Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief

by James M. McPherson

  Hitchcock declined the offer on grounds of age and health. For better or worse the president decided to stick with McClellan. But on March 7 Lincoln summoned the general to his office and told him with unprecedented bluntness that his tenure was short unless he got moving. The president also hinted—perhaps stated openly—that some influential men believed the real purpose of his Urbana plan was to leave Washington uncovered so the Rebels could capture it. McClellan was outraged, but Lincoln assured him that he did not believe a word of the rumors.27

  With his tin ear for the political realities of both his and the president’s positions, McClellan said he would resolve any doubts about his Urbana plan by submitting it to a vote of his division commanders and the army’s chief engineer officer. They voted eight to four in favor of the plan—not surprising, perhaps, since most of those eight owed their positions to McClellan’s sponsorship. Three of the four division commanders with the greatest seniority voted against the plan and expressed a preference for Lincoln’s and McDowell’s Occoquan strategy. Lincoln nevertheless said he would assent to the majority decision. “We can do nothing else than accept their plan,” he told Stanton. “We can’t reject it and adopt another without assuming all the responsibility in the case of the one we adopt.”28

  Perhaps he should have rejected it. But that probably would have provoked McClellan’s resignation, demoralization in the Army of the Potomac, and further delay. Lincoln did not have anyone else in whom he had confidence to substitute for McClellan, who had created the Army of the Potomac and enjoyed the adulatory support of the rank and file as well as of most officers. But the day after the generals’ vote, Lincoln issued an order organizing the Army of the Potomac into four corps and appointing the four senior generals—including three who had voted against the Urbana plan—as the corps commanders. McClellan had opposed the corps organization until he could make his own recommendations for corps commanders, but was overruled. Lincoln also issued a second order on March 8 approving the Urbana plan on condition that McClellan leave “in, and about Washington” a force sufficient to make the capital “entirely secure.” Three days later came another order that relieved McClellan as general-in-chief because, as commander of an army about to take the field, he could no longer “do it all.” The same order protected Lincoln’s left political flank (the radical Republicans) by creating a new command in western Virginia for Frémont, designated the Mountain Department. This order also gave Halleck command over the vast area west of Frémont’s department all the way to Kansas. For the time being Lincoln and Stanton would do the job of general-in-chief themselves.29

  The impact of these orders was to put McClellan on notice that he would be held accountable for results in his theater, and that Halleck was being rewarded for success in his theater and promoted to virtual equality of responsibility with McClellan. But for McClellan the central fact in this flurry of orders was that Lincoln had approved his plan. The general wrote to his friend Samuel L. M. Barlow, a prominent lawyer and Democratic leader in New York: “The President is all right—he is my strongest friend.”30

  The very day that a majority of generals voted for the Urbana plan, however, Joseph Johnston threw a monkey wrench into the operation. He withdrew his army from the Manassas/Centreville line to Culpeper, south of the Rappahannock River, where he was in a position to block McClellan’s intention to move toward Richmond from Urbana. Johnston was thus also no longer vulnerable to a turning movement via the Occoquan Valley—which was one of his reasons for the withdrawal.31

  McClellan immediately led the Army of the Potomac on what he called a “practice march” to the abandoned Confederate works. Northern journalists who accompanied the army discovered that the Confederate defenses were by no means as formidable as McClellan had claimed, and the camps had room for only about half as many men as McClellan had estimated. Several of the heavy-artillery redoubts mounted logs painted black rather than large-caliber cannons. These “Quaker guns” caused McClellan much embarrassment. Already skeptical of his estimates of enemy numbers and strength, Lincoln and Stanton never again gave credence to the general’s perpetual complaints of inferior numbers.

