Tried by War

by James M. McPherson

  Favoritism aside, Cameron was clearly not up to the task of overseeing with efficiency the huge military mobilization of 1861. By October of that year Lincoln was fed up with him. In a conversation with John Nicolay, who took notes, the president complained that Cameron was “utterly ignorant and regardless of the course of things…. Selfish and openly discourteous to the President. Obnoxious to the Country. Incapable either of organizing details or conceiving and advising general plans.”9 Lincoln determined to get rid of Cameron but had to tread carefully to avoid alienating his partisans in Pennsylvania. In January the president seized his opportunity. Cameron had made vague references to a desire to resign if he could be appointed to a less stressful but honorable post. When the minister to Russia resigned, the president offered the job to Cameron, who accepted.10

  Lincoln’s choice as Cameron’s successor was somewhat surprising. Edwin M. Stanton was a Democrat, a confidant of McClellan who had made no secret of his disdain for the administration in 1861. It was from Stanton that McClellan had picked up the description of Lincoln as “the original gorilla.” One of the country’s leading trial lawyers, Stanton had snubbed Lincoln when they were associated on a patent infringement case in 1855. But the president admired Stanton’s ability and was willing to overlook personal discourtesy—as he had done with McClellan.

  The choice of Stanton proved to be an inspired one. Although many people were offended by his brusque manners and suffer-no-fools rudeness, they were often in need of offending. Ruthlessly honest, he brought efficiency and integrity to the business of war contracts. Lincoln and Stanton developed an unexpectedly warm relationship based on mutual respect. They also practiced a sort of good cop/bad cop administrative style: Lincoln would send politicians and others requesting impossible favors to Stanton, who he knew would say no. The disappointed favor seekers would go away blaming Stanton, saving Lincoln from negative political consequences.

  McClellan was initially delighted with Stanton’s appointment, which he described to a fellow Democrat as “a most unexpected piece of good fortune.” But Stanton soon became disillusioned with the general. A few days after taking over at the War Department, he wrote that “as soon as I can get the machinery of office going, the rats cleared out, and the rat holes stopped, we shall move. This army has got to fight or run away;…the champagne and oysters on the Potomac must be stopped.”11

  Lincoln thought so too, and at the end of January he issued two orders designed to force Halleck and Buell as well as McClellan into action. General Order No. 1 specified that the “Land and Naval forces” should move “against the insurgent forces” on or before February 22, Washington’s Birthday. Special Order No. 1 stated that the Army of the Potomac should move against the railroad supplying Johnston’s army at Manassas (the Occoquan operation favored by Lincoln and McDowell) on or before the same date.12

  Lincoln did not necessarily intend the February 22 date to be taken literally. Rather, as he explained to Orville Browning, he wanted the principal Union armies to advance more or less simultaneously to “threaten all [enemy] positions at the same time with superior force, and if they weakened one to strengthen another seize and hold the one weakened.” Lincoln’s strategy of coordinated offensives grew out of his correspondence with Buell and Halleck, in which the commander in chief tried to get them to cooperate in movements against Confederate strongpoints in Kentucky and Tennessee. After Halleck explained that he could not move because he lacked arms and equipment (in the letter that Lincoln found “exceedingly discouraging”), the general proceeded to lecture the president: “To operate on exterior lines against an enemy occupying a central position, will fail, as it has always failed, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred. It is condemned by every military authority I have ever read.”13

  By this time Lincoln had read some of those authorities himself in his cram course on strategy, and was prepared to challenge Halleck’s reasoning. The president recognized that by the geography of the case, Union forces had to operate from exterior lines around the perimeter of the Confederacy. Lincoln grasped sooner than many of his generals the strategic concept of “concentration in time.” Because the Confederacy’s basic military strategy was to defend the territory that lay behind its frontier, Southern armies had the advantage of interior lines. That advantage enabled them to shift reinforcements from inactive to active fronts, as they had done at Manassas in July 1861. This concentration in space could be overcome only if the Union employed its greater numbers (a reality despite McClellan’s belief to the contrary) to attack on two or more fronts at once—concentration in time.

