand this, and do the best you can with the force you have.”219 This message has been misinterpreted as evidence that a panicky Lincoln was thinking defensively, concerned above all with saving Washington. But it was sent the day after he urged McDowell and Frémont to take the offensive and bag Jackson; he did not order them to fall back to defend the capital. Lincoln’s telegram to McClellan was designed to prod him into attacking Richmond.

  Angered by Frémont’s decision to proceed to Banks’s relief via Mooresfield, far north of his assigned spot (Harrisonburg), Lincoln caustically remarked that “there are three kinds of animals: there is a horse & a mule & a jackass. A horse when he is broken will obey the reins easily, a mule is hard to guide but still you can make him go rightly. But a jackass you can’t guide at all!!”220 The president complained bitterly about Frémont’s failure to obey orders. When it was suggested that the president criticize the Pathfinder in the press, Lincoln replied that he was far too busy to write for newspapers. Impatiently, the president ordered Frémont to Strasburg, south of Harrisonburg on the Valley Turnpike. (In mid-June, Lincoln explained that when he ordered Frémont to Harrisonburg, he had been unaware that the Pathfinder’s “supplies had not reached him & that he was not prepared to cross the mountains. If I had known that, if he had so informed me I would have ordered him to rest two days until his stores came & then cross the mountains.” To one of Frémont’s subordinates he said that the general “should have notified me that he could not go to Harrisonburg by the route I directed.”)221

  On May 28, Lincoln spurred McDowell on: “it is, for you a question of legs. Put in all the speed you can.”222 As McDowell and Frémont converged on Strasburg, it looked as if they might close the pincers on Jackson. But that wily Confederate, driving his men hard, slithered between them and escaped up the Valley, burning bridges behind him to slow down his pursuers. On June 8, he wheeled about and bloodied Frémont in a rear-guard action at Cross Keys. The following day he did the same thing to Shields at Port Republic. Soon thereafter he left the Valley and rejoined Lee unmolested, for Lincoln directed Frémont to stay at Harrisonburg, sent Banks to protect Front Royal, and had Shields return to Fredericksburg.

  As the Confederates evaded the trap Lincoln had set, he lamented the failure to bag them. He reportedly “felt certain that Jackson should have been captured, and cannot comprehend the excuses made by the generals who should have taken him.”223 He was especially disappointed in Shields, explaining that if that general “had not drilled his men about so much [and] he had moved in strength to Port Republic & held or destroyed the Bridge Fremont would have destroyed Jackson[’]s entire army. Shields drilled his forces along the mountain road South from Front Royal until his forces were 40 miles apart & fearing that the forces of Frémont were also scattered in the race I ordered him to stop at Harrisonburg.”224

  Critics chastised Lincoln for his decision to send part of McDowell’s corps to the Valley rather than to McClellan, but his thinking was not unreasonable. Jackson might have been bagged if the amateur Union generals had been more capable and if they had not been plagued with torrential rain at crucial times. Moreover, it is unlikely that the congenitally timid McClellan would have taken Richmond even if he had had all of McDowell’s men at his disposal.

  Defeat: Lee Whips McClellan

  Meanwhile, on May 31 and June 1, McClellan had fought Joseph E. Johnston in a bloody, indecisive battle at Fair Oaks (also known as Seven Pines), five miles from the Confederate capital. During the action, the Rebel commander was wounded and replaced by Robert E. Lee. McClellan, horrified by the severe losses his army sustained, grew increasingly reluctant to assault the enemy directly; now more than ever was he disposed to rely on maneuver and siege operations. Lincoln viewed the fighting “as the last desperate effort of the rebels in which they had thrown their whole strength. Their defeat he regarded as final.” It was not.225

