Rise to Greatness (18 page)

The meeting broke up without having made any progress. A line of reasoning that seemed obvious and persuasive to Lincoln had failed to break through the emotional responses built up over whole lives accustomed to slavery. Especially in the border states, the default position of elected representatives was to put the divisive question of slavery as far away as possible, whether that required wishful thinking or circular logic, stratagems of delay or appeals to the Constitution.

Lincoln’s disappointment must have been apparent to his advisers, because later that week Edward Bates decided that the president needed to be bucked up. In a private visit to the White House, the attorney general—who was from Missouri and well understood the ingrained habits of thought that made slavery so hard to reject—commiserated with Lincoln about the difficulty of steering a course between the extremes of opinion in the Union coalition. He urged the president to “stand firm on his present rock (as to the slavery question) and not yield an inch to either the fierce rush of the northern abolitionists or the timid doubters of the border slave states.” Bates added: “You have taken your positions cautiously. Now maintain them bravely, and I will sink or swim with you.”

*   *   *

Edwin Stanton was still angry when he arrived for a cabinet meeting in Lincoln’s office on March 11. His nasty exchange with Welles two days earlier had festered: Welles had countermanded Stanton’s order to prepare obstructions for the Potomac, prompting another furious outburst from Stanton and another acid response from Welles. The Union had spent months trying to open the river and now the Rebel batteries were finally gone, Welles said. Why did Stanton want to block the Potomac again?

Today’s unpleasant task for the secretary of war was to report on the state of the Union’s military bureaucracy. In two months on the job, Stanton had managed to look under a lot of rocks and throw open plenty of closed doors in his notoriously mismanaged department, and he did not like what he was finding. “Great ignorance, negligence, and lack of order and subordination—and reckless extravagance,” summarized one person who heard the secretary’s presentation. Cabinet members were shocked when Stanton revealed that the army payroll now numbered nearly 700,000 and that its finances were “shamefully managed.” Stanton said that he routinely received requisitions from the quartermaster general’s office that Meigs, the head of the office, knew absolutely nothing about. A bit defensively, Stanton added that he would not take the blame for conditions in his department, which had deteriorated before he arrived.

Indeed, Stanton deserved credit: he was making real progress in cleaning up the mess he had inherited. “Stanton is exceedingly industrious, mindful of the interests of his Bureau, never off from his post, works like a trooper and spends day and night at his office when under a strong pressure,” wrote one observer. One of the secretary’s most effective innovations was the institution of “public days,” when he personally attended to petitions from would-be contractors while standing at an upright desk in a room where anyone could come and watch his deliberations. He put on quite a show. An individual wanting to do business with the army would wait in a long line until his turn was called. Then, typically, the petitioner would state his case in a low voice, trying to achieve a modicum of privacy, only to have Stanton restate the proposal in booming tones, along with his instant verdict.

One would-be supplier of a hundred thousand surplus French rifles, a man named William Roelofson, recounted his experience of the Stanton style. Roelofson’s hopes had soared when Stanton was named secretary of war, because a mutual acquaintance provided an introduction. The contractor rushed to Washington to peddle the guns, but Stanton kept him cooling his heels at Willard’s Hotel for three weeks. Finally, about a month into Stanton’s tenure, Roelofson attended a public day. He handed Stanton a carefully worded proposal, which the secretary snatched, skimmed, and slapped facedown on his desk. He scrawled a few lines, then, peering through his glasses, barked out to everyone assembled what he had written. “The Secretary of War declines to make any contract or arrangement with Mr. Roelofson in respect to the arms mentioned within—because the government has no use for them—and he has no occasion for the services of Mr. Roelofson in his Department of the Government.” Then, the chastened arms dealer recounted, Stanton returned his proposal “in such a manner that I not only felt chagrined but humiliated.”