  No one explained this strategic concept better than Lincoln himself. Three days after receiving Halleck’s letter, Lincoln replied to him and sent an identical letter to Buell. “I state my general idea of this war,” wrote the commander in chief, “that we have the greater numbers, and the enemy has the greater facility of concentrating upon points of collision.” Union forces could not succeed “unless we can find some way of making our advantage an over-match for his; and that this can only be done by menacing him with superior forces at different points, at the same time; so that we can safely attack, one, or both, if he makes no change; and that if he weakens one to strengthen the other, forbear to attack the strengthened one, but seize and hold the weakened one, gaining so much.”14

  If Buell or Halleck acknowledged this good advice, there is no record of it. In any case events in their theaters during the next month proved the soundness of Lincoln’s strategy. At the beginning of February, Halleck ordered Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, with fifteen thousand men, to proceed against Fort Henry on the Tennessee River just south of the Kentucky border. Grant would be accompanied by Flag Officer Andrew H. Foote and his fleet of new ironclad river gunboats. Grant and Foote had been urging such an advance; Halleck responded to that urging as well as to Lincoln’s General Order No. 1 by turning them loose. The gunboats subdued and captured Fort Henry on February 6, opening up the Tennessee River to the Union fleet all the way to Muscle Shoals at Florence, Alabama. Grant prepared to march his army across the twelve miles that separated Fort Henry from Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River.

  This lightning campaign confronted Confederate commander Albert Sidney Johnston with a serious dilemma. Buell menaced his defenses at Bowling Green, Kentucky, at the same time that Grant approached Fort Donelson. Just as Lincoln had predicted, Johnston was forced to weaken one to defend the other from these Union forces converging on exterior lines. Johnston chose to abandon Bowling Green to reinforce Fort Donelson. Grant captured Donelson anyway, which compelled Johnston to abandon Nashville as Buell approached and also to evacuate the Confederate bastion on the Mississippi River at Columbus, Kentucky, which Southerners had proudly labeled “the Gibraltar of the West.”

  Grant became one of the first Union heroes of the war with his demand for “unconditional surrender” of Fort Donelson. Foote received almost equal acclaim and was soon promoted to become one of the first three rear admirals in American naval history (along with Samuel F. Du Pont, captor of Port Royal, and David G. Farragut, captor of New Orleans). “We all went wild over your success,” a lieutenant in the Washington Navy Yard wrote to Foote. “Uncle Abe was joyful, and said everything of the naval boys and spoke of you—in his plain, sensible appreciation of merit and skill.”15

  Halleck tried to take credit for these achievements because Forts Henry and Donelson were in his department. He asked for supreme command in the West as a reward, and also recommended Buell, Grant, and Charles F. Smith (a division commander under Grant) for promotion to major general. Lincoln had a pretty good idea who deserved the credit. He ignored most of Halleck’s requests (for the time being) but immediately promoted Grant to major general of volunteers, making him second in seniority only to Halleck in the Western theater.16

  A misunderstanding between Grant and Halleck—who was perhaps jealous of his subordinate—temporarily threatened Grant’s command. Halleck complained that he had receiv
ed no reports from Grant for two weeks after the capture of Fort Donelson and that Grant had made an unauthorized trip to Nashville after it fell. Halleck slyly hinted that Grant may have resumed his “old habits”—a reference to the persistent rumors of drunkenness that had supposedly forced Grant to resign from the army back in 1854. McClellan authorized Halleck to remove Grant from command if satisfactory explanations were not forthcoming. Halleck suspended Grant pending further information.17

  It turned out that Grant had been sending dispatches to Halleck all along, but the telegraph operator at Cairo—a Confederate sympathizer—had not forwarded them. Grant gave copies of them to his congressional sponsor, Elihu Washburne, who in turn showed them to Lincoln. The president had the adjutant general send a telegram to Halleck demanding an official statement of his charges against Grant. Lincoln’s intervention was decisive. Halleck backed down, cited the telegrapher’s sabotage as the source of the trouble, and ordered Grant to resume his command and “lead [your army] on to new victories.”18

