Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief

by James M. McPherson

  The general-in-chief, exhausted from sleepless nights dealing not only with this crisis but also with the simultaneous Confederate invasion of Kentucky, could not budge McClellan. Lincoln was present with Halleck in the telegraph office much of the time. He witnessed what amounted almost to a nervous breakdown by Halleck under the stress. The president later told John Hay that Halleck “broke down—nerve and pluck all gone—and has ever since evaded all possible responsibility—little more than a first-rate clerk.”19 What Lincoln probably did not know was that Halleck suffered severely from hemorrhoids, which grew even more painful under stress, and that he was taking opium to ease the pain.20 The general-in-chief’s incapacity forced Lincoln once again to take on the responsibilities of that position.

  In the midst of this crisis McClellan sent a telegram to Lincoln that seemed to reveal his real reason for halting Franklin’s corps and failing to hurry up Sumner’s. Although McClellan acknowledged that he was under orders “to open communication with Pope,” he implied that a better alternative might be “to leave Pope to get out of his scrape & at once use all our means to make the capital perfectly safe.” Lincoln was shocked by these words. McClellan “wanted Pope defeated,” he told John Hay.21 Circumstantial evidence seems to support Lincoln’s accusation. General Sumner expressed anger when he learned that McClellan had held him back because his corps was not in shape to go forward. “If I had been ordered to advance right on,” Sumner told the Committee on the Conduct of the War, “I should have been in that second Bull Run battle with my whole force.” As Pope’s army retreated toward Washington after its defeat on August 30, it encountered Franklin’s corps coming up—two days too late. One of Pope’s division commanders overheard some of Franklin’s subordinates voice “their pleasure at Pope’s discomfiture without the slightest concealment, and [they] spoke of our government in Washington with an affectation of supercilious contempt.”22

  These were dark, dismal days in the North. “For the first time,” wrote the Washington bureau chief of the New York Tribune on September 1, “I believe it possible that Washington may be taken.”23 Newspapers of various political stripes agreed that “the Country is in extreme peril. The Rebels seem to be pushing forward their forces all along the border line from the Atlantic to the Missouri.” “Disguise it as we may, the Union arms have been repeatedly, disgracefully, and decisively beaten.” Unless there was some change, “the Union cause is doomed to a speedy and disastrous overthrow.”24 The New York Times reported that many people were asking: “Of what use are all these terrible sacrifices? Shall we have nothing but defeat to show for all our valor?”25

  Demoralization on the home front was bad enough. Demoralization in both the Army of Virginia and the Army of the Potomac was worse. A New Hampshire captain whose regiment had lost heavily at Bull Run declared that “the whole army is disgusted…. You need not be surprised if success falls to the rebels with astonishing rapidity.” “Our men are sick of the war,” wrote Washington Roebling, a New Jersey officer and future builder of the Brooklyn Bridge. “They fight without an aim and without enthusiasm; they have no confidence in their leaders.” A brigade commander shared “a general feeling that the Southern Confederacy will be recognized and that they deserve to be recognized.”26

  No one was more aware of the army’s demoralization than Lincoln. And as commander in chief, his was the responsibility for doing something about it. A newspaper reporter who spoke with Lincoln on August 30 had never seen the president so “wrathful” toward anyone as he was toward McClellan. Lincoln seemed to think that the general was “a little crazy,” according to John Hay, but he agreed with Hay that “envy jealousy and spite are probably a better explanation.”27 The president received plenty of advice on what to do about the matter. Stanton wanted McClellan court-martialed; Chase said he should be shot. Four members of the cabinet signed a memorandum urging the president to dismiss McClellan. Secretary of the Navy Welles did not sign but agreed with the sentiments in the memorandum.28

  So did Lincoln, but he knew that he would have an army mutiny on his hands if he retained Pope in command. At 7:30 A.M. on September 2 Lincoln and Halleck called on McClellan at his house during breakfast and asked him to take command of all the troops as they retreated into the Washington defenses—Pope’s army as well as his own. Three days later, after Burnside had again declined command of a field army to be formed from the troops now in those defenses, Lincoln saw no alternative to McClellan as commander of the merged armies. “Again I have been called upon to save the country,” McClellan wrote his wife. “My enemies are crushed, silent & disarmed” (he meant Stanton, Chase, and radical Republicans). He accepted because “under the circumstances no one else could save the country.”29

