Rise to Greatness (45 page)

As news of the Rebels’ chilly reception spread to Washington and points north, it became a source of pride for the battered Union. Legends of defiance soon wrapped themselves around the simple facts. The poet John Greenleaf Whittier composed a ballad celebrating one such story, and generations of schoolchildren would eventually have to memorize it. Supposedly an elderly Frederick resident named Barbara Frietchie waved the Stars and Stripes defiantly as Jackson passed beneath her attic window: “‘Shoot, if you must, this old gray head / But spare your country’s flag,’ she said.”

Jefferson Davis would later explain away the tepid response in the border states by saying that their citizens were cowed, and that they needed to see a victory by the Southern armies before they dared rise up against Lincoln. But the truth was more complex, and far more damaging to Southern hopes of independence. As summer had turned to autumn, the loyal slave states, which once wavered between South and North, had become emphatically more loyal than slave. “I may not have made as great a president as some other men,” Lincoln said of his success in holding on to this crucial territory, “but I believe I have kept these discordant elements together as well as anyone could.”

The people of Kentucky, for example, had elected a loyalist state government, and nine of the state’s ten congressional seats were filled by Unionists. Kentucky was on its way to sending 100,000 men to the Federal army. In part, this rejection of the Confederate cause reflected the thickly rooted patriotism of the birthplace of Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln. It also revealed a clear understanding of Kentucky’s future interests. To side with the South would at best leave Kentucky as the eternally tense frontier between two fundamentally incompatible nations. If the South won the war, the planters of deep Dixie could presumably go back to growing their cotton in peace. Kentucky, however, would suffer the friction of inevitable grinding between the two countries as they clashed over such issues as runaway slaves, access to waterways, and ownership of western lands. But if Kentucky aided the successful restoration of the Union, the state could enjoy a prosperous future at the heart of a single, stable nation.

As for Maryland, Lee’s reception there might have been friendlier had he taken his troops into the eastern part of the state, where the old aristocratic families still worked slaves on plantations. But geography made it difficult for Lee to head east, because the Army of Northern Virginia depended on the Shenandoah Valley as its lifeline for supplies and communication; a move toward eastern Maryland would have exposed this artery to be cut by Federal troops. Instead, Lee encountered the farmers of western Maryland, who had more in common—culturally, economically, and politically—with their Pennsylvania neighbors than they ever would have with the planters of the South.

The Confederate venture into the border states was a bold effort to win the war then and there. Had Maryland rallied to Lee, Washington, D.C., could have been cut off from the North. Had Kentucky flocked to Bragg, the Ohio River might have been closed. Either one of these outcomes would have been catastrophic for the Union; both together would likely have been fatal. But Lee and Bragg had succumbed to the same mistaken notions that hobbled the thinking of Lincoln and many of his advisers as they planned their southern invasion. Just as many Northerners trusted that a strong vein of Union loyalty ran through the South, so the Rebel generals were convinced that only the harsh hand of Lincoln choked off the border states’ true Southern sympathies. On both sides, leaders wrongly believed that their foes were extremists who ruled by oppression and lacked popular support.

For the South, the implications of this error in judgment were profound. The Confederacy lacked the industrial might and the manpower necessary to maintain large armies for long periods in hostile territory. As a consequence, if the Confederacy could not win the contest for hearts and minds in the border states, the Rebels would be destined to fight for their independence primarily on their own territory, ravaging their own cities and their own lands.

*   *   *

Other influential audiences watched the Rebels advance, and their reactions also had the power to decide the war. Northern voters were preparing to choose the governors who would hear future calls for fresh troops, and the congressmen who would debate future war budgets. The first state to go to the polls was Maine, in early September, and the results were ominous for Lincoln: although the Republicans kept their grip on key offices, the party’s share of the vote for governor dropped from 62 percent in 1860 to 53 percent now. Because very few states were as solidly Republican as Maine, a similar drop in the remaining Northern states would spell disaster for the president. Were such erosion to occur, it would give the Democratic opposition control of the House of Representatives and a majority of the statehouses.

