Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief

by James M. McPherson

  After they left, Lincoln sat down and wrote a letter to Halleck instructing him to go to the army with Burnside, examine the ground, consult with the generals, and make a decision whether or not to authorize the movement. “If in such a difficulty you do not help,” the president told his general-in-chief, “you fail me precisely in the point for which I sought your assistance…. Your military skill is useless to me, if you will not do this.”34

  When he read these words, Halleck immediately submitted his resignation. Lincoln had not meant to provoke such a response, however; he agreed to withdraw the letter “because considered harsh by Gen. Halleck.”35 It was harsh, and deservedly so. Halleck claimed that the commanding general of a field army should be given the authority and responsibility to determine operations and tactics because he was the man on the ground, while the general-in-chief was miles away—sometimes hundreds of miles. “I have always…avoided giving positive instructions to generals commanding departments,” Halleck had written to one of them in November, “leaving them the exercise of their own judgment, while giving them my opinion and advice.”36 Lincoln recognized that Halleck’s statement of this philosophy was a rationalization to escape the responsibility of making decisions. As the president later told John Hay, Halleck had turned out to be nothing but a first-rate clerk. But Lincoln needed a military clerk, so he kept him on. The problem of what to do about Burnside had to be postponed, however, because of ominous military developments in the West.

  THE MOST SUCCESSFUL theater of Union military and naval operations in 1862 had been the Mississippi River valley and the adjacent regions drained by the great river’s tributaries. Yet these conquests attracted less attention at home and abroad than frustration and failure in the East. Lincoln noted this contrast in a letter of August 4 to Count Agénor-Etienne de Gasparin, a Union supporter in France. Gasparin had warned the president that Northern military victories were necessary to forestall European recognition of the Confederacy. Lincoln agreed, but added: “It seems unreasonable that a series of successes, extending through half-a-year and clearing more than a hundred thousand square miles of country, should help us so little, while a single half-defeat [the Seven Days’] should hurt us so much.”37

  Yet Lincoln himself found it necessary to devote most of his attention to the Eastern theater and to events in Middle and East Tennessee. When a prominent judge in St. Louis accused the president of neglecting the Mississippi Valley, he responded that he was strongly committed to opening the river, but he had to focus on the threats to Kentucky as well as to Maryland and Pennsylvania. “The country will not allow us to send our whole Western force down the Mississippi,” wrote the commander in chief, “while the enemy sacks Louisville and Cincinnati.”38

  Lincoln was well aware of the strategic importance of the great river he had twice descended on a flatboat in his youth. The success of the Union river navy that fought its way down to Vicksburg, and of David G. Farragut’s blue-water navy that fought its way up to the same Confederate bastion in the spring of 1862, had given early promise of opening the whole river from Minnesota to the Gulf. But the reinforced strength of this new “Gibraltar of the West” at Vicksburg and the summer drop in the river level, which threatened to ground Farragut’s deep-draft vessels, ended that effort in August 1862. The military crises in Kentucky and Maryland, as well as a combined attempt by two smaller Confederate armies under Gens. Earl Van Dorn and Sterling Price to drive Grant out of northern Mississippi, prevented any renewed Union effort against Vicksburg until November. And when that effort finally began, it was initially plagued by a divided Union command for which Lincoln was partly responsible.

  In November 1862 Lincoln decided to replace the controversial Benjamin Butler with Nathaniel P. Banks as commander of Union army forces in southern Louisiana. Banks’s record in Virginia, where he had been roughly handled by Stonewall Jackson, offered dubious promise of success as a combat commander in Louisiana. Nevertheless Lincoln and Halleck gave Banks the mission of opening the Mississippi River—which would require the capture of Vicksburg and of Port Hudson, a second fortified bastion two hundred miles south of Vicksburg. On November 9 Halleck instructed Banks that “the President regards the opening of the Mississippi River as the first and most important of all our military and naval operations, and it is hoped that you will not lose a moment in accomplishing it.”39

