The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost—From Ancient Greece to Iraq (18 page)

Since the states mustered their own militias to be incorporated into the Union army, a Copperhead legislature or governor could, in theory, insidiously curtail funding and hold back on its required military contributions. And while the Copperheads themselves, or their quiet sympathizers, did not have the votes to win national office, their support for a McClellan ticket might put the Democratic anti-Lincoln forces in power. That was especially likely if the Republicans were to continue to remain deeply divided, as news from the front got worse. The pulse of the war in Virginia governed all the politics of spring and summer. In general, as mostly westerners, the Copperheads were as much in sympathy with the enemy rural South, as with the supposedly allied industrial North with its fervent abolitionists. At other times, the more extreme Copperheads dreamed of seceding to form their own new western republic.

Well aside from the November election to come, the House of Lincoln was collapsing in every direction. First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln had exceeded her White House decoration budget by several thousand dollars. Worse still, she had diverted public funds to her own use through fraudulent bookkeeping. For most of the year, Mary Lincoln was desperately and stealthily seeking wealthy supporters to cover her debts in exchange for her husband’s political patronage—offenses that would have led to impeachment attempts against a contemporary president. Graft was not far from the president himself.
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Lincoln was not in a good state of mind. In February, he told his close
friend, the dying Illinois congressman and staunch abolitionist Owen Lovejoy, “This war is eating my life out. I have a strong impression that I shall not live to see it through.” Lincoln may have suffered a mild case of smallpox in 1863, and not have regained his full strength. Neither Lincoln nor his wife, Mary, had ever quite recovered from the deaths of two of the four Lincoln sons in childhood. Disaster at the front only added to the burdens of personal tragedy and ill health.

There certainly had been disturbing incidents all year long, like the mysterious arson attack on the White House stables in February. A few months later there was an apparent foiled assassination attempt, as well as constant rumors of Confederate-inspired kidnapping plots. Little wonder that Lincoln seemed to go into periods of deep depression—finally to the point of having his cabinet sign letters of resignation that he placed in a White House safe.

If in early 1864, Lincoln had feared that he would not be renominated by the Republicans, after his June nomination he was increasingly convinced that he would not be reelected. By July the president was out on the ramparts at Fort Stevens during Jubal Early’s Washington raid, almost intentionally, it seemed, exposing himself to Confederate sniper fire.
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Then there was the press. By early 1864, the attacks transcended political opposition and centered on Lincoln himself, calling him a naïf, incompetent, tyrant, butcher, baboon, freak—and far worse. The New York newspapers, other than the Republican
Times,
were the most vicious. Horace Greeley’s
New York Tribune
simply reflected the pulse of the battlefield: a rare Union victory in 1864 won from him a sudden endorsement of Lincoln, while the increasing bad news from Virginia earned hysterical condemnation of the administration—often within a few weeks of earlier praise. Greeley, in the manner of a modern electronic commentator, was notorious not just for his fickleness, but also for the vehemence with which his present judgments contradicted his past assertions. Any rumor of military setback seemed to prompt a call for Salmon Chase, John C. Frémont, or Ulysses S. Grant to save the Union from Lincoln’s ineptness and to run for the presidency on a united Republican victory ticket. Greeley himself spent the summer intriguing with McClellanites. Finally he was meeting even with Confederate emissaries in Canada in hopes of ending the war immediately.

