Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief

by James M. McPherson

  This meeting bore little fruit either in assuaging white anxieties about emancipation or in recruiting blacks for emigration. It also earned Lincoln public denunciations by several black and abolitionist leaders and a private complaint by Salmon P. Chase in a diary entry: “How much better would be a manly protest against prejudice against color!—and a wise effort to give freemen homes in America!”45

  The president’s next venture in preparing public opinion for the proclamation resting in his desk was more successful. On August 19 the New York Tribune published an open letter to Lincoln by editor Horace Greeley titled “The Prayer of Twenty Millions.” Greeley chastised the president for “a mistaken deference to Rebel Slavery” and urged him to heed the prayers of twenty million loyal Northerners for the abolition of slavery. In an unusual public response, the commander in chief carefully explained: “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union by not freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because it helps save the Union.” In closing Lincoln said that these statements represented “my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free.”46

  This presidential letter was a stroke of genius. To conservatives who insisted that preservation of the Union must be the sole purpose of the war, Lincoln said that such was his purpose. To radicals who wanted him to proclaim emancipation in order to save the Union, he hinted that he might do so. To everyone he made it clear that partial or even total emancipation might become necessary (as of course he thought it had) to accomplish the purpose on which they all agreed.

  The same intentional ambiguity characterized Lincoln’s interview on September 13 with a group of clergymen who presented him with a petition for emancipation. This event took place at a time of what John Hay described as “fearful anxiety” and “almost unbearable tension” for the commander in chief, who was preoccupied with military crises in Maryland and Kentucky. Lincoln agreed with the delegation that “slavery is the root of the rebellion” and that “emancipation would help us in Europe, and convince them that we are incited by something more than ambition…. And then unquestionably it would weaken the rebels by drawing off their laborers, which is of great importance.” On the other hand, with Confederate armies on the offensive, “what good would a proclamation of emancipation from me do?…I do not want to issue a document that the whole world will necessarily see must be inoperative…. Would my word free the slaves, when I cannot even enforce the Constitution in the rebel states?”47

  Here too was something for everybody: an assertion that emancipation would benefit the Union cause but also an acknowledgment that in the present military circumstances a proclamation would be worse than useless. Four days later at Antietam those circumstances changed. So on September 22 Lincoln called a special meeting of the cabinet. He reminded them of the decision exactly two months earlier to postpone issuance of an Emancipation Proclamation. “I think the time has come now,” he said. “I wish it were a better time. I wish we were in better condition. The action of the army against the rebels has not been quite what I should have best liked. But they have been driven out of Maryland, and Pennsylvania is no longer in danger of invasion.” When the enemy was at Frederick, said the president, he had made a “promise to myself and (hesitating a little)—to my Maker” that “if God gave us the victory in the approaching battle, [I] would consider it an indication of Divine will” in favor of emancipation. The Battle of Antietam was God’s sign that “he had decided this question in favor of the slaves.” Therefore he intended to issue a proclamation warning Confederate states that unless they returned to the Union by January 1, 1863 (which scarcely anyone expected), their slaves “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”48

  Montgomery Blair was the only cabinet member who objected. He had changed during the past year from one of the cabinet’s most radical members to its most conservative. Blair repeated his warning that the proclamation would drive border-state elements into the Confederacy and give Northern Democrats “a club…to beat the Administration” in the forthcoming congressional and state elections. Lincoln replied that he had done everything he could to bring the border states along. “They [will] acquiesce, if not immediately, soon; for they must be satisfied that slavery [has] received its death-blow from slave-owners—it could not survive the rebellion.” As for Northern Democrats, Lincoln no longer intended to indulge them, for “their clubs would be used against us take what course we might.”49

  GOD BLESS ABRAHAM LINCOLN! proclaimed Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, which a month earlier had damned the president for his “mistaken deference” to slavery. The proclamation “is the signal gun of a new era of energy, resolution, and triumph,” declared the Tribune. It “is one of those stupendous facts in human history which marks not only an era in the progress of the nation, but an epoch in the history of the world.”50

  The Tribune was right. The proclamation completed the transformation of Lincoln’s policy and national strategy from a war for restoration of the old Union into a war to give the nation a new birth of freedom. Three days after signing the preliminary proclamation, Lincoln told an unsympathetic official of the Interior Department, as the latter paraphrased the president’s words, that “the character of the war will be changed. It will be one of subjugation…. The [Old] South is to be destroyed and replaced by new propositions and ideas.” General-in-Chief Halleck got the message. “The character of the war has very much changed in the last year,” he told General Grant in March 1863. “There is now no possible hope of reconciliation with the rebels…. We must conquer the rebels or be conquered by them…. Every slave withdrawn from the enemy is the equivalent of a white man put hors de combat.”51

  As if to reinforce the New York Tribune’s prediction about the administration’s new energy and resolution, Lincoln issued a second proclamation two days after the preliminary emancipation edict. On September 24 he suspended the writ of habeas corpus throughout the country and authorized trials by military commissions of “all Rebels and Insurgents, their aiders and abettors within the United States, and all persons discouraging volunteer enlistments, resisting militia drafts, or guilty of any disloyal practice.”52

  This draconian decree was a response to attacks and riots against military recruiters and against efforts to enforce militia drafts in several Northern states. Congress had passed a new militia law in July making the states liable to calls for militia to serve for nine months (instead of the ninety days under the previous law). In August the War Department had issued such a call and mandated a federally enforced draft in states that did not meet their quotas. Resistance to this quasi draft occasioned Lincoln’s order, which gave Democrats another civil liberties “club” with which to beat the administration in the fall elections.

