Lincoln

N >> Nathaniel Wright Stephenson >> Lincoln


McClellan made no concessions to the temper of the hour. With Lincoln,
his relations at first were cordial. Always he was punctiliously
respectful to "His Excellency." It is plain that at first Lincoln liked
him and that his liking was worn away slowly. It is equally plain that
Lincoln did not know how to deal with him. The tendency to pose was so
far from anything in Lincoln's make-up that it remained for him, whether
in McClellan or another, unintelligible. That humility which was so
conspicuous in this first period of his rule, led him to assume with his
General a modest, even an appealing tone. The younger man began to ring
false by failing to appreciate it. He even complained of it in a letter
to his wife. The military ritualist would have liked a more Olympian
superior. And there is no denying that his head was getting turned.
Perhaps he had excuse. The newspapers printed nonsensical editorials
praising "the young Napoleon." His mail was filled with letters urging
him to carry things with a high hand; disregard, if necessary, the
pusillanimous civil government, and boldly "save the country." He had
so little humor that he could take this stuff seriously. Among all the
foolish letters which the executors of famous men have permitted to see
the light of publicity, few outdo a letter of McClellan's in which he
confided to his wife that he was willing to become dictator, should that
be the only way out, and then, after saving his country, to perish.(3)

In this lordly mood of the melodramatic, he gradually--probably without
knowing it--became inattentive to the President. Lincoln used to go
to his house to consult him, generally on foot, clad in very ordinary
clothes. He was known to sit in McClellan's library "rather unnoticed"
awaiting the General's pleasure.(4)

At last the growing coolness of McClellan went so far that an event
occurred which Hay indignantly set down in his diary: "I wish here
to record what I consider a portent of evil to come. The President,
Governor Seward and I went over to McClellan's house tonight. The
servant at the door said the General was at the wedding of Colonel
Wheaton at General Buell's and would soon return. We went in and after
we had waited about an hour, McClellan came in, and without paying
particular attention to the porter who told him the President was
waiting to see him, went up-stairs, passing the door of the room where
the President and the Secretary of State were seated. They waited about
half an hour, and sent once more a servant to tell the General they were
there; and the answer came that the General had gone to bed.

"I merely record this unparalleled insolence of epaulettes without
comment It is the first indication I have yet seen of the threatened
supremacy of the military authorities. Coming home, I spoke to the
President about the matter, but he seemed not to have noticed it
specially, saying it were better at this time not to be making points of
etiquette and personal dignity."(5)

Did ever a subordinate, even a general, administer to a superior a more
astounding snub? To Lincoln in his selfless temper, it was Only a detail
in his problem of getting the army into action. What room for personal
affronts however gross in a mood like his? To be sure he ceased going to
McClellan's house, and thereafter summoned McClellan to come to him, but
no change appeared in the tone of his intercourse with the General. "I
will hold McClellan's horse," said he, "if he will win me victories."(6)

All this while, the two were debating plans of campaign and McClellan
was revealing-as we now see, though no one saw it at the time-the deep
dread of responsibility that was destined to paralyze him as an active
general. He was never ready. Always, there must be more preparation,
more men, more this, more that.

In January, 1862, Lincoln, grown desperate because of hope deferred,
made the first move of a sort that was to be lamentably frequent the
next six months. He went over the head of the Commanding General,
and, in order to force a result, evoked a power not recognized in
the military scheme of things. By this time the popular adulation of
McClellan was giving place to a general imitation of the growling of the
Jacobins, now well organized in the terrible Committee and growing each
day more and more hostile to the Administration. Lincoln had besought
McClellan to take into account the seriousness of this rising tide of
opposition.(7) His arguments made no impression. McClellan would not
recognize the political side of war. At last, partly to allay the
popular clamor, partly to force McClellan into a corner, Lincoln
published to the country a military program. He publicly instructed the
Commanding General to put all his forces in movement on all fronts, on
Washington's birthday.(8)