The
New York Herald
under James Gordon Bennett was the largest newspaper in the North and by 1862 not so unpredictable as the
Tribune
—it blasted Lincoln without exception. Along with the less influential Manton Marble’s pro-Democrat
New York World,
Bennett could influence critical public opinion in the banking capital of the North, whose financiers’ support for Lincoln’s war was critical. In an age without the cell phone, Internet, e-mail, radio, or television, the New York papers, along with the monthly and weekly magazines and perhaps the
Chicago Tribune,
enjoyed almost a monopoly on the news. The only reason why the press had not yet prevented Lincoln from being renominated was that Union politics were at an impasse: as yet, no Republican or independent candidate had offered any better plan to stop the killing without rendering meaningless the past sacrifice of tens of thousands of Union soldiers. Continue the war and there would be more Gettysburgs; quit it and the hallowed sacrifice of Gettysburg would be in vain. Defeating a Southern army was one thing; defeating and occupying a vast area the size of Western Europe was quite another.
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Lincoln’s fractious cabinet was more bitterly divided than ever. His political wisdom of early 1861 of bringing in a “team of rivals” of presidential hopefuls to keep an eye on their ambitions had come to seem like folly as the cabinet fell into a sort of chaos. Secretaries such as Edward Bates (attorney general), Montgomery Blair (postmaster general), Salmon P. Chase (secretary of the treasury), William Seward (secretary of state), and Edwin Stanton (secretary of war) were either intriguing with Lincoln’s opponents, plotting to take Lincoln’s job, fighting with one another, or indiscreetly lamenting to the press that their rustic commander in chief simply was not up to the task of winning a war in the east. The cabinet secretaries also knew that no American president had managed to be reelected since Andrew Jackson in 1832. Conventional wisdom certainly suggested that the amateur Lincoln was not the sort to pull off what others far more competent and experienced had not for more than thirty years.
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Things got even worse. Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase, a longtime influential abolitionist and increasingly disloyal to his boss, for months had been politicking on the sly with Radical Republicans, the most extreme wing of the party. Chase dreamed of wresting the nomination from Lincoln and winning the November election against the Peace Democrats on a more fiery platform of immediate universal abolition and a harsh occupation to be imposed on the rebel Confederates. Some of Chase’s radical supporters wanted even more—perhaps a sort of permanent military subjugation and occupation of the South, or even repopulating
the defunct Confederacy by poor Northerners, freed Southern blacks, and new immigrants. If more conservative critics wished a scaling down of the war, abolitionists urged a renewed existential struggle, one in which the culture of the losers would be obliterated, that of the winners made all-powerful.

Draconian punishment for Southern secession was also a backdoor way for abolitionists to gain permanent control of the U.S. Congress: Ex-Confederates would be denied voting rights; freedmen, as the sole representatives from a reconstructed South, would vote their thanks for Northern abolitionists by joining a now entrenched and permanent radical Republican majority. Both Northern Democrats and Republicans agreed that Lincoln was without a constituency—unable to offer leadership necessary to win the war, bring the slaughter to a close, or create the political consensus to slog on.

Only the unseemliness of a cabinet minister openly scheming against his own president had derailed Salmon Chase’s efforts to subvert Lincoln. By June, Lincoln finally had enough and accepted Chase’s pro forma resignation. In a near state of shock at the acceptance of his latest offer to resign—his three previous ones had been refused—the treasury secretary at last left the administration. But the evolving threat from the Radical Republicans far transcended Chase’s own presidential aspirations. The abolitionist cause had already been taken up by the frontier hero and “pathfinder” John C. Frémont. The erratic Frémont was nominated on May 31 by a breakaway group of radical Republicans and war Democrats under the banner of the Radical Democracy Party. The unstable and conniving Frémont was mostly a symbolic protest presidential candidate. Yet he, too, might do his part to so weaken Lincoln and divide the Republicans that McClellan could win by uniting the Democrats.

While Chase, Frémont, and McClellan schemed on, Lincoln was worried about other Union generals coming to the fore. At various times, he sent out feelers to Ulysses S. Grant’s friends to ensure that the once wildly popular general had no presidential aspirations before he was given the reins of all Union armies in March. Lincoln even inquired whether the incompetent, but still influential, radical General Benjamin Butler might be interested in replacing Hannibal Hamlin as his vice president. Hamlin, in fact, by June would not be renominated—and perhaps felt relieved. He had little influence with Lincoln anyway. Now, just in time, he could exit what seemed to be a losing ticket in the autumn.

