Rise to Greatness (9 page)

Instead of thanking McClellan for sharing his plan, Lincoln merely said he would ask his war council about it the next day. He also told McClellan that he was welcome to attend the council. Here was another sign of change: before the general in chief fell sick, Lincoln’s goal was to persuade him to share information. Now a grudging peek into McClellan’s plans was no longer sufficient. Lincoln intended to probe, prod, and even modify those plans. Their relationship had subtly, but fundamentally, shifted. And if George McClellan was ill-tempered and suspicious on his way into the White House that morning, he was boiling mad on his way out.

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With so little real news to process, the Washington rumor mill was running double shifts. Sketchy reports of genuine activity—General Ambrose Burnside sailing from Hampton Roads with a hundred ships carrying a strike force down the Atlantic coast; Halleck ordering some sort of expedition in the West—were quickly blown into dramatic tales of crushing blows about to be landed. “It is thought that at least 400,000 Men, good Union soldiers, will move this week,” one man summed up.

The lobbies and bars of the Washington hotels were the mills where gossip was spun into common knowledge. Officers mixed easily with civilians, passing tidbits back and forth over brandy and water. Now and then a Confederate spy would feed a scrap of disinformation into the machine and listen with satisfaction as it was picked up and processed into gospel. One hotel was not enough to contain all the chatter. Fresh rumors were churned out at the National and at Brown’s, but the elite mill was Willard’s, a great barn of a hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue near the Treasury Department. Though Willard’s was arguably even “shabbier and dirtier” than the National, one British journalist reported, it was unquestionably “the house of call for everybody who has business in Washington. From early morning till late at night its lobbies and passages were filled with a motley throng of all classes and all nations.” Through clouds of cigar smoke, cabinet secretaries, major generals, senators, and congressmen came and went endlessly across the hotel’s spit-stained carpets.

Lincoln’s secretaries appeared at Willard’s for supper virtually every night. John Nicolay and John Hay were “irresistible personalities”—two young men with nearly unparalleled access to “the Tycoon,” as they called Lincoln—and they often found themselves “holding court among the belles.” Nicolay was the older of the two, almost thirty, engaged to a girl back home and diligent about writing her almost every day. He was a Bavarian immigrant who had arrived in America with his parents at the age of five. As a teen, he went to work in the print shop of an antislavery newspaper in Illinois, working his way quickly from reporter to editor to owner. His coverage of Republican politics caught Lincoln’s eye, and when he moved to Springfield for a job in the state government, Nicolay had a front-row seat on the future president’s rise. In 1860, he served as jack-of-all-trades to the presidential nominee.

The clever and cutting Hay also had been known to Lincoln for years; Hay’s uncle Milton had a law office next door to Lincoln’s. A dandy and a bit of a snob, Hay was raised in Illinois but educated at Brown University, where he was named poet of the class of 1858. When Lincoln won the election, Nicolay recruited Hay as an assistant, and together they moved to Washington, even though the White House budget at the time included only enough money for one presidential assistant. A spot was found for Hay on the payroll of the Pension Office until Congress gave Lincoln a second employee. Baby-faced at twenty-three, Hay was the velvet and Nicolay—irascible and fiercely protective of the president’s time—the hammer.

A place like Willard’s would have little appeal to Lincoln, who neither drank nor smoked. He preferred to relax through private conversation, and on the evening of January 12, he welcomed his old Illinois colleague Orville Hickman Browning for a long talk after supper. Lincoln had known Browning for years; across more than two decades they had colluded and vied in the quest for influence in Illinois politics. Browning had come to Washington some six weeks earlier to fill the Senate seat vacated by the sudden death of Lincoln’s famous rival Stephen A. Douglas. Lincoln knew immediately that Browning could be a useful liaison to the Senate; what he probably didn’t anticipate was that the senator would become an almost daily visitor, a sounding board, a friend with whom he could vent his cares, and a comrade in grief. In the early days of the war, both Lincoln and Browning lost young men whom they had loved like sons. Browning’s ward William Shipley was killed in the battle of Belmont only a few months after Elmer Ellsworth, Lincoln’s former law clerk, was gunned down in Alexandria.

