More astonishing, according to Julian, “Lincoln himself did not think he had any right to know, but that, as he was not a military man, it was his duty to defer to General McClellan.” Bates strenuously objected to Lincoln’s deferential stance, urging him repeatedly to “organize a Staff of his own, and assume to be in fact, what he is in law,” the commander in chief, with a duty to “command the commanders.” This opinion, voiced by the conservative, trustworthy Bates, struck Lincoln forcefully. He borrowed General Halleck’s book on military strategy from the Library of Congress and told Browning a few days later that “he was thinking of taking the field himself.”
Though his statement may not have reflected a literal intention, Lincoln had clearly resolved that he must energize the army at once. “The bottom is out of the tub,” he confided in General Meigs, repeating a favorite phrase. The nearly bankrupt Treasury could no longer sustain the enormous expense of providing food, clothing, and shelter for hundreds of thousands of immobile soldiers. Without some forward progress, Chase told the president, he would get no additional funds from a discontented public. Meigs suggested that Lincoln convene a war council with his other generals to formulate a decisive course of action. Receiving news of this, McClellan suddenly recovered sufficiently to attend the meeting on the following day. Still reluctant to expose his plans, McClellan told Meigs that the president “can’t keep a secret, he will tell them to Tadd.”
Finally, Lincoln lost his vaunted patience. On January 27, 1862, he issued his famous General War Order No. 1, setting February 22 as “the day for a general movement of the Land and Naval forces of the United States against the insurgent forces.” Lincoln correctly believed that, given the North’s superior numbers, they should attack several rebel positions at the same time. The order prompted McClellan to submit his plans for a roundabout movement that developed into the Peninsula Campaign. The plan called for the troops to move by ship down the Potomac River to the Chesapeake Bay, with a turn into Urbanna on the south shore of the Rappahannock River. From there McClellan planned to march southwest to Richmond.
Lincoln, backed by Stanton and several generals, including McDowell, proposed a different strategy. Troops would march overland through nearby Manassas, pushing the rebel army farther and farther back toward Richmond, “destroying him by superior force.” This straightforward approach would shield Washington, keeping the Union Army between the capital and the Confederates. Under McClellan’s circuitous plan, it was feared that the Confederates might willingly sacrifice Richmond to capture Washington. If the South occupied the seat of the Union, foreign recognition of the Confederacy would undoubtedly follow. In the end, Lincoln reluctantly acquiesced to the Peninsula plan, but not before imposing a written order requiring that a sufficient force be left “in, and about Washington,” to keep the capital safe from attack.
February 22, the date designated for the advance, arrived and went with Lincoln deeply preoccupied by Willie’s death and Tad’s grievous illness. A disheartened Stanton noted that “there was no more sign of movement on the Potomac than there had been for three months before.” When he first took his cabinet position, Stanton later explained, he “was, and for months had been the sincere and devoted friend of General McClellan,” but he had quickly grown disenchanted. After less than two weeks as secretary of war, he told a friend that “while men are striving nobly in the West, the champagne and oysters on the Potomac must be stopped.” Stanton’s remark alluded to the sumptuous dinners McClellan hosted each evening for nearly two dozen guests, many of whom were prominent figures in Washington’s Southern-leaning society.
Stanton was further disgruntled when McClellan kept him waiting on a number of occasions. Unlike Lincoln, the proud war secretary did not ignore the arrogance of the general in chief. After one particularly galling experience, when he had been forced to wait for an hour after stopping by McClellan’s headquarters on his way to the War Department, Stanton angrily announced: “That will be the last time General McClellan will give either myself or the President the waiting snub.” A few weeks later, Stanton delivered orders to transfer the telegraph office from McClellan’s headquarters to a room adjoining his office in the War Department. Dispatches from the miraculous new system that connected Washington with army officials, camps, and forts throughout the entire North would no longer be funneled through McClellan. McClellan was furious, considering the transfer “his humiliation.” He had, indeed, lost significant influence, for the adjacent telegraph office not only allowed Stanton to exercise control over all military communications, but ensured that Lincoln would now spend many daily hours with his war secretary rather than his general in chief.