By February 1864, flyers began circulating—the most prominent were entitled “The Next Presidential Election” and “The Pomeroy Circular”—listing high-ranking Republicans who had gone on record opposing Lincoln’s nomination. These clumsy broadsides would not win Salmon Chase the Republican nomination. But once more, they contributed to the insidious narrative of a beleaguered Lincoln, whose former friends and supporters were as hostile as his proven enemies. In July, Lincoln pocket-vetoed the notorious Wade-Davis bill. The measure was a clumsy attempt to ensure a Radical Republican blueprint for postwar reconstruction that sought to destroy the remnants of antebellum Southern culture. By August there was a massive pro-McClellan rally in New York City. Observers noted that the worse the news of the war became, the better “Little Mac” looked.
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Lincoln reasoned that, in lieu of a dramatic Union victory, he needed either a Radical Republican on the ticket to quiet the base, or, contrarily, a Southern Union loyalist who could facilitate reconstruction and win crossover Democratic voters. Barring that, perhaps a loyal, successful general would do—to weaken either his right or left flank and restore his sinking military credibility. After the firing of Chase, the selection of the nondescript Andrew Johnson as his new vice presidential candidate pleased very few.
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Despite the criticism from the radical abolitionists, Abraham Lincoln himself had not changed much. He had not altered fundamentally his recent intent of serially abolishing slavery everywhere in the Union after the war in the interest of reuniting the country. But he had also not won the war after more than three years, and he could not adequately explain, in military terms, how he hoped to achieve victory as 1864 wore on—or why, as the South grew weaker, Union casualties mounted in each new month of the year. The country was $2 billion in debt. It was spending over $2 million a day on the war. Lincoln had desperate plans to call up another half a million northerners, in part by providing enough cash bonuses and incentives to ensure that veterans reenlisted after their three-year commitments expired. He was gambling on one final big surge to win in 1864 before his own political support vanished for good. A dramatic, timely victory by Grant would prove Lincoln and his agenda inspired after all, even as one more bloody defeat like Cold Harbor would confirm his incompetence.

From the beginning of 1864, Northern fortunes had deteriorated on the battlefield. Since spring 1861, about a quarter million Union soldiers
had died in combat or from disease; almost two million Northern men had been taken from their jobs and enrolled in the Union Army. By 1864, a disturbing number of Northern voters no longer had any strong ideological beliefs other than to ally themselves with the winning political side—and the suspicion grew that by August 1864, Lincoln could not afford the mounting costs to defeat the Confederacy. From that one fact of military deadlock grew all of the doubts that Lincoln would not be president after March 1865.
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In August, another frequent visitor to the White House, the Pennsylvanian Alexander McClure, remarked of his visit with the president, “His face, always sad in repose, was then saddened until it became a picture of despair.” Still the war went on. Yet the public did not appreciate that the advantages were still with the Union. No foreign powers had recognized the Confederacy. The Southern economy was slowly being strangled. The Union was producing new armies and war matériel at an astonishing rate—even as the North still could not defeat Lee’s army, and was still having little luck on the battlefield beyond Virginia.
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The South saw that the rising antiwar mood of 1864 up north was the key to victory. If large areas of Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Virginia were under Northern control, the majority of the Confederacy, especially its large cities, was still unoccupied. Paradoxically, while the Confederacy was robbed of agricultural land, manpower, and some industry in its lost territories, the South also had more men to defend less ground, while the Union was forced to occupy and hold vast swaths of territory—the age-old military paradox that so plagued invaders from Napoleon and Hitler in Russia to the Koreans and Chinese who sought to cross the 38th Parallel and reach Pusan. The emperor Justinian may have had grand visions of a new Mediterranean Rome. Yet the reality for him as well was that more occupied land had to be guarded by always fewer troops.

The Confederacy—even in its reduced size, still far larger than most Western European nations—grasped that its new hope was to make the struggle so costly to northerners that various peace parties would defeat Lincoln in 1864 and vote in reasonable compromisers who would sue for an armistice. Riots and social chaos followed from the voracious manpower needs of Union generals, while the South had somehow, with far
less domestic violence, managed to call up seven hundred thousand despite its much smaller population base.