  Many of the regiments from New England recruited in response to Lincoln’s July 1 call for new three-year volunteers, plus several nine-month militia regiments organized in the fall of 1862, were assigned to Banks. His Army of the Gulf grew into a sizable force. Banks outranked Grant at the time, so Halleck told him that “as the ranking general in the Southwest, you are authorized to assume control of any military forces from the Upper Mississippi which may come within your command. The line of division between your department and that of Major-General Grant is therefore left undecided for the present, and you will exercise superior authority as far as you may ascend the river.”40

  Lincoln overrated Banks’s abilities, as future events would show.41 At this time he also overrated the capacity of another general who would complicate the command situation in the Vicksburg campaign: Maj. Gen. John A. McClernand, who did not outrank Grant but thought he should.

  Lincoln had known McClernand since they served together in the Illinois legislature in the 1830s. Although Lincoln was a Whig and then a Republican while McClernand was a Democrat, they remained friends across the political divide. The president commissioned McClernand as a brigadier general in 1861 and was gratified by his success in mobilizing Democrats in Illinois for the war. McClernand commanded a brigade under Grant at the Battle of Belmont (November 7, 1861) and a division at Fort Donelson and Shiloh. His performance in these battles was mixed, but he showed an aggressive spirit that Lincoln initially admired.42 As a subordinate, however, McClernand was a loose cannon and tended to act without orders or contrary to orders. He was also something of a glory hunter and had a habit of issuing congratulatory orders to his own commands and taking credit for the success that Grant’s armies achieved. Not surprisingly Grant disliked him—and the feeling was mutual.

  McClernand presumed on his friendship with Lincoln to go outside channels and write directly to the president asking for an independent command. He also got eight governors to petition Lincoln to give him command “either of a Department or army, in some active field of operations, particularly in the Mississippi Valley.”43 McClernand came to Washington in September 1862 and personally lobbied the president to put him in charge of new three-year regiments being raised in the Midwest for a campaign down the Mississippi to capture Vicksburg.

  McClernand’s request was grounded in political as well as military arguments. Some “Copperhead” Democrats—the antiwar wing of the party—were talking of forming an independent “Northwest Confederacy” of Midwestern states to make a separate peace with the Confederacy in order to open the Mississippi River to shipment of Midwestern farm products. This conspiracy might gain powerful support, McClernand warned Lincoln, unless Union military forces opened the river. How seriously Lincoln took this supposed plot for a Northwest Confederacy is unclear. But significant Democratic electoral gains in the Midwest in 1862 were a danger signal. In any event, at a cabinet meeting on October 7 Lincoln announced the plan to give McClernand his independent command.44

  Lincoln and Stanton apparently kept Halleck out of the loop on this matter. They were well aware of Halleck’s negative opinion of political generals. For their part the president and secretary of war had become skeptical of the professionals, particularly Buell and McClellan, whom Lincoln was soon to sack. The nonprofessional McClernand won their support because he promised an aggressive campaign. On October 20 Lincoln endorsed an order by Stanton for McClernand to organize the troops from several Midwestern states for a campaign “to clear the Mississippi River and open navigation to New Orleans.” Lincoln’s endorsement stated that “I feel deep interest in the succes
s of the expedition, and desire it to be pushed forward with all possible despatch.” But by this time Halleck may have learned of the proposed expedition. Two significant qualifying clauses in Stanton’s order bear the earmarks of Halleck’s phrasing: “The forces so organized will remain subject to the designation of the General-in-Chief,” and McClernand should begin his campaign “when a sufficient force, not required by the operations of General Grant’s command, shall be raised.”45

  If Halleck was the author of these loopholes, he proved to be a stronger supporter of Grant than he had previously been. Within a week of Stanton’s order Grant heard rumors of the McClernand expedition. On November 10 Grant sought clarification from Halleck of his authority in this theater, especially as he was planning his own campaign against Vicksburg. Halleck wired back: “You have command of all the troops sent to your Department, and have permission to fight the enemy when you please.” Grant immediately telegraphed General Sherman to “move on the enemy so soon as you can leave Memphis with two full Divisions”—including the regiments that McClernand had organized and sent to Memphis with the expectation that he would soon follow and take command. On December 9 Grant informed Halleck that “a letter from General McClernand, just received states that he expects to go forward in two days. Sherman has already gone.”46 The West Pointers Grant and Halleck had outwitted the politician McClernand and hijacked the army he expected to command.