Lee had these Northern voters in mind when he briefed Jefferson Davis after that disappointing reception in Frederick. Having failed to spark an uprising, he turned to a new strategy: he would “inflict injury” on the North in Pennsylvania, then offer a truce based on Southern independence. With that offer on the table, “the people of the United States [would] determine at their coming elections” whether to keep fighting or bring the war to an end. Lee understood—as his father’s friend George Washington had understood—that he didn’t have to conquer the enemy to be victorious. He only had to exhaust the enemy’s confidence and its appetite for war.

A second attentive audience was, of course, Europe. The Union debacle at Bull Run and the Confederate advance into Kentucky at last persuaded Palmerston that it was time to intervene. He said as much in a letter to Russell, who was still on the Continent with the queen. The foreign minister felt the same; in his reply to Palmerston, he added that if the Union refused a mediated settlement, England should take the next step and recognize the Confederacy as an independent nation. At that point, Britain and France could supply the naval and industrial muscle the Confederates so desperately lacked. When that happened, the project of conquering the South—a project that was already staggering—would become impossible; the North would have to give up. Palmerston and Russell agreed to put the topic at the top of the cabinet’s agenda when they gathered again in October.

The military and political terrain had shifted yet again, and these first two weeks of September determined much of Richmond’s strategy for the remainder of the war. The dream of sparking a pro-Confederacy uprising in the border states had fizzled, never to be seriously revived. With it died the South’s strategy for winning an outright victory through its own efforts. The Rebels were left to rely on help from outside forces: exhausted Northern voters, emboldened foreign powers, or some combination of the two. That this was a milestone in the course of the conflict was not immediately apparent; as the days went by, the Rebels continued northward and Union armies moved to meet them on fields that would soon be hot with blood and gunfire. But the reconfigured landscape did sharply raise the stakes of these impending battles, because the stars seemed perfectly aligned to bring those outside forces into play. Northern elections were at hand. The Europeans were poised for action. The Rebels would never see a better chance to win foreign support and flay the morale of the North. This was their moment.

*   *   *

On September 6, units of the reorganized Army of the Potomac paraded up Pennsylvania Avenue toward the White House, only to make a sharp right turn before they got there. More than 20,000 troops all made the same ostentatious right face, then took a left onto H Street, which brought them past McClellan’s house. The chesty little man in brass and blue basked in the music and salutes.

In a handful of days, the general had done an extraordinary job of putting the army back on its feet. This was, in the words of James McPherson, “perhaps his finest hour.” Still, it wasn’t clear what McClellan was up to. “There was design” in that detour, fretted Gideon Welles, whose own home was catty-corner from Little Mac’s. From his front walk, Welles could look across H Street and over the heads of the marching men to see the proud McClellan in the foreground and—a block away, across Lafayette Square—the Executive Mansion. There was something ominous, something conspiratorial, about that scene. “They cheered the General lustily, instead of passing by the White House and honoring the President,” Welles reported. Then, to the west of McClellan’s place, the column turned right again to start up the hill toward Tennallytown and onward along the Rockville Pike into Maryland. They were off to hunt the invaders.

If Lincoln noticed the slight, he kept it to himself. What mattered most was that the troops were going after Lee rather than coming for his own head. The army was “becoming reckless and untameable,” in the words of one close observer, and word was circulating at high levels in Washington “of a conspiracy on foot among certain generals for a revolution.” Similar talk was rampant in New York. Lincoln took such threats in stride, but they strengthened his judgment that McClellan’s clique did too much talking and too little fighting. Lee’s foray into Union territory provided an opportunity to change that equation. The Rebels were sticking their necks out; where others saw only menace in the Confederate initiative, Lincoln saw an excellent chance to isolate them, cut them off, and crush them.

