Rise to Greatness (19 page)

A hard rain had turned Fourteenth Street into a bog; the presidential carriage got stuck. Lincoln ordered his driver and footman to hold the nervous horses steady while he got down and found three large stones to make a pathway. Taking Pomroy’s hand, he guided her across the stones to the safety of the sidewalk. As he often did, he perceived in this simple scene a principle for living. Standing in his muddy boots, the president counseled the nurse: “All through life, be sure to put your feet in the right place, and then
stand firm
.”

*   *   *

In 1862, a transatlantic voyage took two weeks or more, depending on the weather, so news of the war produced a delayed reaction in Europe. The February victories of Grant and Burnside registered in London and Paris only in March, followed a couple of weeks later by news of Lincoln’s proposal for a gradual end to slavery. Louis-Napoleon called Ambassador Dayton to the palace at once.

Dayton had been having trouble scheduling a meeting with the foreign minister, Thouvenel, so he was surprised to be summoned on such short notice by the emperor himself. When the New Jersey lawyer was ushered into Louis-Napoleon’s presence at two
P.M.
on March 25, he found the handsome, mustachioed monarch in a very businesslike frame of mind. The emperor wanted to talk about cotton. When the war broke out, French warehouses had been stuffed with raw material for the nation’s busy looms, but the stockpiles were gone now and textile workers were jobless. A man with the name Napoleon did not need to be told what might happen when masses of working people found themselves poor and hungry. Having no interest in another French revolution, Louis needed cotton.

Furthermore, the emperor said, his thinking about the American situation had changed in recent weeks. “When the insurrection broke out,” Dayton recalled him saying, “he did not suppose the North would succeed;… it was the general belief of statesmen in Europe that the two sections would never come together again,” because the South “was a large country, and for that reason difficult to subdue.” Now Louis was no longer so sure. He had seen the success of the Union war effort and knew that an expedition had been launched to retake the vital port of New Orleans. The monarch seemed favorably impressed by Lincoln’s emancipation proposal, which was “almost universally looked upon [in Europe] as the ‘beginning of the end’” of the war, Dayton noted.

But the emperor confessed fears “that the war might yet be a long one.” And with the Confederates promising to burn cotton rather than let the Yankees capture it and sell it to Europe, he wanted to ask Dayton whether Washington had any strategy for reopening the cotton trade in places liberated by Union troops.

Seeing an opening, Dayton reassured Napoleon that plenty of growers in the South would rather sell their crop than sacrifice it for the Confederate cause; he promised the monarch that once the Union gained control of New Orleans and other Southern ports, the military would find a way to get that cotton to market. However, Dayton added, nothing buoyed the hopes of the Rebels more than the possibility of European intervention. These hopes had been raised when France and Britain declared the Confederacy a lawful belligerent early in the conflict, and they would be crushed if the two countries withdrew that declaration. The rebellion would collapse, the Union blockade would be lifted, the cotton would flow, and the emperor’s workers would be back at their spindles.

Louis-Napoleon promised to give Dayton’s words careful consideration. Indeed, the monarch had a lot to think about, because by now his grand plan to restore French power in the New World had become exquisitely complex. He badly wanted to conquer Mexico and install the Archduke Maximilian—butterfly-collecting younger brother of the emperor of Austria—as a puppet ruler. But he had to step carefully. He knew that proslavery Southerners had long considered Mexico prime territory for the spread of their peculiar institution, so he was eager to make the Confederacy a friend rather than an enemy. Together, Maximilian of Mexico and Jefferson Davis could more than offset the rising power of the former United States. Still, if the North really was about to throttle the rebellion, Napoleon needed to be on Lincoln’s good side, lest the president decide to use his huge new army to enforce the Monroe Doctrine against meddling Europeans. Perhaps the best response, from the emperor’s perspective, would be to help the South win its independence while making the North believe that France was still a trusted ally.