  Lincoln’s role in this hijacking is unclear. He was aware of the telegraphic exchanges between Halleck and Grant. Halleck rarely issued important orders without the president’s knowledge and approval. So it seems likely that Lincoln endorsed a command situation in the Department of the Tennessee that was contrary to McClernand’s belief that he had been given an independent command. That general fired off a series of bitter protests to the president.

  In the midst of this controversy Grant’s campaign came crashing down because of the same kind of Confederate cavalry raids against his communications that had doomed Buell’s advance on Chattanooga the previous summer. Nathan Bedford Forrest cut the railroads and telegraph in West Tennessee, while Earl Van Dorn led a raid that captured Grant’s supply depot at Holly Springs, Mississippi. Unaware that Grant’s overland advance on Vicksburg had been forced to turn back, Sherman went ahead with his part of the campaign plan with an attack on the Chickasaw Bluffs just north of Vicksburg on December 29. Confederate defenders punished the attackers with a bloody repulse.

  The news of these reverses arrived in Washington at the same time as McClernand’s denunciations of Halleck for taking away his army. During those dark December days Lincoln was also fending off senators trying to purge his cabinet and dissident generals in the Army of the Potomac trying to purge Burnside. The president was in no mood to indulge McClernand’s complaints. He wrote the general a stern letter advising him for his own good to bow to the inevitable and become a loyal corps commander under Grant. “I have too many family controversies (so to speak) already on my hands,” Lincoln wrote, “to voluntarily take up another. You are now doing well—well for the country, well for yourself—much better than you could possibly be, if engaged in open war with Gen. Halleck. Allow me to beg, that for your sake, for my sake, & for the country’s sake, you give your whole attention to the better work.”47 McClernand submitted with ill grace for the time being, but he would be heard from again.

  ALONG WITH HIS appointment as the new commander of the renamed Army of the Cumberland on October 23, General Rosecrans had received a warning from Halleck that neither the country nor the government could tolerate inactivity by that army. Five weeks went by, and the Army of the Cumberland was still in camp at Nashville. Impatient messages from Washington evoked from Rosecrans the same sort of explanations that Lincoln had heard too often from McClellan and Buell: He could not move against the Confederate army at Murfreesboro thirty miles away until he was fully supplied with every necessity. Conveying Lincoln’s displeasure, Halleck told Rosecrans that “I must warn you against this piling up of impedimenta. Take a lesson from the enemy. Move light, and supply yourself…in the country you move through.” Another week went by with no movement. “The President is very impatient with your long stay in Nashville,” Halleck wired Rosecrans on December 4. “You give Bragg time to supply himself by plundering the very country your army should have occupied…. Twice have I been asked to designate someone else to command your army. If you remain one more week at Nashville, I cannot prevent your removal.”48

  Even though Rosecrans did not begin his advance until the day after Christmas, Lincoln’s distractions closer to home forestalled any action for his removal in the interim. On December 31 Bragg anticipated Rosecrans’s planned attack at Murfreesboro by striking first. In some of the war’s most savage fighting, the Confederate assault drove back the Union right three miles. But the Federals managed to hang on to the railroad and road back to Nashville that was their supply lifeline. Nevertheless Bragg wired Richmond that he had won a victory and implied that the enemy was retreating.49

  That was not true, however. On New Year’s Day both armies held their positions, and on January 2 the Federals knocked back Bragg’s final effort to salvage an actual victory. The following night it was Bragg who retreated. In this Battle of Stones River (or Murfreesboro, as the Confederates called it) the two armies suffered combined casualties amounting to 32 percent of their strength—the highest percentage for any battle in the war. This bloodbath left both of them in no shape to renew fighting for a long time. Despite the cost it was a Union victory that cut the gloom that had settled over the North during this dark holiday season. Lincoln telegraphed to Rosecrans “the Nation’s gratitude” for his army’s “skill, endurance, and da[u]ntless courage.” The president later wrote to Rosecrans that “I can never forget, whilst I remember anything…you gave us a hard earned victory which, had there been a defeat instead, the nation could scarcely have lived over.”50