  At a cabinet meeting on September 2, Stanton and Chase protested Lincoln’s action; Chase said “it would prove a national calamity.” Lincoln’s decision caused an estrangement with Stanton that lasted for several weeks. Two cabinet members who kept diaries described the president as “extremely distressed” during the meeting. “He seemed wrung by the bitterest anguish—said he felt ready to hang himself.” That mood was general. “There was a more disturbed and desponding feeling than I have ever witnessed in council,” wrote Welles. Lincoln agreed that McClellan “had acted badly in this matter.” There was “a design, a purpose, in breaking down Pope, without regard to the consequences to the country,” admitted the president. “It is shocking to see and know this.” But the army was “utterly demoralized,” and McClellan was the only one who could “reorganize the army and bring it out of chaos,” said Lincoln. “McClellan has the army with him…[and] we must use the tools we have. There is no man…who can…lick these troops into shape half as well as he…. If he can’t fight himself, he excels in making others ready to fight.”30

  The extraordinary response of soldiers to McClellan’s resumption of command confirmed Lincoln’s judgment. As the dispirited troops trudged back toward Washington on the “cold and rainy” afternoon of September 2, a veteran recalled years later, “everything had a look of sadness in union with our feelings.” Everyone “looked as if he would like to hide his head somewhere from all the world.” Many soldiers then and later described what happened next. An officer mounted on a dark bay horse with a single escort met the first of the retreating soldiers. A startled captain took one look and ran back to his colonel shouting, “General McClellan is here. ‘Little Mac’ is on the road.” Other soldiers heard the cry. “From extreme sadness we passed in a twinkling to a delirium of delight. A Deliverer had come…. Men threw their caps high in the air, and danced and frolicked like schoolboys.” Word quickly spread. “Way off in the distance as he passed the different corps we could hear them cheer him…. The effect of this man’s presence…was electrical, and too wonderful to make it worth while attempting to give a reason for it.”31 The Washington correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, no partisan of McClellan, witnessed this event. “I have disbelieved the reports of the army’s affection for McClellan,” he wrote, “being entirely unable to account for the phenomenon. I cannot account for it to my satisfaction now, but I accept it as a fact.”32

  Like the Tribune reporter, historians have found it difficult to explain McClellan’s popularity with his soldiers. Part of it stemmed from his undeniable charisma, which is not captured by the paper trail on which historians rely but clearly existed in the flesh-and-blood reality of 1862. McClellan possessed an indefinable charm and magnetism that caused Lincoln (and many others) to like him personally even as the president expressed frustration with his behavior. Then, too, McClellan had created the Army of the Potomac. They had gone through thick and thin together. He had instilled in them a sense of identity and pride; they reciprocated by identifying with him and his claim that their defeats were caused by lack of support from Congress and the War Department. McClellan was their man, and they were his boys.

  In any event McClellan did bring order out of chaos and lick the troops into shape,
as Lincoln hoped. Within a few days he reorganized and amalgamated the disparate armies and corps. He got them ready to fight. Whether he would actually lead them into battle would soon be determined, for on September 4 the Army of Northern Virginia began crossing the Potomac into Maryland looking for a fight.

  LINCOLN ONCE AGAIN saw this Confederate offensive as an opportunity more than as a threat—an opportunity to cut off the invading enemy far from his base and if possible prevent him from getting back. Lincoln urged McClellan to go after Lee in strong force. The general started well. But as he probed northward in the second week of September looking for the enemy, McClellan once more began to inflate their numbers by a factor of two or three. Lee’s exhausted army was leaking stragglers on every mile of road. Starting with 55,000 men, the Army of Northern Virginia was down to fewer than 45,000 before its first contact with the Union army. McClellan estimated their numbers at 110,000.