Thouvenel took Dayton aside after the meeting with Louis Napoleon to underline the emperor’s views: the French government was now confident that the Union would get control of the ports, but lacked faith that the cotton crop could be saved. As for withdrawing the declaration of belligerent rights, Thouvenel felt it was beneath the dignity of a great nation to reverse its position simply because the South appeared beaten. In any event, nothing could be done without the agreement of Great Britain. Thouvenel closed on a hopeful note, according to Dayton. In his report to Seward, the ambassador wrote: “He said, if we took possession of the ports, the war would be altogether internal, and France would have nothing to do with it.… He said, furthermore, that we knew very well that all the sympathies of France and her people had been with the north from the beginning.”

*   *   *

“The period of inaction has passed,” George McClellan announced in a message to his Army of the Potomac, more than 100,000 strong. At last, after all the meetings and intrigues, he was moving. “I will bring you now face to face with the rebels, and only pray that God may defend the right.… I am to watch over you as a parent watches over his children, and you know that your General loves you from the depths of his heart.”

While newspaper reporters and congressmen prowled through the remains of the Confederate camps around Manassas in late March, McClellan began sending his army south in the largest movement of troops and supplies yet seen in North America. “Numerous steam-tugs were pulling huge sailing vessels here and there, and large transports, loaded with soldiers, horses, bales of hay, and munitions for an army, swept majestically down the river,” wrote one awed private. “Every description of water conveyance, from a canal boat to a huge three-decked steamboat, [was] pressed into the service.” An English observer termed it “the stride of a giant.”

McClellan had revised his plans to account for the consequences of Johnston’s retreat. The Rappahannock River was closed now, and the still menacing
Virginia
lurked on the James. He would use the York River on the north side of the peninsula near Richmond as his supply line on the way to the Confederate capital. To accomplish this, he told Stanton, he would need to capture Yorktown in a coordinated attack by infantry and navy gunboats.

But the expedition had scarcely begun when it had to be reined in. To maximize his own force, McClellan left a minimal number of troops behind. Lincoln was dismayed to find the ranks in and around Washington so thin. Though Little Mac’s supporters insisted that the capital faced no real risk, Lincoln believed that even a raid by the Rebels could deliver a mortal blow to the Union. “We began to fear the Rebels would take the capital, and once in possession of that, we feared that foreign countries might acknowledge the Confederacy,” he later explained. “Nobody could foresee the evil that might come from the destruction of records and property.”

Compounding these fears was a fresh barrage of rumors that McClellan was playing a double game. At the very moment when the general steamed away from Washington, a letter arrived on Stanton’s desk from Thomas Ewing, an influential former senator and cabinet member. He reported an encounter between his son Philemon and a “reliable” gentleman from New Orleans. In significant detail, the man told Philemon that McClellan had taken the secret oath of the Knights of the Golden Circle in 1860 and that “he is, was, and has been all along a tool of Jeff Davis.”

Alarmed, Stanton tucked the letter into his pocket and headed to Lincoln’s office, where he found the president meeting with Orville Browning. As it happened, Browning had been asking Lincoln “if he still had confidence in [McClellan’s] fidelity.” Lincoln answered that “he never had any reason to doubt it.” He described the tears in the general’s eyes when he confronted him about the rumors of treason. True, Lincoln continued, McClellan was not “sufficiently energetic and aggressive,” but that was why he had ordered Little Mac to “move now, and he must do it.”

Into this conversation came Stanton. He pulled the letter from his coat, announcing that it was written by “one of the first men of the Nation,” someone well known to both Lincoln and Browning, though he was not at liberty to say who it was. He described the explosive charges. Lincoln was skeptical, but to Stanton the conspiracy made sense.

After the meeting, the secretary offered Browning a ride home in his carriage; on the way, Stanton spoke of McClellan’s long relationship with Jefferson Davis. When the Mississippi aristocrat served as U.S. secretary of war, Little Mac was one of his favorite officers. Davis had handpicked the young captain to join two more experienced soldiers as American observers of the Crimean War. In doing so, Davis set McClellan apart from the other ambitious veterans of the Mexican War, and Little Mac had been reaping benefits from the military and from private industry ever since. On the basis of these ties, Stanton concluded that McClellan was hard pressed to “emancipate himself from the influence of Jeff Davis.” And he feared that the general “wasn’t willing to … damage the cause of secession.” McClellan, Stanton declared, “ought to have been removed long ago.”