  WHILE THIS CONTRETEMPS between Halleck and Grant was going on, Lincoln was losing patience with McClellan—again. In response to the president’s Special Order No. 1, the general asked for permission “to submit in writing my objections to his plans and my reasons for preferring my own.” Lincoln granted the request, and on February 3 McClellan wrote a long memorandum explaining for the first time his proposal for a deep flanking movement to pry the enemy out of his Manassas/Centreville fortifications. As foreshadowed by General Franklin three weeks earlier, McClellan proposed to take the Army of the Potomac down its namesake river and the Chesapeake Bay and up the Rappahannock River to Urbana, some 120 miles by water from Washington. From there he would have a secure base to launch a 50-mile campaign to Richmond. This move, he said, would force Joseph Johnston to evacuate the Manassas line and retreat south to defend Richmond, which McClellan predicted he might reach before the enemy could get there.

  Lincoln was not convinced. He was concerned that the enemy might attack Washington before McClellan got anywhere near Richmond. He posed a series of hard questions to the general. In what ways, Lincoln asked, would a victory be more certain and valuable by McClellan’s plan than by the president’s preferred operation in the Occoquan Valley? In case of defeat, “would not a safe retreat be more difficult by your plan than mine?” Finally, “does not your plan involve a greatly larger expenditure of time, and money, than mine?”

  McClellan largely ignored this last question, but answered the others by assuring the president that his own plan “if successful gives us the capital, the communications, the supplies of rebels; Norfolk would fall; all the waters of the Chesapeake would be ours; all Virginia would be in our power; & the enemy forced to abandon Tennessee & North Carolina.” But if not successful, McClellan said he would have a safe line of retreat down the peninsula between the York and James Rivers to Fort Monroe.19

  Lincoln remained skeptical. Two sound premises that underlay his questions were left unanswered by McClellan: First, the enemy army, not Richmond, should be the primary objective; and second, Lincoln’s plan would enable the Army of the Potomac to operate close to its own base (Alexandria), while McClellan’s plan, even if successful, would draw the enemy back to his base (Richmond) and greatly lengthen Union supply lines.

  Nevertheless Lincoln once again (perhaps unwisely) deferred to McClellan’s supposedly superior professional qualifications and tentatively approved the general’s plan. Assembling the shipping and other logistical requirements for the operation would take several weeks—one of the reasons, of course, that Lincoln had questioned it. As these February weeks went by, the Union victories in Kentucky and Tennessee as well as the success of Burnside’s expedition that gained control of the North Carolina sounds and much of the coast made the Army of the Potomac’s apparent continuing inactivity all the more humiliating by comparison.

  A fiasco at Harpers Ferry did further damage to McClellan’s credibility. Desiring to protect the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and keep Confederates off his flank on the Potomac above Washington, McClellan planned to cross General Banks’s division at Harpers Ferry and occupy Winchester. Banks’s troops would be supplied via a pontoon bridge of canal boats towed up the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal from Washington. McClellan went to Harpers Ferry on February 26 to oversee the operation. But it turned out that the boats were six inches too wide to pass through the outlet locks from the canal to the river. When the embarrassed McClellan telegraphed this news to Stanton, the secretary of war took the telegram to Lincoln. “What does this mean?” asked the astonished president. “It means it is a d[amne]d fizzle,” said Stanton. “It means that he does not intend to do anything.”20

  Lincoln usually managed to keep his temper in check. But not this time. He summoned McClellan’s chief of staff (who was also the general’s father-in-law), Randolph Marcy, and vented his spleen. “Why in [tar]nation,” snapped the president, “couldn’t the Gen. have known whether a boat would go through that lock, before he spent a million of dollars getting them there? I am no engineer; but it seems to me that if I wished to know whether a boat would go through a hole, or a lock, common sense would teach me to go and measure it.” Lincoln expressed himself as “almost despairing at these results. Everything seems to fail. The general impression is daily growing that the general does not intend to do anything. By a failure like this we lose all the prestige we gained by the capture of Fort Donelson. I am grievously disappointed.”21