From this moment the debate between the President and the General
with regard to plans of campaign approached the nature of a dispute.
McClellan repeated his demand for more time in which to prepare. He
objected to the course of advance which the President wished him to
pursue. Lincoln, seeing the situation first of all as a political
problem, grounded his thought upon two ideas neither of which was shared
by McClellan: the idea that the supreme consideration was the safety
of Washington; the resultant idea that McClellan should move directly
south, keeping his whole army constantly between Washington and the
enemy. McClellan wished to treat Washington as but one important detail
in his strategy; he had a grandiose scheme for a wide flanking movement,
for taking the bulk of his army by sea to the coast of Virginia, and
thus to draw the Confederate army homeward for a duel to the death under
the walls of Richmond. Lincoln, neither then nor afterward more than an
amateur in strategy, was deeply alarmed by this bold mode of procedure.
His political instinct told him that if there was any slip and
Washington was taken, even briefly, by the Confederates, the game was
up. He was still further alarmed when he found that some of the eider
generals held views resembling his own.(9) To his modest, still groping
mind, this was a trying situation. In the President lay the ultimate
responsibility for every move the army should make. And whose advice
should he accept as authoritative? The first time he asked himself that
question, such peace of mind as had survived the harassing year 1861
left him, not to return for many a day.

At this moment of crises, occurred one of his keenest personal
afflictions. His little son Willie sickened and died. Lincoln's relation
to his children was very close, very tender. Many anecdotes show this
boy frolicking about the White House, a licensed intruder everywhere.
Another flood of anecdotes preserve the stupefying grief of his father
after the child's death. Of these latter, the most extreme which portray
Lincoln toward the close of February so unnerved as to be incapable of
public duty, may be dismissed as apocryphal. But there can be no
doubt that his unhappiness was too great for the vain measurement
of descriptive words; that it intensified the nervous mood which had
already possessed him; that anxiety, deepening at times into terrible
alarm, became his constant companion.

In his dread and sorrow, his dilemma grew daily more intolerable.
McClellan had opposed so stoutly the Washington birthday order that
Lincoln had permitted him to ignore it. He was still wavering which
advice to take, McClellan's or the elder generals'. To remove McClellan,
to try at this critical moment some other general, did not occur to him
as a rational possibility. But somehow he felt he must justify himself
to himself for yielding to McClellan' s views. In his zeal to secure
some judgment more authoritative than his own, he took a further step
along the dangerous road of going over the Commander's head, of bringing
to bear upon him influences not strictly included in the military
system. He required McClellan to submit his plan to a council of his
general officers. Lincoln attended this council and told the generals
"he was not a military man and therefore would be governed by the
opinion of a majority."(10) The council decided in McClellan's favor by
a vote of eight to four. This was a disappointment to Lincoln. So firm
was his addiction to the overland route that he could not rest content
with the council's decision. Stanton urged him to disregard it, sneering
that the eight who voted against him were McClellan's creatures, his
"pets." But Lincoln would not risk going against the majority of
the council. "We are civilians," said he, "we should justly be held
responsible for any disaster if we set up our opinions against those of
experienced military men in the practical management of a campaign."(11)

Nevertheless, from this quandary, in which his reason forced him to do
one thing while all his sensibilities protested, he extricated himself
in a curious way. Throughout the late winter he had been the object of
a concerted attack from Stanton and the Committee. The Committee had
tacitly annexed Stanton. He conferred with them confidentially. At each
important turn of events, he and they always got together in a secret
powwow. As early as February twentieth, when Lincoln seemed to be
breaking down with grief and anxiety, one of those secret conferences
of the high conspirators ended in a determination to employ all their
forces, direct and indirect, to bring about McClellan's retirement. They
were all victims of that mania of suspicion which was the order of
the day. "A majority of the Committee," wrote its best member, long
afterward when he had come to see things in a different light, "strongly
suspected that General McClellan was a traitor." Wade vented his spleen
in furious words about "King McClellan." Unrestrained by Lincoln's
anguish, the Committee demanded a conference a few days after his son's
death and threatened an appeal from President to Congress if he did not
quickly force McClellan to advance.(12)