The secretary struck an even more ominous note in his reply to Ewing. “Private and confidential,” Stanton scrawled across a page of War Department stationery. “Movements of the last few days have occasioned greater anxiety than ever before. The government seems doomed to some frightful calamity. The remedy is in the hands of the Pres[ident], and no effort of mine can inspire him with any alarm, much less the degree of vigilance and anxiety I think the occasion requires.”

Lincoln was not easily rattled, but neither was he willing to risk everything on the enigma that was George McClellan. The general now had an army on the peninsula roughly four times the size of the force that Grant took into Tennessee, and that would have to be enough. The president ordered the last of the four corps earmarked for McClellan’s campaign to remain around Manassas instead, as added security for the capital. A last-minute alteration, this change was an unsightly crack in the carefully laid plans of the Young Napoleon.

*   *   *

William Tecumseh Sherman—“Cump” to friends and family—was no longer behind Ulysses Grant pushing supplies in his direction. He was now the lead element in Grant’s army, having taken a division of fresh (and untested) troops down the Tennessee River into southern Tennessee. In late March, near a steamboat dock called Pittsburg Landing not far from the Mississippi border, Sherman stationed his men around a little white church and named the position in its honor: Camp Shiloh. A growing army of Rebels gathered just down the road at Corinth, Mississippi, but Sherman put up no fortifications. He still subscribed to the old-army idea that “such a course would have made our raw men timid.” He waited to be joined by the rest of Grant’s forces and by Buell’s Army of the Ohio, which was marching from Nashville. The plan was to link up and drive the Confederates into the Mississippi River.

“Indeed all the valley of the Mississippi must be under one Government, otherwise there never can be peace,” Sherman wrote as he waited, “but the task is so gigantic that I am staggered by its cost. To say that the Southern people are reconciled, or likely to be, may be so, but I cannot see it.… The Southern Leaders know the importance of the Mississippi, and will fight for every mile of it.” Grant’s army, he added, was “well fed, clothed and anxious to do something but
very few appreciate the difficulties and dangers
before us.”

Sherman was among the most far-seeing military men in the Union. The previous fall he had suffered terrible embarrassment, enough to make him contemplate suicide, when he was denounced as a lunatic for saying that it would take hundreds of thousands of troops to safeguard Kentucky. Time was vindicating his sanity. But he did not know how quickly the words in his letter would be proven true. The Rebels were indeed going to fight for every mile; in fact, they were marching toward Camp Shiloh even as Sherman folded the paper and addressed the envelope. And they were bringing difficulties and dangers on a scale the North American continent had never seen.

5

APRIL

“If Albert Sidney Johnston is not a general, then I have no general,” said Jefferson Davis, attempting to soothe the outrage in Richmond over Confederate losses in the West. A tall, broad-chested man with blazing eyes, Johnston was a charismatic leader who, by the spring of 1862, was nearly sixty years old and still as tough as a longhorn steak, a veteran of many years’ hard marching and fighting against Indians, Mexicans, and ambitious rivals. Winfield Scott once judged him “more than a good officer—he is a God send to the country.”

As the war approached, Johnston was promoted to command the Pacific Department of the regular U.S. Army. But when the time came for choosing sides, he went with his adopted state of Texas and joined the Confederacy. Assigned to command the sprawling western theater, Johnston immediately recognized the vulnerability of his long, thin defensive line in Kentucky and Tennessee. Given more time, he might have found a way to strengthen it, but Grant never gave him the chance. Now Johnston had pulled back into a coiled crouch, reconstituting his forces as two clenched fists: one to fend off the Federals on the Mississippi River, the other to deliver a counterpunch intended to send the hero of Fort Donelson reeling.

Johnston’s left was clenched at a place called Island No. 10, about halfway between St. Louis and Memphis. The prosaically named island provided an excellent spot for blocking river traffic, for here the Mississippi doubled back on itself to flow north a short distance, then kinked again to resume its southward movement. The guns from the abandoned Rebel fortress at Columbus were transferred to the island and to shore batteries near the town of New Madrid, Missouri, on the western bank of the Big Muddy. Together these guns formed a deadly gantlet, ready to blast unwelcome ships to pieces as they snaked through the bends.