As they sat together that night in the glow of the gas lamps, their talk turned to Lincoln’s crash course in military strategy. The president had evidently gained much confidence in his ability to think like a general. In fact, he startled Browning by saying that he was weighing the idea of taking command himself; he’d be a warrior-president, leading troops to the fields of battle. It would be unprecedented, yes, but so was everything else that was happening. Lincoln then reviewed for Browning his still-evolving strategy for winning the war. The North must move aggressively on multiple fronts all at once.

With satisfaction Lincoln also told Browning that the western generals were finally acting on his strategy. Newspapers that morning reported that Halleck had ordered a sizeable force down the Mississippi toward the rebel citadel at Columbus. What they didn’t know, Lincoln disclosed, was that this move was just “a feint” in support of a push into Tennessee by Buell. The president spoke with confidence because he had received a telegram from Buell that day, promising Lincoln that he would “devote all of my efforts to your views, and [McClellan’s].”

The president was entitled to feel satisfied. Less than two weeks had passed since Halleck and Buell dismissed Lincoln’s initial telegrams out of hand. Too much haste would ruin everything, they’d said. Now they were both moving, just as Lincoln had urged them to do. The moves weren’t terribly impressive—not in their particulars, anyway. But together they turned out to be the beginning of something decisive to the fate of the Union.

In response to the president’s plea for action, Buell sent a force of about 4,000 men under Brigadier General George Thomas to challenge a Rebel army under the former congressman Felix Zollicoffer. On January 19, Thomas defeated Zollicoffer’s force in the battle of Mill Springs, near the entrance to the Cumberland Gap. It was the first significant land-based Union victory of the war.

Meanwhile, the feint ordered by Halleck was a miserable affair, day after day of sloppy marching along muddy roads in snow and sleet to no purpose that the troops could see. One column marched from Cairo, Illinois, down the Mississippi to menace Columbus; these soldiers were accompanied by several of the Eads turtles, which threw shells at the fortress on the bluffs. A second column left nearby Paducah, Kentucky, and headed up the Tennessee River toward a pair of Confederate forts under construction.

As Lincoln predicted, the Rebels were frozen in their places by the movements of these two columns and so unable to combine with Zollicoffer to fight against Thomas. But the ultimate impact of the feint on the future of the Union went well beyond Thomas’s morale-boosting victory at Mill Springs. Of far greater importance was the vital intelligence gleaned by the brigadier general who commanded that miserable march. That general—a compactly built man in a scruffy uniform, a distinguished veteran of the Mexican War who somehow had never lived up to his potential—was Ulysses S. Grant.

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The outbreak of the Civil War had found Captain Grant behind the counter of his father’s leather goods store in Galena, Illinois, making a botch of civilian life. Like many promising young officers of the 1850s, including McClellan, Buell, and Halleck, Grant had grown tired of the dull grind of the peacetime army. Unlike those other men, he left the service under a cloud, amid rumors of excessive drinking as he served lonely garrison duty in California far from his wife, Julia. His reputation was so tarnished that, after Fort Sumter, McClellan rejected Grant’s application to join his staff.

Those who knew him better, the men of Galena, felt differently. They turned to Grant to help them organize a regiment of volunteers. “I would rather like a regiment,” he allowed, “yet there are few men really competent to command a thousand soldiers, and I doubt whether I’m one of them.” He was correct about most men, but wrong about himself. His brisk and uncomplaining efficiency made him a natural leader, and soon he attracted the attention of Illinois politicians, one of whom, Lincoln’s friend Representative Elihu Washburne, pressed for Grant’s promotion to brigadier general of volunteers. Grant assumed command over the army’s operations at Cairo, the strategic point at which the Ohio River flows into the Mississippi.

