Rise to Greatness (16 page)

His moderate approach led the abolitionist senator Thaddeus Stevens to gripe that Lincoln was serving up “diluted, milk-and-water-gruel,” but the president’s mild tone did not deceive Stevens’s colleague Charles Sumner. Sumner immediately recognized that any vote for emancipation, in the present context, would start a chain of dominoes falling. “The proposition of the Pres[ident] is an epoch,” the senator wrote hastily, “& I hope it will commence the end.” The antislavery
Daily National Republican
agreed. “The great, transcendent fact is, that for the first time in two generations we have a recommendation from the presidential chair of the
abolition of slavery,
” the newspaper exulted.

Compensated emancipation, freely chosen by the states, was for Lincoln a way around the most difficult problem he faced in regard to slavery: the Supreme Court. With the appointment of Justice Swayne, Lincoln was beginning to remake the panel, but for now it was still Roger Taney’s court. On March 17, the Chief Justice marked his eighty-sixth birthday in a glum mood. A week later, when the court adjourned, he asked his fellow justices to pay him a visit before they left town. One by one, they called at his Capitol Hill home and found Taney emotional as he said goodbye until the fall. “He had a presentiment that he should die very soon,” Attorney General Bates recorded in his diary. But the author of the
Dred Scott
decision wasn’t dead yet.

Lincoln studied the reaction to his proposal very closely. When
The New York Times
fretted that the cost of compensating slave states would be prohibitive in light of “the coming terror of war taxation,” he fired off a handwritten letter to the editor, Henry Raymond, marked “private.” “Have you noticed the facts that less than one half-day’s cost of this war would pay for all the slaves in Delaware, at four hundred dollars per head?” Lincoln asked. “That eighty-seven days’ cost of this war would pay for all in Delaware, Maryland, District of Columbia, Kentucky, and Missouri at the same price? Were those states to take the step, do you doubt that it would shorten the war more than eighty-seven days, and thus be an actual saving of expense?” Raymond quickly apologized, praising Lincoln’s proposal as “a master-piece of practical wisdom and sound policy.”

*   *   *

Following the fiasco with McClellan’s canal boats, Lincoln told Sumner, during one of the senator’s frequent visits, that he intended “to talk plainly” to his general in chief, who nevertheless managed to avoid the president after returning to Washington from the upper Potomac. (He later complained that Secretary of War Stanton had kept him away from Lincoln.) Instead, the general busied himself with details of a possible mission to clear the Confederate batteries that blocked river traffic into Washington. The long debate over McClellan’s plan to assault Richmond via the Chesapeake Bay was bending in McClellan’s favor, but the Rebel guns prevented the necessary troopships from reaching his army at the Alexandria docks. McClellan did not yet realize that the Rebels were retreating.

When asked about the failed mission to restore the Harpers Ferry railroad bridge, McClellan overflowed with excuses; he compiled them all into a memo for the War Department in which he pronounced himself “well satisfied with what had been accomplished” on the seemingly feckless expedition. Stanton, however, had already decided that the “damned fizzle” was yet another indication that McClellan “doesn’t intend to do anything” to fight the Rebels.

McClellan had greeted Stanton’s appointment as “a most unexpected piece of good fortune,” but in just two months, their relationship had become poisonous. From his earliest days on the job, Stanton had been hearing “at intervals from a variety of sources” that McClellan was secretly conspiring to lose the war. People whispered that he was a member of a shadowy pro-Confederate group known as the Knights of the Golden Circle. Founded in 1854 by a doctor in Cincinnati, the Knights originally sought to create slave colonies in Mexico and the Caribbean. The colonies would eventually become new states, thus ensuring that proslavery votes would continue to dominate the U.S. Senate. Little came of these half-baked plans, but, with the outbreak of war, the Knights suddenly took on a dark power in the imaginations of suspicious Unionists. They saw the group as a nest of treasonous conspirators at a time when treason and conspiracy were dangerously real. Stanton put enough stock in the rumors about McClellan that, as he confessed to a friend, they “caused great solicitude in my mind.” He discussed his concerns with Lincoln, who by now had not spoken with McClellan for more than two weeks, since before the death of his son. The president summoned McClellan to the White House early on March 8, a beautiful spring Saturday.