All this while the Committee was airing another grievance. They clamored
to have the twelve divisions of the army of the Potomac grouped into
corps. They gave as their motive, military efficiency. And perhaps
they thought they meant it. But there was a cat in the bag which
they carefully tried to conceal. The generals of divisions formed two
distinct groups, the elder ones who did not owe their elevation to
McClellan and the younger ones who did. The elder generals, it happened,
sympathized generally with the Committee in politics, or at least
did not sympathize with McClellan. The younger generals reflected the
politics of their patron. And McClellan was a Democrat, a hater of
the Vindictives, unsympathetic with Abolition. Therefore, the mania of
suspicion being in full flood, the Committee would believe no good of
McClellan when he opposed advancing the elder generals to the rank of
corps commanders. His explanation that he "wished to test them in the
field," was poohpoohed. Could not any good Jacobin see through that! Of
course, it was but an excuse to hold back the plums until he could drop
them into the itching palms of those wicked Democrats, his "pets." Why
should not the good men and true, elder and therefore better soldiers,
whose righteousness was so well attested by their political leanings,
why should not they have the places of power to which their rank
entitled them?

Hitherto, however, Lincoln had held out against the Committee's demand
and bad refused to compel McClellan to reorganize his army against his
will. He now observed that in the council which cast the die against the
overland route, the division between the two groups of generals, what
we may call the Lincoln generals and the McClellan generals, was sharply
evident. The next day he issued a general order which organized the army
of the Potomac into corps, and promoted to the rank of corps commanders,
those elder generals whose point of view was similar to his own.(13)
Thereafter, any reference of crucial matters to a council of general
officers, would mean submitting it, not to a dozen commanders of
divisions with McClellan men in the majority, but to four or five
commanders of corps none of whom was definitely of the McClellan
faction. Thus McClellan was virtually put under surveillance of an
informal war council scrutinizing his course from the President's
point of view. It was this reduced council of the subordinates, as will
presently appear, that made the crucial decision of the campaign.

On the same day Lincoln issued another general order accepting
McClellan's plan for a flanking movement to the Virginia coast.(14) The
Confederate lines at this time ran through Manassas--the point
Lincoln wished McClellan to strike. It was to be known later that the
Confederate General gave to Lincoln's views the high endorsement
of assuming that they were the inevitable views that the Northern
Commander, if he knew his business, would act upon. Therefore, he had
been quietly preparing to withdraw his army to more defensible positions
farther South. By a curious coincidence, his "strategic retreat"
occurred immediately after McClellan had been given authority to do what
he liked. On the ninth of March it was known at Washington that Manassas
had been evacuated. Whereupon, McClellan's fatal lack of humor permitted
him to make a great blunder. The man who had refused to go to Manassas
while the Confederates were there, marched an army to Manassas the
moment he heard that they were gone--and then marched back again.
This performance was instantly fixed upon for ridicule as McClellan's
"promenade to Manassas."

To Lincoln the news of the promenade seemed both a vindication of his
own plan and crushing evidence that if he had insisted on his plan, the
Confederate army would have been annihilated, the war in one cataclysm
brought to an end. He was ridden, as most men were, by the delusion
of one terrific battle that was to end all. In a bitterness of
disappointment, his slowly tortured spirit burst into rage. The
Committee was delighted. For once, they approved of him. The next act
of this man, ordinarily so gentle, seems hardly credible. By a stroke
of his pen, he stripped McClellan of the office of Commanding General,
reduced him to the rank of mere head of a local army, the army of
the Potomac; furthermore, he permitted him to hear of his degradation
through the heartless medium of the daily papers.(15) The functions of
Commanding General were added to the duties of the Secretary of
War. Stanton, now utterly merciless toward McClellan, instantly took
possession of his office and seized his papers, for all the world as if
he were pouncing upon the effects of a malefactor. That McClellan was
not yet wholly spoiled was shown by the way he received this blow. It
was the McClellan of the old days, the gallant gentleman of the year
1860, not the poseur of 1861, who wrote at once to Lincoln making no
complaint, saying that his services belonged to his country in whatever
capacity they might be required.

Again a council of subordinates was invoked to determine the next move.
McClellan called together the newly made corps commanders and obtained
their approval of a variation of his former plan. He now proposed to use
Fortress Monroe as a base, and thence conduct an attack upon Richmond.
Again, though with a touch of sullenness very rare in Lincoln, the
President acquiesced. But he added a condition to McClellan's plan by
issuing positive orders, March thirteenth, that it should not be carried
out unless sufficient force was left at Washington to render the city
impregnable.