  On September 13, however, McClellan had a stroke of luck such as few generals have ever had. In a field near Frederick, where the Army of Northern Virginia had camped a few days earlier, a Union corporal found a copy of Lee’s Special Orders No. 191 wrapped around three cigars, evidently lost by a careless Confederate courier. These orders detailed a plan for almost two-thirds of Lee’s army under Stonewall Jackson to converge from three directions and capture the Union garrison at Harpers Ferry, which stood athwart Lee’s supply line from the Shenandoah Valley. This lucky find quickly made its way up the chain of command to McClellan. It gave him a picture of the Army of Northern Virginia divided into four or five parts, each several miles from any other, and the most widely separated units thirty miles apart with the Potomac River between them. No Civil War general had a better chance to destroy an enemy army in detail before it could reunite. McClellan was jubilant. At noon on September 13 he wired Lincoln: “I think Lee has made a gross mistake and that he will be severely punished for it…. I have the plans of the Rebels and will catch them in their own trap if my men are equal to the emergency.”33

  Yet, typically, McClellan himself did not seem to feel any sense of urgency. Six more hours went by before he issued orders to his corps commanders to break through the gaps in the South Mountain range. And these orders did not specify an assault at first light the next day, but only that Union troops begin their march toward the attack points at first light. This eighteen-hour delay was just enough for Lee to avoid disaster. On September 14 Confederate defenders at Fox’s, Turner’s, and Crampton’s Gaps held off the attacking Federals, while Jackson completed his encirclement of Harpers Ferry and captured it the following morning. Confederate troops evacuated the gaps overnight on September 14–15. The next morning McClellan telegraphed to Washington greatly exaggerated reports of a “rout & demoralization of the rebel army” that was retreating “in a perfect panic…. It is stated that Lee gives his loss as fifteen thousand.”34 (Confederate casualties were actually about 2,700, which were more than counterbalanced by Jackson’s capture of 12,500 Federals at Harpers Ferry, which McClellan neglected to mention.)

  Lincoln wired congratulations to McClellan: “God bless you, and all with you.” Then the president added: “Destroy the rebel army, if possible.” Unwisely casting aside his skepticism about anything he heard from McClellan, Lincoln sent a jubilant telegram to the state auditor of Illinois, which quickly found its way into the newspapers: “Gen. McClellan has gained a great victory over the rebel army in Maryland…. He is now pursuing the flying foe.”35

  But the foe was not flying nor was McClellan pursuing him. Instead, Lee concentrated his army on the high ground east of the village of Sharpsburg to accept battle if McClellan offered it. The Union general approached cautiously on September 15, studied the situation on the sixteenth, and attacked on the seventeenth. For twelve hours on that bloodiest single day of the Civil War (indeed, in all of American history), repeated assaults by 60,000 of McClellan’s 80,000 men forced back but did not break through the 37,000 Confederates (whom McClellan estimated to be 110,000). The Union attacks came one corps at a time, enabling Lee to shift his troops from one flank to the other to shore up threatened positions.

  On two occasions in the early and late afternoon, Union assaults on the enemy center and right achieved potential breakthroughs that might have cut Lee off from his retreat route over a single ford on the Potomac. But McClellan, certain that the Confederates outnumbered him and that Lee was holding back large reserves, refused to commit his own reserves. Never during this long day did more than 15,000 Union infantry go into action simultaneously, and almost 20,000 of McClellan’s infantry and cavalry never fired a shot at all. After a night of horror in which 4,000 Rebels and Yankees lay dead on the field and 2,000 of the 17,000 wounded would soon die, the morning of September 18 dawned with the Confederates still standing defiantly in place. Although McClellan wired Halleck at 8:00 A.M. that “the battle will probably be renewed today,” it was not.36 That night the Army of Northern Virginia crossed the Potomac to its namesake state. Except for a feeble pursuit on the nineteenth and twentieth that was easily repulsed, the Battle of Antietam was over.

  McClellan telegraphed news of “a complete victory” to Washington. “The enemy is driven back into Virginia.” Forgotten was Lincoln’s injunction to “destroy the rebel army.” Gideon Welles probably echoed the president’s sentiments when he wrote in his diary on September 19: “Nothing from the army, except that instead of following up the victory, attacking and capturing the Rebels, they…are rapidly escaping across the river…. Oh dear.”37 But McClellan believed that “I fought the battle splendidly & that it was a masterpiece of art.” He also thought that he now had the upper hand over his “enemies” in Washington. “Thro’ certain friends of mine…I have insisted that Stanton shall be removed & that Halleck shall give way to me as Comdr. in Chief…. Unless these conditions are fulfilled I will leave the service.”38