In the streets of Washington, all signs pointed to some great drama about to unfold. The photographers’ shops along Pennsylvania Avenue were packed with men having pictures taken as mementoes for their families and friends; one shop was mounting some two thousand portraits per day. Columns of troops began marching from the hills north of the city and crossing into Virginia over the Long Bridge, their regimental bands playing brightly. Soldiers shouted their farewells to friends they had made and lovers they had wooed during their months in camp, and these sounds mixed with the creaking of wagon wheels and the braying of army mules. Adventurers, journalists, and other thrill seekers from around the world crowded the capital; one diarist described “an immense throng” and went on: “The City seems to be entirely full. The prospect now is that there will be a desperate battle near here soon. McClellan is well-prepared and has an immense army near here all ready and anxious for a fight.”

But was that true? The president needed to know.

Behind closed doors with the general, Lincoln launched into the plain talk he had mentioned to Sumner. No matter what McClellan might think, the president was emphatically not “well satisfied” with the results of the canal boat mission. McClellan laid out his excuses; later, he claimed that Lincoln found them persuasive. Perhaps so. But more important was the real reason why Lincoln had called Little Mac to his office: he needed to make sure the young general understood that excuses were no longer enough. McClellan always had excuses. Taken one by one they might each seem persuasive, but compounded over month after month, the litany had severely undermined his credibility. McClellan’s enemies no longer trusted his good faith, if they ever had, and this failure of the canal boats now fed suspicions about the general’s true intentions. As McClellan later recalled the conversation, Lincoln connected the fiasco at Harpers Ferry to what he called “a very ugly matter,” namely, the growing belief that the real motive behind the general’s plan to take the Army of the Potomac down the bay was a “traitorous” plot to leave Washington wide open to attack.

When he heard the word “traitor,” McClellan exploded, completely missing the fact that Lincoln was trying to help him. He leaped to his feet with tears in his eyes and demanded, in salty terms, a retraction of a charge that Lincoln was merely reporting. Like the president, McClellan—the man who had bragged “I can do it all”—was suffering from exhaustion; as he struggled to keep up with the details of running his own army while supervising the war as a whole, his nerves had become badly frayed. A few days earlier, he had confessed in a private letter that he felt pushed to his limits. “The abolitionists are doing their best to displace me,” he wrote. “You have no idea of the undying hate with which they pressure me.… I sometimes become quite angry.”

Lincoln tried to calm his general in chief, apologizing for the misunderstanding and assuring McClellan that he was only trying to make him aware of the deteriorating political situation. The president explained to McClellan that he needed to be more careful, and he also needed some real success on the battlefield—now. Nothing less would silence his detractors. But with his fine-tuned sense of honor offended, the general would have none of it. He repeated that he could not have his name spoken in the same sentence with that horrible word.

Then McClellan had an idea. He was meeting that morning with the senior generals of the Army of the Potomac. He offered to poll them as to the wisdom of his current strategy. Surely Lincoln would trust them, wouldn’t he? So it was that, a short time later, McClellan sent the generals from his headquarters across Lafayette Square to report their conclusions to Lincoln and Stanton.

The people on the sidewalks watching this bustle of braid and brass buttons could hardly have imagined the dysfunction behind it. The secretary of war feared that the general in chief was secretly conspiring with the enemy, so the outraged general in chief was parading his subordinates before the president as character witnesses. The vote of the generals was eight to four in favor of McClellan’s proposed plan to sail down the coast and attack Richmond, over Lincoln’s preferred approach of attacking the Rebels at Manassas, where they were still believed to be entrenched. A fuming Stanton cross-examined the division commanders, ultimately concluding that they were “afraid to fight.” Lincoln professed not to care about which strategy the generals pursued, as long as the army got moving. “All I ask is for you to just pitch in,” he exhorted the group.