During the next few days the Committee must have been quite satisfied
with the President. For him, he was savage. The normal Lincoln, the man
of immeasurable mercy, had temporarily vanished. McClellan's blunder had
touched the one spring that roused the tiger in Lincoln. By letting slip
a chance to terminate the war--as it seemed to that deluded Washington
of March, 1862--McClellan had converted Lincoln from a brooding
gentleness to an incarnation of the last judgment. He told Hay he
thought that in permitting McClellan to retain any command, he had shown
him "very great kindness."(16) Apparently, he had no consciousness that
he had been harsh in the mode of McClellan's abatement, no thought of
the fine manliness of McClellan's reply.

During this period of Lincoln's brief vengefulness, Stanton thought that
his time for clearing scores with McClellan had come. He even picked out
the man who was to be rushed over other men's heads to the command of
the army of the Potomac. General Hitchcock, an accomplished soldier
of the regular army, a grandson of Ethan Allen, who had grown old in
honorable service, was summoned to Washington, and was "amazed"
by having plumped at him the question, would he consent to succeed
McClellan? Though General Hitchcock was not without faults--and there
is an episode in his later relations with McClellan which his biographer
discreetly omits--he was a modest man. He refused to consider Stanton's
offer. But he consented to become the confidential adviser of the War
Office. This was done after an interview with Lincoln who impressed on
Hitchcock his sense of a great responsibility and of the fact that he
"had no military knowledge" and that he must have advice.(17) Out of
this congested sense of helplessness in Lincoln, joined with the new
labors of the Secretary of War as executive head of all the armies, grew
quickly another of those ill-omened, extra-constitutional war councils,
one more wheel within the wheels, that were all doing their part to
make the whole machine unworkable; distributing instead of concentrating
power. This new council which came to be known as the Army Board, was
made up of the heads of the Bureaus of the War Department with the
addition of Hitchcock as "Advising General." Of the temper of the Army
Board, composed as it was entirely of the satellites of Stanton, a
confession in Hitchcock's diary speaks volumes. On the evening of
the first day of their new relation, Stanton poured out to him such a
quantity of oral evidence of McClellan's "incompetency" as to make this
new recruit for anti-McClellanism "feel positively sick."(18)

By permitting this added source of confusion among his advisers, Lincoln
treated himself much as he had already treated McClellan. By going over
McClellan's head to take advice from his subordinates he had put the
General on a leash; now, by setting Hitchcock and the experts in the
seat of judgment, he virtually, for a short while, put himself on a
leash. Thus had come into tacit but real power three military councils
none of which was recognized as such by law--the Council of the
Subordinates behind McClellan; the Council of the Experts behind
Lincoln; the Council of the Jacobins, called The Committee, behind them
all.

The political pressure on Lincoln now changed its tack. Its unfailing
zeal to discredit McClellan assumed the form of insisting that he had a
secret purpose in waiting to get his army away from Washington, that he
was scheming to leave the city open to the Confederates, to "uncover"
it, as the soldiers said. By way of focussing the matter on a definite
issue, his enemies demanded that he detach from his army and assign
to the defense of Washington, a division which was supposed to be
peculiarly efficient General Blenker had recruited a sort of "foreign
legion," in which were many daring adventurers who had seen service in
European armies. Blenker's was the division demanded. So determined was
the pressure that Lincoln yielded. However, his brief anger had blown
itself out. To continue vengeful any length of time was for Lincoln
impossible. He was again the normal Lincoln, passionless, tender,
fearful of doing an injustice, weighed down by the sense of
responsibility. He broke the news about Blenker in a personal note to
McClellan that was almost apologetic. "I write this to assure you that I
did so with great pain, understanding that you would wish it otherwise.
If you could know the full pressure of the case, I am confident you
would justify it."(19) In conversation, he assured McClellan that no
other portion of his army should be taken from him.(20)

The change in Lincoln's mood exasperated Stanton. He called on his pals
in the Committee for another of those secret confabulations in which
both he and they delighted. Speaking with scorn of Lincoln's return to
magnanimity, he told them that the President had "gone back to his first
love," the traitor McClellan. Probably all those men who wagged their
chins in that conference really believed that McClellan was aiming to
betray them. One indeed, Julian, long afterward had the largeness of
mind to confess his fault and recant. The rest died in their absurd
delusion, maniacs of suspicion to the very end. At the time all of them
laid their heads together--for what purpose? Was it to catch McClellan
in a trap?