But for now all was uncertainty, and the pressure of the situation burst the weak seams holding Lincoln’s cabinet together. Chase was furious at Welles for refusing to sign the demand for McClellan’s ouster, and he blamed the navy secretary for the fact that “everything was going wrong [and] the country was ruined.” Welles suspected Stanton of planting stories in the New York press to make the navy look bad whenever the army was in a bind. Caleb Smith of Interior turned on Seward as the source of all “misfortune and mismanagement.” Montgomery Blair set on Stanton, spreading accusations that the war secretary was taking bribes. According to Welles, Blair began recruiting colleagues to help him force Stanton from office; it was time, Blair said, to “get this black terrier out of his kennel.”

By this point, the bitter feelings had spread well beyond the cabinet itself. Blair, for instance, was the target, along with Seward, of a committee of abolitionists that called on Lincoln on September 10. The committee’s spokesman, a distinguished New York lawyer named James Hamilton—a son of Alexander Hamilton—was Chase’s houseguest while in Washington. Over breakfast before the meeting with Lincoln, Chase and Hamilton discussed Seward’s supposed resistance to emancipation. In Chase’s diary entry describing the conversation, he portrayed himself as Seward’s stalwart defender. But that wasn’t the message Hamilton heard. He left Chase’s house so infected with anti-Seward feeling that the president sensed it from the moment the meeting began. As Hamilton launched into his presentation, Lincoln cut him off angrily. “It’s plain enough what you want—you want to get Seward out of the Cabinet. There is not one of you who would not see the country ruined if you could turn out Seward.”

Stanton, meanwhile, reserved his greatest frustration for Lincoln himself, who continued to display what he called “humiliating submissiveness” to McClellan. The president’s latest notion was that he should ride out to the Maryland countryside for a chat with the general, whose army was creeping forward across a wide front in hopes of bumping into the Rebels.

As usual, McClellan was calling for reinforcements as he went. He grossly exaggerated the strength of the enemy, making himself the outnumbered underdog even though he actually led more than twice as many men as Lee. He again gave credence to mistaken reports that multitudes of Rebels were on their way from the West to make the odds against him still longer. In sum, the same calamitous thinking that crippled McClellan on the peninsula set in as soon as he marched away from the fortifications of Washington. The Rebels, he told Henry Halleck, “consist of their oldest regiments, and are commanded by their best Generals … their forces are numerically superior to ours by at least twenty-five percent. This, with the prestige of their recent successes, will, without doubt, inspire them with a confidence which will cause them to fight well.” Therefore, McClellan continued, “at the risk of being considered slow and overcautious,” he was calling for at least 25,000 additional troops. He certainly hoped to win the coming battle, but “if we should be so unfortunate as to meet with defeat, our country is at their mercy.”

Stanton was enraged by McClellan’s endless predictions of a withering battle against a mighty, if largely imaginary, host. And the president’s continued efforts to inspire the general merely led to the fruitless pleading that the war secretary found so demeaning. Even now, Lincoln could pry scarcely a morsel of definitive information from McClellan—and this while being bombarded with frantic pleas for help from Kentucky and Pennsylvania, where authorities were packing up the state archives and Treasury for safekeeping in New York. By the rainy, sleepless night of September 12, the president was desperate for news from the front. “How does it look now?” he cabled Little Mac. The message, written at four
A.M.
, never received an answer.

*   *   *

Later that morning, Salmon Chase began a difficult day by losing a rolled-up sheaf of embarrassing documents—an anti-McClellan memo and several pages of his gossipy journal—while on his way to work. “What if it should fall into the hands of somebody who will make public what is not designed for publication?” he agonized. At his office in the Treasury building, he found a mountain of unpaid bills waiting for him. Funding the war effort was as lonely as it was daunting. “Expenses are enormous, increasing instead of diminishing,” he confided to his diary, “but neither the president, his counselors nor his commanding generals seem to care. They rush on from expense to expense and from defeat to defeat, heedless of the abyss of bankruptcy and ruin which yawns before us.” Chase’s lost papers were soon picked up in the street and returned, much to his relief, but any good feeling was erased by a summons to a cabinet meeting.