  Johnston’s retreat compelled McClellan to shift his proposed flanking movement another thirty miles south to Fort Monroe, at the tip of the Virginia Peninsula. This time all four corps commanders voted for the plan, and Lincoln once again reluctantly approved—provided enough troops were left behind to protect Washington.32 McClellan promised to do so, but failed to consult with Lincoln about what constituted a sufficient force. In fact the general did not even send a list of the units designated for this purpose until he had boarded ship for the Peninsula on April 1. A courier carried back to the War Department a misleading tabulation that counted some nonexistent troops, counting others twice, and included thirty thousand soldiers under General Banks around Harpers Ferry who were as far from Washington as was Johnston’s army around Culpeper. Stanton submitted to Hitchcock and Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas the question of whether these units constituted the sufficient force the president had specified for Washington’s defense. They replied on April 2 that “the President’s order has not been fully complied with.”33 Described by Senator Charles Sumner as “justly indignant” about this information, Lincoln ordered McDowell’s large corps of thirty thousand men temporarily withheld from McClellan and deployed in the vicinity of Manassas.34

  McClellan was incensed when he received this news. He described it to his wife as “the most infamous thing that history has recorded.” He blamed Stanton more than Lincoln. Indeed, the general’s bitterness toward Stanton was all the more intense because he had once considered the secretary of war an ally in the struggle against his radical enemies. Stanton was now hand in glove with the “wretches” and “hell hounds” in Washington who wanted him to fail because they disliked his politics. “History will present a sad record of these traitors who are willing to sacrifice the country & its army for personal spite,” wrote McClellan. “Stanton is without exception the vilest man I ever knew.”35

  McClellan appealed to Lincoln for a reversal of the order withholding McDowell’s corps. “I beg that you will reconsider,” he telegraphed the president on April 5. “The enemy are in large force along our front…. The success of our cause will be imperiled by so greatly reducing my force…. I am now of the opinion that I shall have to fight all the available force of the Rebels not far from here.” In an effort to explain why he had held back McDowell’s corps, Lincoln summarized the false arithmetic in McClellan’s listing of the units left to defend Washington and asked: “Do you really think I should permit the line from Richmond, via Manassas Junction, to this city to be entirely open, except what resistance could be presented by less than twenty thousand unorganized troops?” This was, said the commander in chief, “a question which the country will not allow me to evade.”36 McClellan may have been correct in asserting that his offensive on the Peninsula would force Johnston to hasten south to defend his own capital instead of attacking Washington. But Lincoln was right in saying that he could not afford the risk.

  When McClellan wrote on April 5 that the enemy was in “large force” on his front, most of Johnston’s army was eighty miles away. McClellan had 60,000 men with another 25,000 only a day or two distant, facing about 13,000 Confederates stretched thinly along a dozen miles of defenses behind the Warwick River near Yorktown. Lincoln telegraphed McClellan that with this advantage, “I think you better break the enemies’ line…at once. They will probably use time, as advantageously as you can.” McClellan’s only reaction to this admonition was a comment to his wife: “I was much tempted to reply that he had better come and do it himself.”37

  The commander of the Confederate force at Yorktown was Gen. John. B. Magruder, who had been known in the old army as “Prince John” because of his taste for the high life, including amateur theatricals. Prince John put on a show for McClellan. He marched some of his troops back and forth behind his lines and
shifted his artillery around to give the impression that he had more men than he really did. Whether for that reason or because of his habitual exaggeration of enemy numbers, McClellan believed that “the enemy are in large force along our front,” as he told Lincoln.