He had not been there long before he focused on a Confederate position, not far to the southeast, “of immence importance to the enemy, and of course correspondingly important for us,” as he later recalled. Just inside the Confederacy, the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers converged until they were only a dozen miles apart. These two waterways pierced the center of the Confederate line in the West and opened the way into deep Dixie. When, in September 1861, the Confederate general Leonidas Polk violated Kentucky’s announced neutrality by seizing the town of Columbus, Grant moved swiftly to occupy Paducah and Smithland at the mouths of the two rivers. Astutely, he announced that he was entering Kentucky in peace, solely to protect the citizens from Polk’s invasion. Thus, the young general placed the blame on the Rebels and grabbed two vital prizes, all without firing a shot. In retrospect, this strategic masterstroke marked him from the start as something special.

Now Rebel troops were at work building forts not far from Paducah to protect this natural gateway, and Grant was eager to strike before the defenses were made impregnable. Using Halleck’s feint toward Columbus as a chance to collect information on the condition of the forts, Grant sent a detachment led by Brigadier General C. F. Smith to have a look around. Smith reported that the two forts guarding the Tennessee were extremely vulnerable to attack. Fort Henry, on the eastern riverbank, was set on such low ground that some of its guns were flooded. A replacement for Fort Henry, called Fort Heiman, was set on high ground across the river, but it was unfinished and would be easy to capture.

Grant pictured the dominoes that might fall if he were able to take the two forts. Beyond them, the Tennessee River was navigable by steam-powered gunboats and troop transports all the way to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, where the boats could fire on the Memphis and Charleston Railroad, a vital artery for shuttling Confederate troops and supplies. Moreover, a decent road led twelve miles from Fort Henry to Fort Donelson, on the west bank of the Cumberland River. Grant could march his army over that road and attack Donelson, and once he captured that fort he could move without obstruction up the Cumberland River to Nashville, the center of supply for the entire Confederate line in the West. With his line slashed at the center, Polk would be outflanked in Columbus. He would have no choice but to fall back, and the Confederacy’s Gibraltar on the Mississippi would melt away.

Probably no other thread in the fabric of the rebellion would unravel so much with a single tug. Excited, Grant made his own reconnaissance of Fort Henry by steamboat. He concluded that the opportunity was now; the forts must be attacked quickly. Yet when he went to St. Louis to present his plan to Halleck, he got a frosty reception.

Halleck and Grant knew each other only in passing. They hadn’t overlapped at West Point, nor had they met during the Mexican War. Both men were posted to California in the 1850s, and they left the army just one day apart. But while Halleck was on his way to earning a fortune, Grant was spiraling downward. Temperamentally, they were opposites: a thinker versus a doer. Halleck’s view of war was academic. He was the author of a textbook on military strategy that translated into English the elegant martial science of Antoine-Henri Jomini, a Swiss nobleman who had endeavored to reduce Napoleon’s genius to mathematical principles. Grant’s principles were not so fancy. “The art of war is simple enough,” he once said. “Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike at him as hard as you can and as often as you can, and keep moving on.” Where Halleck worried about “too much haste,” Grant feared just the opposite. He had a natural appreciation of the fact that the enemy were men no better or worse than he. If he was scared, they must be scared, too; if he was tired, they must be tired, also; and if he was racing to bring new recruits up to readiness and struggling to get guns into their hands, then the enemy was surely unprepared and underequipped as well. Delay, therefore, would gain him nothing.

In St. Louis, Halleck received the eager Grant with such brusque disdain that the visitor could barely stammer out his ideas. As Grant described it in his memoirs, “I had not uttered many sentences before I was cut short as if my plan was preposterous.” Grant returned to Cairo dejected but determined—much like his commander in chief in faraway Washington.

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The victory at Mill Springs produced few lasting results. Brigadier General Thomas and his men chased the Rebels through the Cumberland Gap almost to Knoxville but, with too few troops to secure a supply line, Thomas had no choice but to pull back, leaving the loyalists of east Tennessee stranded.

In Washington, meanwhile, Lincoln continued to push McClellan. The general reluctantly appeared, as scheduled, for a war council on January 13, but he sat as sullen as a schoolhouse bully in the principal’s office. Lincoln asked the division commanders, McDowell and Franklin, to review the options for advancing the Army of the Potomac. McClellan refused to say anything until Meigs pulled a chair up close and whispered to the general in chief that his silence was clearly disrespectful.