Still, McClellan had powerful allies in the cabinet, including the influential Montgomery Blair. The Democratic press largely credited the “young Napoleon” for the victories at Forts Henry and Donelson, as if Grant and the troops were merely puppets with McClellan pulling the strings from Washington. Stanton noted satirically that the image portrayed in the papers of a heroic McClellan, seated at the telegraph office, “organizing victory, and by sublime military combinations capturing Fort Donelson six hours after Grant and Smith had taken it,” was “a picture worthy of Punch.”
As it turned out, the victories in the West increased the pressure on McClellan to act. At last, on the weekend of March 8, the massive Army of the Potomac prepared to break camp. Anticipating the move, the Confederates began to pull their batteries back from Manassas to the banks of the Rappahannock. Hearing reports of the fallback, McClellan led his armies on a short foray to catch the remaining troops. But once there, he found to his great embarrassment that the entire Confederate force had already departed with their tents, supplies, and weapons. Still more humiliating, the supposedly impregnable fortifications that had deterred him for months turned out to be simply wooden logs painted black to resemble cannons. Had McClellan attacked anytime in the previous months, he would have had superiority in numbers and weapons.
The “Quaker gun” affair, as the stage-prop guns were called, provoked the wrath of radicals. “We shall be the scorn of the world,” Senator Fessenden wrote his wife. “It is no longer doubtful that General McClellan is utterly unfit for his position…. And yet the President will keep him in command.” The embarrassing situation should have been expected, Fessenden lamented, for “we went in for a railsplitter, and we have got one.” Echoing Fessenden’s dismay, the Committee on the Conduct of the War demanded McClellan’s resignation. When Lincoln asked who they proposed to replace McClellan, one of the committee members growled, “Anybody.” Lincoln’s reply was swift. “Anybody will do for you, but not for me. I must have somebody.”
Lincoln was convinced that something had to be done. On March 11, he issued a war order that relieved McClellan from his post as general in chief but left him in charge of the Army of the Potomac. Lincoln gave Halleck command of the Department of the Mississippi and, in a move that delighted the radicals, reinstated Frémont to take charge of a newly created Mountain Department. The post of general in chief was not filled, leaving Lincoln and Stanton to determine overall strategy. McClellan later recalled that he “learned through the public newspapers that [he] was displaced.” Claiming that “no one in authority had ever expressed to [him] the slightest disapprobation,” he was infuriated. Lincoln sent Ohio’s Governor Dennison to his camp to assure him that this was not a demotion. The president, Dennison explained, simply wanted General McClellan to focus his full energies on the all-important Army of the Potomac, whose actions would most likely determine the result of the war.
Lincoln anticipated that his postmaster general, Monty Blair, would stridently oppose McClellan’s removal from high command. The conservative Blair family were staunch McClellan supporters, a loyalty that would continue in the months ahead. Referring to his radical detractors, Francis Blair, Sr., warned the general “not to let the Carpet Knights in Congress,” who would sacrifice anyone’s blood but their own, “hurry or worry him into
doing anything.” Meanwhile, Washington gossip spread that Monty Blair was openly berating his fellow cabinet colleague Stanton for his failure to support McClellan. While conservatives vilified Stanton, radicals upbraided the Blairs as “preservers of slavery” for defending the inert McClellan at Stanton’s expense.
Already troubled by McClellan’s loss of central control, the powerful Blair family was enraged by Lincoln’s decision to reinstall Frémont in a position of command. Monty Blair privately considered Frémont’s appointment “unpalatable” and warned his father that it would be “mortifying to Frank,” who had been humiliated by his arrest and imprisonment by Frémont. Lizzie Blair told her husband it was “urged by Chase—& Stanton who has his revenges, too,” and that her brother Frank felt it intensely. Only four days earlier, with the backing of Democrats and conservative Republicans, Frank Blair had delivered a blistering attack against Frémont on the floor of the House. Frémont had come to Washington at the request of the Committee on the Conduct of the War. For weeks, radicals on the committee had pressured Lincoln to give “the Emancipator,” as they called Frémont, a second chance. Congressman Schuyler Colfax eloquently defended their position when he rose to the floor immediately after Frank Blair to deliver a scorching point-by-point repudiation of Blair’s address.