But he did care. Months later, he was still telling friends “that his opinion always had been that the great fight should have been at Manassas,” but that he gave in because the majority of the generals opposed him. After the awkward meeting broke up, Lincoln issued two orders, both of which indicated his continuing lack of trust in McClellan’s judgment. The first directed the overworked general to reorganize his army into four corps under the leadership of his four most senior generals. As it happened, all of these men were skeptical to one degree or another of McClellan and his plans. Whether they had earned Lincoln’s confidence by their years of experience, or by their independence from McClellan, the effect was the same: the president would not allow Little Mac to promote his friends and favorites. Lincoln’s second order was even more pointed. He set a hard deadline: the Army of the Potomac was to begin executing McClellan’s plan within the next ten days—but not before the new corps commanders agreed that the capital was completely safe.

No doubt Lincoln believed that by appointing these seasoned generals as auditors of McClellan’s movements he was protecting both his general in chief and his administration against suspicions of perfidy or incompetence. But the effect of his two orders was to launch the Union’s vast military campaign under a cloud of mistrust and miscommunication.

*   *   *

While the generals were meeting with Lincoln, a strange and fearsome craft was slowly steaming north from Norfolk toward Hampton Roads, looking, in the words of one observer, “like a house submerged to the eaves, borne onward by a flood.” It was the Confederate ship
Virginia,
once known as USS
Merrimack,
a 275-foot, forty-gun wooden frigate that had been, for a short time, the U.S. Navy’s finest warship.

When Rebel guns fired on Fort Sumter, the
Merrimack
was docked in the navy yard at Norfolk for repairs. Rather than allow the ship to fall into Confederate hands, the officer in charge of the yard ordered her burned and sunk. But soon the Rebels raised the hulk. Great hopes were pinned on the restoration project: scrap iron was salvaged from ships and railroads around the Confederacy and sent to the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, where it was recycled into armor plates. The plates were then bolted to pine timbers two feet thick, backed by another four inches of solid oak. Fashioned into a sloping structure with firing ports for four guns on each side and pivot guns fore and aft, the iron cladding and heavy timbers made the formidable craft as unwieldy as it was impervious. A fifteen-hundred-pound iron ram, attached to the prow just below the waterline, completed the rechristened ship’s menacing array.

Admirals the world over had known for several years that the long age of wooden warships was coming to an end. The first armored ship in the world,
La Gloire,
was built by the French in 1858, and the British quickly followed with HMS
Warrior
and the recently completed
Ironside
. Those ships had not been battle tested, however, so this was the day and the place that would usher in the modern age of naval warfare.

The
Virginia
’s dark hulk entered the James River under the command of Commodore Franklin Buchanan, who had been the first superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis. Buchanan drew a bead on the big wooden warships lying at anchor between Norfolk and the Union bastion of Fort Monroe on the opposite shore. At full steam, the ironclad made barely five knots, so the crews of the Federal ships had sufficient time to prepare for the oncoming monster. As she came in range, the fifty-gun USS
Congress
fired first. The cannonballs bounced off the ironclad like hailstones hitting a frying pan. Nearby, the
Cumberland,
carrying thirty guns, opened fire, along with batteries ashore, but equally in vain. Closing the distance, the
Virginia
loosed a volley at the
Congress
and then rammed the
Cumberland
. Water poured through the pierced hull, and the wooden warship sank quickly.

Shaking loose, and losing her ram in the process, the Rebel ironclad began a slow, ponderous turn to fire on the
Congress
again. The Union crew tried to sail away but struck a shoal. Three other Federal ships, steaming upstream toward the fight, also ran aground. Helpless and shot to pieces, the
Congress
surrendered, but by that time the tide was running out and the heavy ironclad, with its twenty-two-foot draft, was in danger of grounding as well. As a parting shot, the Rebels set fire to the
Congress
with a shower of heated cannonballs, eventually producing an immense explosion when the frigate’s magazine went up. Then the
Virginia
withdrew for the evening, her crew confident of finishing the Federal flotilla come morning.