  To help replace the Army of the Potomac’s losses, the president gave McClellan control of the Fort Monroe garrison, from which the general promptly summoned nine regiments. In addition, reinforcements from Baltimore and Washington, as well as another division of McDowell’s corps from Fredericksburg, were rushed to augment the army on the Peninsula. From North Carolina, 7,000 men of Burnside’s division were assigned to McClellan’s command. But two divisions of McDowell’s corps were left in the Valley to deal with any potential threat from Jackson, whose whereabouts were unknown. Because those units did not join him, the Young Napoleon characteristically complained about lack of support: “Honest A has again fallen into the hands of my enemies,” he exclaimed to his wife, “& is no longer a cordial friend of mine!”226 To be sure, Lincoln had on June 15 told him that he could not forward Shields’s division because it “has gotten so terribly out of shape, out at elbows, and out at toes, that it will require a long time to get it in again.”227 But McClellan was well furnished with troops. On April 1 he had 158,419 on his rolls (including McDowell’s corps and Blenker’s division), and on June 20 he had 156,838. The loss of Blenker and McDowell’s 45,000 troops had been made up by the replacements.

  As time passed, Lincoln grew impatient to know why the Army of the Potomac remained idle after Fair Oaks. On June 5, Nicolay reported from the White House that “McClellan’s extreme caution, or tardiness, or something, is utterly exhaustive of all hope and patience, and leaves one in that feverish apprehension that as something may go wrong, something most likely will go wrong.”228 The president also objected to McClellan’s excessive tenderness in dealing with enemy property, most notably a dwelling near Richmond belonging to Robert E. Lee known as the White House. Before the war, Little Mac had promised Lee that if hostilities broke out, that structure would be protected. On June 16, according to D. W. Bartlett, “Mr. Lincoln ‘put his foot down’ … , declaring that he would break the engagement between the two generals” for, he “said he wasn’t bound by any such promise.” He ordered that Lee’s White House be used as a Union hospital.229

  On June 18, Lincoln gently prodded McClellan: “I could better dispose of things if I could know about what day you can attack Richmond, and would be glad to be informed, if you think you can inform me with safety.”230 That day the president told Orville H. Browning that he had reluctantly gone along with McClellan’s plan only after the division commanders so strongly endorsed it. Now, however, he was convinced that he had been right when he urged that the fight should have been made near Manassas.

  Anxious about the fate of McClellan’s army, fearful that McDowell might be attacked before he could link up with it, and eager for counsel, Lincoln on June 23 slipped out of Washington to meet with Winfield Scott at West Point. The president, who had recently remarked that Old Fuss and Feathers was “worth all the rest” of the generals, asked about “the present state of the campaign, and the best policy to bring the war to a speedy end.” No formal record of their five-hour conversation survives except a memo by the general approving Lincoln’s decision to send McDowell’s corps to McClellan. According to press reports, Scott offered advice regarding the need to reorganize the army and assured Lincoln that Frémont and Banks’s forces were properly deployed. Some speculated that the president was about to remove McClellan, but on his return trip to Washington, he scotched that rumor by telling a crowd at Jersey City that his visit to West Point “was not to make or unmake any generals now in the army.”231 In all likelihood, Lincoln and Scott discussed a plan to unite the corps of Frémont, Banks, and McDowell under one commander, as Chase had recommended.

  That new commander of the combined force was to be John Pope, who had been summoned from the West. On June 26, Pope met with Lincoln, who persuaded him to take charge of the newly created Army of Virginia, containing the 45,000 troops in the Shenandoah Valley. Pope hesitated to assume that role, explaining that all three of the major gene
rals in that army—Banks, Shields, and Frémont—outranked him; they and their troops might well be reluctant to follow his lead uncomplainingly. Pope argued that “I should be much in the situation of the strange dog, without even the right to run out of the village.”232

  Frémont resigned his commission in protest and was replaced by Franz Sigel, much to the consternation of abolitionists like Henry T. Cheever, who exclaimed: “How dreadful [are] the new blunders of the President. How shameful [is] the treatment of Fremont.” Kentuckians, however, were delighted to see the Pathfinder go.233 Pope’s selection was dictated more by politics than by considerations of military merit. Chase and Stanton pressed Lincoln to name him, for they were tired of McClellan’s everlasting delays and suspicious of his political conservatism. They wanted a fighting general to replace the Young Napoleon, and Pope had proved aggressive in the West. The general’s outspoken hostility to slavery endeared him to the Radicals. In addition, Stanton wished to embarrass McClellan, whom he had come to despise. The war secretary had been trying to persuade Lincoln to replace Little Mac with Napoleon B. Buford.