  In a conversation with Orville Browning, the president said that McClellan “had the capacity to make arrangements properly for a great conflict, but as the hour for action approached he became nervous and oppressed with the responsibility and hesitated to meet the crisis.” It was an incisive observation, and entirely accurate. In an attempt to help McClellan overcome his nervous hesitation, Lincoln wrote him a fatherly letter on April 9. Now was “the precise time to strike a blow,” he said. “By delay the enemy will gain faster, by fortifications and re-inforcements, than you can by re-inforcements alone.” This was exactly right. “And, once more let me tell you,” Lincoln continued, “it is indispensable to you that you strike a blow…. You will do me the justice to remember I always insisted, that going down the Bay in search of a field, instead of fighting at or near Manassas, was only shifting, and not surmounting, a difficulty—that we would find the same enemy, and the same, or equal, intrenchments, at either place. The country will not fail to note—is now noting—that the present hesitation to move upon an intrenched enemy, is but the story of Manassas repeated.” Lincoln assured McClellan that “I have never written you, or spoken to you, in greater kindness of feeling than now, nor with a fuller purpose to sustain you…. But you must act.”38

  It was a superb letter, one of Lincoln’s best. But McClellan ignored it. And even though one of McDowell’s divisions had joined him, he decided to bring up his siege guns to pulverize the Confederate lines—a process that would take weeks just to get the guns and mortars into position. On April 16 a reconnaissance in force by several companies of the Third Vermont discovered a weak point in the Confederate line at Dam No. 1 on the Warwick River. Instead of reinforcing this potential breakthrough, McClellan rode away and subsequently reported that “the object I proposed had been fully accomplished.” The only result was to persuade the enemy to reinforce that part of the line.39 But when General Johnston arrived on April 22 and inspected the Confederate defenses, he reported that “labor enough has been expended here to make a very strong position, but it has been wretchedly misapplied by younger engineer officers. No one but McClellan could have hesitated to attack.”40

  LINCOLN REMAINED PREOCCUPIED with McClellan and the Virginia theater during this period because the war in other theaters was going so well. As usual it was the squeaky wheel that got the grease—and McClellan’s wheel was by far the squeakiest. After the capture of Fort Donelson and the occupation of Nashville, General Halleck ordered Grant and Buell to unite their armies at Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River for a campaign against the key Confederate railroad junction at Corinth, Mississippi. In northwest Arkansas a small Union army routed the enemy in the Battle of Pea Ridge on March 7–8 and gained control of the northern part of the state. A naval flotilla supported by Gen. John Pope’s Army of the Mississippi moved down that river picking off Confederate fortifications on its way to naval capture of Memphis on June 6. Operations along the South Atlantic coast captured islands from South Carolina to Florida and the harbors of New Bern and Beaufort, North Carolina, and closed Savannah and Fernandina, Florida, to blockade-runners by capturing the forts at the entrance to their harbors.

  The greatest coup of all was the capture of New Orleans by a fleet under the command of David Glasgow Farragut at the end of April. Benjamin Butler’s army occupied the city while Farragut’s ships proceeded up the Mississippi, compelling the surrender of Baton Rouge and Natchez on their way to meet the Union river fleet coming down to Vicksburg. That bastion on the bluff held out, but its capture seemed only a matter of time.

  The well-oiled Union machinery in these theaters emitted some troubling noises only at Pittsburg Landing, where a Confederate attack almost pushed Grant’s army into the Tennessee River on April 6. The next day, however, a counterattack by Grant and part of Buell’s Army of the Ohio drove the enemy back to Corinth. This two-day Battle of Shiloh was the largest of the war so far, with almost twenty-four thousand casualties on both sides, of which thirteen thousand were Union. Newspaper correspondents who descended on the field after the battle reported that Grant had been surprised on the first day because he was drunk or incompetent. Neither was true, but the stories gained such wide circulation that several politicians went to Lincoln and demanded Grant’s dismissal.