The bitter public quarrel between the Blairs and Frémont must have given Lincoln pause as he considered reinstating Frémont. Though the appointment would thrill the radicals, it might cost him the allegiance of the Blairs and thereby destroy the delicate balance he had worked to foster between the conservatives and the radicals. As it happened, a magnanimous gesture by Lincoln just six days before Frémont’s appointment played an important role in resolving the complex situation.
On March 5, Monty Blair had come to the White House in great distress. The New York Tribune had just published a private letter that he had written to Frémont the previous summer before the family feud had begun. In the letter, furnished by Frémont to the press in an attempt to embarrass Blair, the postmaster general had complained that Lincoln’s past affiliations had brought “him naturally not only to incline to the feeble policy of Whigs, but to give his confidence to such advisers. It costs me a great deal of labor to get anything done because of the inclination of mind on the part of the President.”
Elizabeth Blair described her brother’s meeting with Lincoln in a note to her husband. “Brother just took the letter up to the P. & asked him to read it.” Lincoln refused, “saying he did not intend to read it,” as it was published for that very purpose. Monty acknowledged “it was a foolish letter” that he deeply regretted. “It is due to you,” he told the president, “to make some amends by resigning my place…. I leave the whole thing to you & will do exactly as you wish.” The president had no desire to exact retribution or remove Blair. “Forget it,” he said, “& never mention or think of it again.”
A grateful Monty Blair immediately came to Lincoln’s defense regarding the Frémont appointment. Although he had not been consulted about the decision and realized his family would consider it a blatant affront to Frank, he told his father that he understood Lincoln’s need to arrest “the spread of factions in the country & prevent divisions at this time,” and for that reason, he thought “very well of it.” The conservative New York Times agreed, approving Frémont’s appointment as a necessary “concession to this craving for unity” and “the value of united counsels.” In his conduct of the war, the Times observed, Lincoln believed “tenaciously” in the “necessity of perfect unity of popular opinion and action” in the North.
More than any other cabinet member, Seward appreciated Lincoln’s peerless skill in balancing factions both within his administration and in the country at large. While radicals considered Seward a conservative influence on the president, in truth, he and the president were engaged in the same task of finding a middle position between the two extremes—the radical Republicans, who believed that freeing the slaves should be the primary goal of the war, and the conservative Democrats, who resisted any change in the status of the slaves and fought solely for the restoration of the Union. “Somebody must be in a position to mollify and moderate,” Seward told Weed. “That is the task of the P. and the S. of S.” In another letter to his old friend, Seward expressed great confidence in Lincoln. “The President is wise and practical,” he wrote. His trust in Lincoln was complete, inspiring faith in the eventual success of the Union cause.
From the outside, however, Seward was viewed by radicals as a malevolent influence on Lincoln. Count Gurowski despaired at Seward’s supposed ties with McClellan, Blair, and their allies in the conservative press. “Oh! Mr. Seward, Mr. Seward,” he queried, “why is your name to be recorded among the most ardent supporters of [McClellan’s] strategy?” In fact, already by the middle of March, Seward had lost his early faith in McClellan and wondered why Lincoln did not strip him of command. In a private conversation with a friend, Seward scorned McClellan’s inflated estimates of enemy strength, suggesting that the Union troops from New York State alone probably outnumbered all the Confederate forces in northern Virginia! Nonetheless, he refrained from airing his doubts in public.