Meanwhile, in obedience to Lincoln's orders of March thirteenth,
McClellan drew up a plan for the defense of Washington. As Hitchcock was
now in such high feather, McClellan sent his plan to the new favorite of
the War Office, for criticism. Hitchcock refused to criticize, and
when McClellan's chief of staff pressed for "his opinion, as an old and
experienced officer," Hitchcock replied that McClellan had had ample
opportunity to know what was needed, and persisted in his refusal.(21)
McClellan asked no further advice and made his arrangements to suit
himself. On April first he took boat at Alexandria for the front. Part
of his army had preceded him. The remainder-except the force he had
assigned to the defense of Washington-was speedily to follow.

With McClellan's departure still another devotee of suspicion moves
to the front of the stage. This was General Wadsworth. Early in March,
Stanton had told McClellan that he wanted Wadsworth as commander of the
defenses of Washington. McClellan had protested. Wadsworth was not a
military man. He was a politician turned soldier who had tried to be
senator from New York and failed; tried to be governor and failed; and
was destined to try again to be governor, and again to fail. Why should
such a person be singled out to become responsible for the safety of the
capital? Stanton's only argument was that the appointment of Wadsworth
was desirable for political reasons. He added that it would be made
whether McClellan liked it or not. And made it was.(22) Furthermore,
Wadsworth, who had previously professed friendship for McClellan,
promptly joined the ranks of his enemies. Can any one doubt, Stanton
being Stanton, mad with distrust of McClellan, that Wadsworth was fully
informed of McClellan's opposition to his advancement?

On the second of April Wadsworth threw a bomb after the vanishing
McClellan, then aboard his steamer somewhere between Washington and
Fortress Monroe. Wadsworth informed Stanton that McClellan had not
carried out the orders of March thirteenth, that the force he had
left at Washington was inadequate to its safety, that the capital was
"uncovered." Here was a chance for Stanton to bring to bear on Lincoln
both those unofficial councils that were meddling so deeply in the
control of the army. He threw this firebrand of a report among his
satellites of the Army Board and into the midst of the Committee.2(3)

It is needless here to go into the furious disputes that ensued-the
accusations, the recriminations, the innuendoes! McClellan stoutly
insisted that he had obeyed both the spirit and the letter of March
thirteenth; that Washington was amply protected. His enemies shrieked
that his statements were based on juggled figures; that even if
the number of soldiers was adequate, the quality and equipment were
wretched; in a word that he lied. It is a shame-less controversy
inconceivable were there not many men in whom politics and prejudice far
outweighed patriotism. In all this, Hitchcock was Stanton's trump card.
He who had refused to advise McClellan, did not hesitate to denounce
him. In response to a request from Stanton, he made a report sustaining
Wadsworth. The Committee summoned Wadsworth before it; he read them
his report to Stanton; reiterated its charges, and treated them to some
innuendoes after their own hearts, plainly hinting that McClellan could
have crushed the Confederates at Manassas if he had wished to.(24)

A wave of hysteria swept the Committee and the War Office and beat
fiercely upon Lincoln. The Board charged him to save the day by mulcting
the army of the Potomac of an entire corps, retaining it at Washington.
Lincoln met the Board in a long and troubled conference. His anxious
desire to do all he could for McClellan was palpable.(25) But what,
under the circumstances, could he do? Here was this new device for the
steadying of his judgment, this Council of Experts, singing the same old
tune, assuring him that McClellan was not to be trusted. Although in the
reaction from his momentary vengefulness he had undoubtedly swung far
back toward recovering confidence in McClellan, did he dare--painfully
conscious as he was that he "had no military knowledge"--did he dare go
against the Board, disregard its warning that McClellan's arrangements
made of Washington a dangling plum for Confederate raiders to snatch
whenever they pleased. His bewilderment as to what McClellan was really
driving at came back upon him in full force. He reached at last the
dreary conclusion that there was nothing for it but to let the new wheel
within the wheels take its turn at running the machine. Accepting the
view that McClellan had not kept faith on the basis of the orders of
March thirteenth, Lincoln "after much consideration" set aside his own
promise to McClellan and authorized the Secretary of War to detain a
full corps.(26)