  Having personally promoted Grant after Fort Donelson, Lincoln parried the demands. After all, Shiloh was a Union victory. And despite the stories, Lincoln learned from official reports and other information that Grant’s tactical handling of his army during the battle deserved much of the credit for that victory. On April 23 the president sent an official inquiry to Halleck asking “whether any neglect or misconduct of General Grant or any other officer contributed to the sad casualties that befell our forces on Sunday” (April 6). Halleck replied that several subordinate officers had behaved badly, but the rumors about Grant were false.41

  Lincoln defended Grant against the shower of criticism. The president probably did not utter the famous words quoted by the Pennsylvania politico Alexander McClure: “I can’t spare this man; he fights.”42 But he certainly spoke other words as strong or stronger in Grant’s defense. As Elihu Washburne later told Grant, “When the torrent of obloquy and detraction was rolling over you, and your friends, after the battle of Shiloh, Mr. Lincoln stood like a wall of fire between you and it, uninfluenced by the threats of Congressmen and the demands of insolent cowardice.”43 Had it not been for Lincoln’s support at this time, the Grant of history would not have existed—and perhaps neither would the Lincoln of history.

  DURING THESE MONTHS of military frustration in Virginia and success elsewhere, Lincoln also had to deal with the escalating issue of slavery. His modification of Frémont’s emancipation edict continued to rankle many Republicans. When Congress met in December 1861, a solid Republican vote in the House defeated a motion to reaffirm the Crittenden resolution that had disavowed any antislavery purpose in the war.44 More and more slaves came into Union lines as Northern armies penetrated into the South, especially in Tennessee and the lower Mississippi Valley. Some generals tried to bar them from entering Union lines, but these efforts seemed little more effective than King Canute’s attempt to hold back the waves. On March 13 Congress enacted a new article of war prohibiting army officers, under pain of court-martial, from returning escaped slaves to their masters—even loyal masters. On April 16 Lincoln signed into law a bill abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia.45 During this session of Congress, bills to expand the Confiscation Act by freeing the slaves of all Rebel owners were making their way through congressional committees.

  Lincoln recognized that he needed to seize control of the slavery issue before it ran away from him. There was no question about his personal inclinations. He had frequently branded slavery “an unqualified evil to the negro, the white man, and the State…. The monstrous injustice of slavery…deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites.”46 But Lincoln did not believe that “the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling.”47 And he told Congress in December 1861 that “in considering the policy to be adopted for suppressing the insurrection, I have been anxious that the inevitable conflict for this purpose shall not degenerate into a violent and remorseless revolutionary conflict.” What he meant by that was not entirely clear. But he seemed to mean that he wanted the purpose of the war to remain restoration of the Union with a minimum of radical transformation in the Southern social order. However, another passage in the same message—little noticed at the time—pushed that minimum beyond what it had been when he signed the Confiscation Act the previous August. He referred to the contrabands
affected by that law as “thus liberated”—that is, free people who could not be returned to slavery. Lincoln also hinted in this message at a new border-state strategy that would keep these states in the Union while making progress toward emancipation.48

  Lincoln believed that the existence of slavery in the border states kept alive Confederate hopes that they would eventually join their slave nation. If the border states could be persuaded to abolish slavery gradually, they would be more firmly welded to the Union, and the Confederacy would be correspondingly weakened. In the fall of 1861 Lincoln tried to test this proposition in the state where slavery had almost disappeared already—Delaware. Only 8 percent of Delaware’s black population were enslaved. In November 1861 Lincoln drafted a bill for gradual abolition of slavery in the state, with owners to be compensated by the federal government. Delaware’s congressman presented the bill to the legislature, which buried it after Democrats denounced this effort “to place the negro on a footing of equality with the white man.”49

  Lincoln did not give up, however. On March 6, 1862, he sent Congress a special message recommending passage of a joint resolution offering financial aid to any state “which may adopt gradual abolishment of slavery.” If all four border states should accept the offer, the cost would be no more than the cost of three months of war. Lincoln predicted (overoptimistically) that if adopted, the measure would “substantially end the rebellion” by depriving the Confederacy of any hope that these states would join them. Lincoln also uttered a thinly veiled warning to the border states. If they refused this offer, he said, “it is impossible to foresee all the incidents which may attend and all the ruin which may follow” if the war continued much longer—in other words, they might lose slavery anyway and have nothing to show for it.50