In the wake of the “Quaker gun” affair, Lincoln’s confidence in McClellan had also eroded. While acknowledging that the general was a great “engineer,” Lincoln noted drolly that “he seems to have a special talent for developing a ‘stationary’ engine.” The more he studied the general, he confided to Browning, the more he realized that when “the hour for action approached he became nervous and oppressed with the responsibility and hesitated to meet the crisis.” For this reason, Lincoln had “given him peremptory orders to move.” Finally, twenty-four hours before Lincoln’s deadline, McClellan’s massive army of nearly a quarter of a million men left the base camps around Washington and headed toward the Potomac, where more than four hundred ships had gathered to carry them to Fort Monroe in Hampton Roads, Virginia. Parading to the refrains of regimental bands, with rifles on their shoulders and new equipment on their backs, the high-spirited, well-disciplined troops presented a sight, one diarist noted, such as “the eye of man has seldom seen.” Before the army set sail, McClellan delivered an emotional address. “I will bring you now face to face with the rebels,” he told his beloved troops, “ever bear in mind that my fate is linked with yours…. I am to watch over you as a parent over his children, and you know that your General loves you from the depths of his heart.”
When most of the force had reached Fort Monroe, Stanton later recalled, “information was given to me by various persons that there was great reason to fear that no adequate force had been left to defend the Capital,” despite Lincoln’s “explicit order that Washington should, by the judgment of all the commanders of Army corps, be left entirely secure.” Stanton referred the matter to Lorenzo Thomas, the adjutant general, who, after surveying the circumstance, concluded that the president’s order had most definitely not been obeyed. McClellan had left behind “less than 20,000 raw recruits with not a single organized brigade,” a force utterly incapable of defending Washington from sudden attack. Enraged, Stanton carried the damning report to the president at midnight. Lincoln promptly withdrew General McDowell’s 1st Corps from McClellan’s command so that Washington would be protected. That withdrawal, Stanton later recalled, “provoked [McClellan’s] wrath, and the wrath of his friends.”
With immense forces still at his disposal, McClellan advanced from Fort Monroe to the outskirts of Yorktown, roughly fifty miles from Richmond. Once again, mistakenly insisting that the rebel force outnumbered his, McClellan kept his army in a state of perpetual preparation. His engineers spent precious weeks constructing earthworks so his big guns could quash rebel defenses before the infantry assault. On April 6, Lincoln telegraphed McClellan: “You now have over one hundred thousand troops…. I think you better break the enemies’ line from York-town to Warwick River, at once. They will probably use time, as advantageously as you can.” The following
day, McClellan scorned the president’s admonition, informing his wife that if Lincoln wanted the enemy line broken, “he had better come & do it himself.”
Still, McClellan persisted in his baffling inaction. He notified Stanton that “the enemy batteries are stronger” than anticipated. Stanton was livid: “You were sent on purpose to take strong batteries,” he reminded McClellan. Later that day, Lincoln telegraphed the general, warning that further delay would only allow the enemy to summon reinforcements from other theaters. “It is indispensable to you that you strike a blow,” Lincoln advised his commander on April 9. “The country will not fail to note—is now noting—that the present hesitation to move upon an intrenched enemy, is but the story of Manassas repeated. I beg to assure you that I have never written you, or spoken to you, in greater kindness of feeling than now…. But you must act.”
Two more weeks passed without any sign of movement. “Do not misunderstand the apparent inaction here,” McClellan wired Lincoln; “not a day, not an hour has been lost, works have been constructed that may almost be called gigantic—roads built through swamps & difficult ravines, material brought up, batteries built.” In another letter to his wife, he rationalized his continuing delay with the dubious contention that the more troops the enemy gathered in Yorktown, “the more decisive the results will be.” A few days later, McClellan formulated yet another justification for postponement, arguing that he had been “compelled to change plans & become cautious” without McDowell’s 1st Corps that had been taken from him to protect Washington. This left him “unexpectedly weakened & with a powerful enemy strongly entrenched in my front.” Therefore, he was not “answerable for the delay of victory.”