  High-ranking Democrats in the Army of the Potomac reacted with anger to these twin presidential proclamations—especially the first one. Gen. Fitz-John Porter, McClellan’s favorite subordinate, denounced the Emancipation Proclamation as the act “of a political coward” that was “ridiculed in the army—causing disgust, discontent, and expressions of disloyalty to the views of the administration.” McClellan told his wife that he was thinking of resigning because the Emancipation Proclamation and “the continuation of Stanton & Halleck in office render it almost impossible for me to retain my commission & self-respect at the same time.”53

  McClellan wrote to his friend William Aspinwall, a wealthy New York businessman, for advice on what he should do in response to Lincoln’s proclamations “inaugurating servile war” (emancipation) and “changing our free institutions into a despotism” (suspending habeas corpus). Rather than responding in writing, Aspinwall traveled down to see McClellan personall
y. He was “decidedly of the opinion,” McClellan reported, “that it is my duty to submit to the Presdt’s proclamation & quietly continue doing my duty as a soldier.” The general told Aspinwall that he would think it over.54

  McClellan received similar advice from other quarters, and decided to heed it—especially when he learned what happened to Maj. John Key, a staff member in the War Department and brother of Col. Thomas Key of McClellan’s own staff. Word reached Lincoln several days after the Battle of Antietam that in a private conversation Major Key had said that the reason the Rebel army was not “bagged” before recrossing the Potomac was “that is not the game. The object is that neither army shall get much advantage of the other; that both shall be kept in the field till they are exhausted, when we will make a compromise and save slavery.” Lincoln called Key on the carpet and cross-examined him. When the major admitted making this remark, Lincoln cashiered him on the spot. If this was the “game” of some army officers, Lincoln wrote, it was his intention “to break up the game.” The president told John Hay that he had heard similar rumors about “staff talk” in the Army of the Potomac, so he cashiered Key to send a message.55

  McClellan got the message. On October 7 he issued a general order (a copy of which he sent to Lincoln) pointing out that the army was the servant of government. Civil authorities made policy; the army executed it. “Armed forces are raised and supported simply to sustain the Civil Authorities and are to be held in strict subordination thereto in all respects…. The Chief Executive, who is charged with the administration of the National affairs, is the proper and only source through which the views and orders of the Government can be known to the Armies of the Nation.” This was excellent, but McClellan could not resist adding a none-too-subtle reference to the forthcoming elections: “The remedy for political errors, if any are committed, is to be found only in the action of the people at the polls.”56

  McClellan talked no more of resigning. But the president in effect put him on notice that unless he showed more initiative as a commander, his tenure was limited. The previous July, Lincoln had said, with respect to his intention to issue an emancipation edict, that “we wanted the Army to strike more vigorous blows. The Administration must set an example, and strike at the heart of the rebellion.” The Emancipation Proclamation struck such a blow. Now it was McClellan’s turn. For him the heart of the rebellion in October 1862 was the Army of Northern Virginia a few miles across the Potomac River. On October 6 he received an order from the president, through Halleck, that McClellan should have considered peremptory: “Cross the Potomac and give battle to the enemy…. Your army must move now.”57

  6

  THE PROMISE MUST NOW BE KEPT

  FOR LINCOLN the dispatches between Washington and the armies commanded by McClellan and Buell in October 1862 must have left a strong feeling of déjà vu. From the White House and the War Department went repeated messages urging action to follow up the limited victories of Antietam and Perryville and do more damage to the enemy. Back to Washington came as many telegrams filled with explanations and excuses for why the armies could not do what Lincoln and Halleck wanted: The roads were bad, supplies were short, the men were tired, horses and mules were worn out, the men needed new uniforms and shoes—on and on. The only general in charge of one of the principal Union armies who did not bombard Washington with excuses and complaints was Ulysses S. Grant, commander of the Army of the Tennessee, which had stopped a Confederate counteroffensive at the Battles of Iuka and Corinth. Lincoln would remember this fact.