No one could accuse the secretary of war of backroom dealing, though many in Washington were coming to think he was a martinet. But if Stanton was beginning to get a grip on his swollen and disordered domain, he had little insight yet into McClellan and his chain of command. He told the president and his fellow cabinet members that the general in chief distrusted the civilian leadership and was using his position to hide information from them. In fact, McClellan had instructed his generals to make all reports directly to him, “and he reports nothing.” For more than a month, Stanton informed the group, McClellan had been holding key telegrams at his headquarters, refusing to share them with the War Department. To cure this intolerable situation, Stanton had ordered the main telegraph moved from McClellan’s office to his own.

Stanton was correct about the motive behind McClellan’s excessive secrecy. He had only the most grudging respect for the constitutional chain of command. On one occasion, the navy’s David Dixon Porter was meeting with McClellan to discuss plans to capture New Orleans when an aide announced that Lincoln was outside. “Let him wait. I am busy,” McClellan answered. Shocked, Porter protested that Lincoln had a great interest in the New Orleans campaign; and besides, Porter said, “It’s not respectful to keep him waiting. Remember that he is our Commander-in-Chief.” McClellan replied: “Well, let the Commander-in-Chief wait, he has no business to know what is going on.”

Stanton’s disturbing report about the telegrams—along with the fact that McClellan and his army had left Washington and advanced through rain and mud to assess the situation in Manassas—moved Lincoln to take an overdue yet fateful step. That evening he instructed John Hay to call Seward, Chase, and Stanton to his office. Seward got there first, and when he arrived Lincoln read aloud his President’s Special War Order No. 3, which removed McClellan as general in chief. Seward heartily approved, saying that after the “imbecility” of the canal boat episode, McClellan was lucky to retain command of the Army of the Potomac. Seward suggested publishing the order in Stanton’s name, as a way of strengthening the secretary of war, but by then Stanton had entered the room, and he demurred. Feelings were so raw between him and the McClellan faction, he said, that the order would look like a personal insult if it came from him. And indeed it would, because two other items in the order also cut against McClellan’s wishes. In the West, Halleck was given command over Buell’s department along with his own, while in the mountains of western Virginia a new department was created for the purpose of giving a command to the unreliable but politically powerful John Frémont.

Putting Frémont in charge of an army again was a potentially explosive decision, because he was now engaged in a very public feud with the powerful Blair family, to which the postmaster general belonged and whose active support was an essential part of Lincoln’s appeal to Democratic Unionists. Further complicating the situation, the radical general had recently caused great embarrassment to Montgomery Blair by leaking a private letter he’d received from Blair the previous year. Published in the
New-York Tribune
earlier in March, the letter complained of the president’s “feeble policy,” which Blair considered a vestige of Lincoln’s days in the defunct Whig Party. When the letter appeared, Blair immediately went to the White House and offered to “make some amends by resigning.” Lincoln answered that he had no intention of reading the letter; he believed it had been published only to stir up trouble. “Forget it,” he told Blair, and “never mention or think of it again.” This magnanimous gesture no doubt influenced Blair’s decision to defend Lincoln’s appointment of Frémont in a strongly worded letter to his influential father. The president had no choice but to name Frémont to the post, Blair wrote, to arrest “the spread of factions in the country & prevent divisions at this time.”

The consolation for McClellan in all this was that the president did not appoint a new general in chief above him. Instead, he ordered that “all commanders … [will] report directly to the Secretary of War,” and “prompt, full and frequent reports will be expected of all.”

After much tribulation, a key problem facing Lincoln at the beginning of the year—namely, how to assert his authority over McClellan and the army—had at last been addressed. Now, through Stanton, the president would be his own general in chief. Lincoln’s confidence in his ability to command the armies had soared after the success of recent campaigns. The simultaneous movements of multiple expeditions had worked just as he predicted, stretching Confederate lines to the breaking point. The armored gunboats he had championed were proving themselves on inland rivers and along the coast.

Public opinion had begun to turn in his favor as well, and the president could find affirmation of his leadership in newspapers throughout the North. The March 12 edition of
The New York Times,
for example, credited Lincoln with the string of victories that surely guaranteed “the end of the rebellion.” The paper declared: “With a patience only equaled by that of the people, he awaited the completion of preparations, but the moment these were completed, the word was given which set in motion the immense machinery of destruction, from the Atlantic to the Missouri line. The scheme of the campaign, the discipline of the troops, the elaboration of preliminary details, may be justly credited to others. Action and victory we owe directly to the President.”