  Ugly rumors began to circulate in Republican circles that McClellan, a Democrat, did not really want to crush the rebellion. Lincoln received scores of letters accusing the general of treasonable motives and endured dozens of visits from Republican leaders, some of whom made similar charges. These rumors were a product of politics as well as of the army’s inactivity. McClellan had made little secret of his dislike for abolitionists and radical Republicans. His closest political associates were Democrats who wanted to restore the Union on the basis of something like the Crittenden Compromise that would preserve slavery and the political power of Southern Democrats. Some of the generals serving in the Confederate army confronting him “were once my most intimate friends,” McClellan had acknowledged (privately) in November 1861. He did not want to fight the kind of war the radicals were beginning to demand—a war to destroy slavery and the power of the planter class. McClellan wrote in November 1861 to an influential Democratic friend: “Help me dodge the nigger…. I am fighting to preserve the integrity of the Union…. To gain that end we cannot afford to raise up the negro question.”22

  Radical Republican senators Benjamin Wade and Zachariah Chandler had played a significant role in boosting McClellan to the position of general-in-chief in November. Four months had passed, and, in their view, McClellan had betrayed them by doing nothing. They were suspicious of his politics and perhaps half believed rumors of his disloyalty. But the main reason for their conversion from supporters of McClellan to his most vocal critics was the general’s inactivity. On March 3 Lincoln met with members of the Committee on the Conduct of the War (chaired by Wade). They gave the president an earful of complaints about McClellan. Wade urged Lincoln to remove him from command. If he did so, Lincoln asked, who should replace him? “Why, anybody!” Wade reportedly responded. “Wade,” Lincoln supposedly said, “anybody will do for you, but not for me. I must have somebody.”23

  This story may be apocryphal. The committee actually had two possible candidates in mind: McDowell or their new favorite, Frémont, whose antislavery credentials seemed more important than military competency. But Lincoln believed that these generals carried too much negative baggage from defeat at Bull Run and failure in Missouri. The president was more receptive to the committee’s advice to organize the Army of the Potomac into four corps of three divisions each instead of the twelve discrete divisions whose commanders each reported directly to McClellan. Most of the generals who would presumably become corps commanders by seniority were Republicans or at le
ast nonpartisan, while most of the younger division commanders whom McClellan had placed in their posts were Democrats. That party had dominated Congress most of the time since the 1830s, so a majority of plebes appointed to West Point by congressmen came from Democratic families. For the same reason officers ambitious to get ahead in the antebellum army often cultivated relationships with Democrats who were in a position to help them. One historian has estimated that in 1860 almost three-quarters of regular army officers whose political affiliation could be determined were Democrats.24

  Despite Lincoln’s deflection of Wade, the president was in fact considering the removal of McClellan. A month had gone by since Lincoln had lukewarmly approved the general’s Urbana plan. The army was still in winter quarters. The day after his meeting with the committee, Lincoln told a Pennsylvania congressman that unless McClellan moved soon he would be replaced.25 Secretary of War Stanton had summoned to Washington the sixty-three-year-old retired colonel Ethan Allen Hitchcock, grandson of Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen. Hitchcock had served in the army for thirty-eight years before resigning after a dispute with Secretary of War Jefferson Davis in 1855. More interested in philosophy and theology than in war, Hitchcock reluctantly accepted a commission as major general and a staff position in the War Department. One day in March, Stanton surprised him by asking if he would be willing to replace McClellan—which Stanton scarcely would have done without Lincoln’s approval. Hitchcock wrote in his diary that Stanton told him “the most astounding facts, all going to show the astonishing incompetency of General McClellan. I can not recite them: but…I felt positively sick…. I do not wonder, now, that the Secretary offered me the command of this Army of the Potomac.”26