  DEMOCRATS BOASTED THAT their gains in the 1862 elections constituted a negative referendum on the Emancipation Proclamation. Since the Republicans retained control of the House and actually gained five seats in the Senate, that claim seems exaggerated. In any case the Democratic press predicted that Lincoln would not issue the final proclamation on January 1. Even some Republicans expressed doubts. The president’s annual message to Congress on December 1 seemed to reinforce these doubts. Lincoln devoted much of the message to a recommendation of a constitutional amendment to offer federal compensation to states that abolished slavery before 1900. Some Republicans wondered: “If the President means to carry out his edict of freedom in the New Year, what is all this stuff about gradual emancipation?”51

  The doubters missed the point. They may have failed to notice Lincoln’s statement that all slaves freed by “the chances of war”—which would include his Emancipation Proclamation—would remain “forever free.” The proclamation was a war measure that applied only to states in rebellion; the proposed constitutional amendment was a measure to encourage the step-by-step abolition of the institution of slavery within a finite period of time. The eloquent peroration of Lincoln’s message clothed this gradualist proposal with a radical vision: “Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history…. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation…. The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present…. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free…. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save the country.”52

  Despite the rumors Lincoln never wavered in his determination to issue the proclamation. After talking with the president in late December, Senator Charles Sumner assured abolitionist friends: “The Presdt. is firm. He says he would not stop the Procltn. if he could, & he could not if he would.”53 After shaking hands at the White House reception, Lincoln retired to his office with a few colleagues to sign the final copy of the proclamation. His hand was so sore from its three hours of social duty that he could scarcel
y hold the pen. Lincoln did not want to sign while his hand was still trembling, because “all who examine the document hereafter will say ‘He hesitated.’” That would not do, for “I never in my life felt more certain that I was doing right than I do in signing this paper…. If my name ever goes into history it will be for this act, and my whole soul is in it.” The president picked up the pen again, but his hand was still unsteady and he put it down. “The South had fair warning,” he reflected, “that if they did not return to their duty, I should strike at this pillar of their strength. The promise must now be kept, and I shall never recall one word.” Lincoln then picked up the pen once more and signed his name without a tremor. “That will do,” he said.54

  Lincoln warranted his proclamation as both “an act of justice” and a “fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion” based on his war powers as commander in chief.55 The proclamation exempted the Union border states and Tennessee plus the portions of Virginia and Louisiana controlled by Federal troops because these areas were not in rebellion against the United States. The cliché that the proclamation “emancipated” only those slaves beyond Northern control and left the others in bondage is misleading. The president’s war powers to seize enemy property applied only to the enemy. The proclamation was a promise of freedom to slaves where it applied if and when the United States won the war. And slavery could scarcely survive in the exempted areas if the North did win the war. Thus the proclamation turned the Union army into a potential army of liberation.

  The document also contained a provision that augmented that potential. It publicly announced a policy of recruiting freed slaves into the Union army and navy. This policy was not absolutely new. Free blacks and some contrabands had served in the navy from almost the beginning of the war. Union army officers had unofficially recruited black soldiers in Kansas and in occupied portions of South Carolina and Louisiana in 1862. But the administration had not sanctioned these activities. And even after Lincoln had decided to embrace emancipation, he hesitated about recruiting black soldiers—even free blacks from the North. The idea of putting arms in the hands of black men provoked greater hostility from Democrats and border-state Unionists than did emancipation itself. In July 1862 the president told Orville Browning that arming blacks “would produce dangerous & fatal dissatisfaction in our army, and do more injury than good.” A month later Lincoln informed a delegation from Indiana that had offered to raise two black regiments that “the nation could not afford to lose Kentucky at this crisis” and that “to arm the negroes would turn 50,000 bayonets against us that were for us.”56