Lincoln was entitled to feel a new confidence. As he had done so often in his life, he had learned a new subject almost entirely through his own efforts: by reading, by questioning, and through lonely hours of thinking. He was now a competent military commander, having graduated at the top of a class numbering just one. Such rare ability to master a challenge through his own resourcefulness encouraged Lincoln’s tendency to rely on himself. Left unchecked, however, this burgeoning confidence threatened to tip into overconfidence.

*   *   *

McClellan took the news of his demotion with surprising good cheer. Getting out of Washington and marching his troops restored some of the exuberance he had shown the previous summer. The newspapers provided reports of meager camps and logs painted to look like cannon in the abandoned Rebel fortifications around Manassas, and Attorney General Bates scoffed that this first mission by the Army of the Potomac was “a fool’s errand.” But well-trained West Pointers recognized that the positions had been in fact, formidable; McClellan, for one, was delighted to have taken the key railroad junction with hardly any bloodshed. “My movements gave us Manassas with the loss of one life—a gallant cavalry officer—history will, when I am in my grave, record it as the brightest passage of my life that I accomplished so much at so small a cost,” he wrote. As for losing the top rank, he professed unconcern. His army was “half glad that I now belong to them alone,” while Lincoln, he wrote, “is my strongest friend.”

With the Potomac open, McClellan called his transports to Alexandria and prepared to fill them with troops and supplies destined for the peninsula east of Richmond. The Confederate retreat had spoiled his hopes of separating Johnston’s army from the Rebel capital, but a campaign on the fine roads between the York and the James rivers still seemed to offer the prospect of a decisive victory, an ambition that had filled his thoughts for months.

Lincoln, by contrast, remained grief-stricken and broken by pain. Willie’s death, he confided to a visitor, “showed me my weakness as I had never felt it before.” Mary, “distressed and pale,” inconsolable, remained secluded in her room day after day, alternating between silence and loud bursts of tears. Tad’s recovery was slow, and many nights he asked his father to sleep with him because he was lonely and afraid. With Mary incapacitated, it fell to the president to handle family crises.

On March 10, for example, he was in the middle of a meeting when John Hay reluctantly interrupted. Stepping into the hall, Lincoln met Rebecca Pomroy, the nurse, who told him that Tad was refusing to take his medicine. After a few minutes alone with the boy, the president emerged from behind the closed sickroom door: “It’s all right now. Tad and I have fixed things up,” he said. Then he went to his desk, where he wrote out a check, drawn on his Riggs & Company bank account, for five dollars payable “to Tad (when he is well enough to present).”

A few days later marked three weeks since Willie’s death; as he had done the previous two Thursdays, Lincoln spent part of the day alone in the room where the boy had died. His quiet there was inviolable. At mid-month, Pomroy returned to her work at the military hospital, but the president often asked her to return to the White House and keep his wife company for a few hours.

As time went on and Mary remained in her room, Pomroy began to weary of the first lady’s self-pity: “She suffers from depression of spirits, but I do think if she would only come [to the hospital] and look at the poor soldiers occasionally it would be better for her.” Pomroy noted approvingly that Lincoln read the Bible almost daily around lunchtime. One afternoon she found him sprawled on the chaise with the big, worn volume open on his lap. He looked up and asked which book in the Bible was her favorite. The Psalms, Pomroy answered. “Yes, they are the best,” he agreed, “for I find in them something for every day of the week.”

One of Pomroy’s visits fell on March 27—another Thursday, the weekly reminder of the family’s unanswerable loss. When it came time to leave, Mary pressed a picture of Willie into Pomroy’s hands, along with one of Tad. Then Lincoln offered the nurse a ride home. He was a little sturdier now, no longer asking her the same forlorn questions about God and grief again and again.