  As the exhausted and outnumbered Confederate Army of Tennessee retreated to its namesake state after the Battle of Perryville, Lincoln urged Buell to pursue and attack again and to secure East Tennessee. But even though more than half of Buell’s Army of the Ohio had not fought at Perryville, the general considered it necessary to reorganize and refit before he could renew the offensive. Lincoln did a slow burn. “I am directed by the President to say that your army must enter East Tennessee this fall,” Halleck wired Buell. “Neither the Government nor the country can endure these repeated delays.” The president “does not understand why we cannot march as the enemy marches, live as he lives, and fight as he fights, unless we admit the inferiority of our troops and generals.”1

  Lincoln made the same point to McClellan. He visited the Army of the Potomac near the Antietam battlefield during the first four days of October. In conversations with McClellan he tried to prod the general into action. A week later, after reading McClellan’s excuses for inaction, Lincoln wrote him a gentle admonition. “You remember me speaking to you of what I called your over-cautiousness,” said the president. “Are you not over-cautious when you assume that you can not do what the enemy is constantly doing? Should you not claim to be at least his equal in prowess, and act upon the claim?” A campaign to cripple Lee’s damaged army was possible “if our troops march as well as the enemy; and it is unmanly to say they can not do it.”2

  McClellan and Buell believed that the armchair commander in chief just did not understand the logistical requirements of moving and supplying a large army. But Lincoln did know that Confederate armies moved faster and lighter than Union armies—faster because lighter. The president understood all too well that Union armies were bogged down by the very abundance of their supplies. He probably never heard of Confederate general Richard Ewell’s dictum that “the road to glory cannot be followed with much baggage.”3 But he certainly was familiar with the observation by the Army of the Potomac’s quartermaster about McClellan’s endless requests for more of everything before he could advance: “An army will never move if it waits until all the different commanders report that they are ready and want no more supplies.”4

  Lincoln may also have read the testimony of Gen. Irvin McDowell before the Committee on the Conduct of the War back in December 1861. “There never was an army in the world that began to be supplied as well as ours is,” said McDowell. Thus Union soldiers “have got into the way that they require and insist upon having an immense deal provided for them. They must have from thirty wagons to a regiment before they will start,” while the enemy moved twice as fast because they got along with half as much. In his crash course of reading military history, Lincoln may have learned that the standard ration of a soldier in Napoleon’s armies was half that of the Union ration and that Napoleonic regiments had only one-third the number of wagons per thousand soldiers as the Union standard.5 In any event the president told one of his generals in November 1862 that “this expanding, and piling up of impedimenta, has been, so far, almost our ruin, and will be our final ruin if it is not abandoned…. You would be better off…for not having a thousand wagons, doing nothing but hauling forage to feed the animals that draw them, and taking at least two thousand men to care for the wagons and animals, who otherwise might be two thousand good soldiers.”6

  Grant and Sherman eventually learned this lesson. Buell and McClellan never did. And by the time Lincoln wrote this letter, both were gone. Buell’s decision to bring his army back to its base in Nashville for rest and refitting instead of pushing on to East Tennessee was the last straw. Midwestern governors demanded Buell’s removal. Two governors were about to start for Washington to press Lincoln on this matter when news arrived that the president on October 23 had replaced Buell with Gen. William S. Rosecrans, who had won the Battle of Corinth three weeks earlier. At Lincoln’s direction, Halleck ordered Rosecrans to go after Braxton Bragg’s Army of Tennessee at Murfreesboro and secure control of East Tennessee. “I need not urge upon you the necessity of giving active employment of your forces,” Halleck told Rosecrans. “Neither the country nor the Government will much longer put up with the inactivity of some of our armies and generals.”7

  BUELL WAS NOT particularly popular with his soldiers or in the Midwestern states from which most of them came. McClellan was another matter. Although some soldiers and junior officers in the Army of the Potomac expressed frustration with their commander’s sluggishness aft
er Antietam, most retained their loyalty to him. Lincoln noticed, however, that when he visited the army in early October the men cheered him as loudly as they cheered McClellan. A bond was forming between common soldiers and “Old Abe,” whose plebeian background was similar to theirs and whose kindly chats with wounded as well as healthy soldiers inspired affection.8 Nevertheless McClellan possessed a powerful constituency among conservatives in the officer corps and on the home front. Early one morning during his visit to the army, Lincoln asked a friend as they strolled through the camps: “Hatch, what do you suppose all these people are?” Why, the Army of the Potomac, a surprised Ozias Hatch replied. “No, you are mistaken,” said the president. “That is General McClellan’s body guard.”9

  Lincoln’s disappointment with McClellan was echoed by a growing clamor of Northern opinion. WILL THE ARMY OF THE POTOMAC ADVANCE? asked a New York Times headline. “Why Should There Be Delay?” “What devil is it that prevents the Potomac army from advancing?” asked the editor of the Chicago Tribune. “What malign influence palsies our army and wastes these glorious days for fighting? If it is McClellan, does not the President see that he is a traitor?”10 General Halleck figuratively threw up his hands in exasperation. “I am sick, tired, and disgusted” with McClellan’s delays, Halleck wrote privately. “It requires the lever of Archimedes to move this inert mass.”11