  Seldom had even McClellan been so blind to reality. His fantasy was fed by a letter from Allan Pinkerton, his chief of intelligence, who reported a conversation with Lincoln on September 22. The lawyer-president asked Pinkerton a series of probing questions in such a mild manner that the detective did not realize he was being cross-examined. Had everything possible been done to prevent the capture of Harpers Ferry? asked Lincoln. Yes, of course, answered Pinkerton. How had McClellan handled himself during the battle? With great skill and courage. Why didn’t the army renew the attack on September 18? The odds were too great, Pinkerton replied. “He next enquired regarding the Rebels escaping across the Potomac,” the detective reported, and the president was satisfied with the explanation that the Union forces faced “many very great obstacles” to preventing it. “I must say General,” concluded Pinkerton, “that I never saw a man feel better than he did with these explanations. He expressed himself as highly pleased and gratified with all you had done…to push the Rebels back to Maryland…and free the Capitol from danger.”39

  Pinkerton’s report that Lincoln was “highly pleased” with all McClellan had done was about as accurate as his intelligence estimates of the numbers of Confederate troops. But much of the Northern public seemed highly pleased. The press magnified Antietam into a great victory, all the more heartening because of the pessimism that had preceded it. “At no time since the war commenced did the cause of Union look more dark and despairing than one week ago,” declared the New York Sunday Mercury on September 21, but now “at no time since the first gun was fired have the hopes of the nation seemed in such a fair way of realization as they do today.” The New York Times proclaimed that this GREAT VICTORY would be “felt in the destinies of the Nation for centuries to come.”40

  THE TIMES WAS right about the long-term consequences of Antietam. Among other results it caused the British government to back away from a joint French-British project to recognize the Confederacy as an independent nation and to offer to mediate an end to the war. But perhaps the most momentous consequence was the opening it provided for Lincoln to issue a prel
iminary Emancipation Proclamation.

  That document had remained in his desk since the cabinet meeting of July 22, when Seward persuaded him to wait for a Union victory. During those two months the pressure for emancipation had continued to build. But so had opposition, as the issue threatened to polarize the North—and its armies, in which many soldiers agreed with a private from Indiana who declared that “if emancipation is to be the policy of this war…I do not care how quick the country goes to pot.”41 Democrats made political headway in 1862 with the demagogic argument that if slaves were freed they would come North and take the jobs of white men—perhaps even marry their daughters. “Shall the Working Classes Be Equalized with Negroes?” blared the headline of one Northern newspaper. “Workingmen! Be Careful! Organize yourselves against this element which threatens your impoverishment and annihilation.” Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, confessed with mortification in July 1862 that “there is a very great aversion in the West—I know it to be so in my State—against having free negroes come among us. Our people want nothing to do with the negro.”42

  As commander in chief, Lincoln could not ignore such sentiments lest a Northern backlash undermine the positive benefits he hoped to achieve with a national strategy of emancipation. Like Trumbull, the president recognized with regret that white racism was a stumbling block to emancipation. Thus he endorsed the colonization of freed slaves abroad as a way of defusing white fears of an influx into the North of freedpeople. An Illinois soldier who approved of emancipation nevertheless declared in October 1862 that “I am not in favor of freeing the negroes and leaving them to run free and mingle among us nether is Sutch the intention of Old Abe but we will Send them off and colonize them.”43

  Such indeed was Lincoln’s expressed intention during the weeks he waited for an opportunity to proclaim emancipation. He invited five black men from Washington to the White House on August 14 and urged them to consider the idea of emigration. The “substance” of Lincoln’s remarks was written down by a reporter for the New York Tribune whom the president had invited to be present. Slavery was “the greatest wrong inflicted on any people,” Lincoln told the delegation. But even if slavery were gone, white prejudice and discrimination would remain. “Your race suffer very greatly, many of them, by living among us, while ours suffer by your presence.” Black people had little chance for equality in the United States. More than that, “There is an unwillingness on the part of our people, harsh as it may be, for you free colored people to remain with us…. I do not mean to discuss this, but to propose it as a fact with which we have to deal. I cannot alter it if I would…. It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated.”44