The scathing document, written in Stanton’s distinctive back-sloping script with words added and erased, declared that the undersigned were “unwilling to be accessory to the waste of natural resources, the protraction of the war, the destruction of our armies, and the imperiling of the Union which we believe must result from the continuance of George B. McClellan in command.” It charged McClellan with willful “disobedience to superior orders,” which had “imperiled the army commanded by General Pope.” Chase made several suggestions for changes, affixed his signature above Stanton’s, and promised to bring it to Bates, Smith, and Welles.
Having long since lost faith in McClellan, Smith was persuaded immediately to add his signature. Climbing the narrow stairs to the navy secretary’s second-floor office later that afternoon, Chase reached him just as he was preparing to leave for the day. After reading the document, Welles assured Chase that he believed McClellan’s “withdrawal from any command was demanded,” but he “did not choose to denounce McC. for incapacity or declare him a traitor,” as the document seemed to proclaim. Even when Chase repeated the damning facts of McClellan’s fatal delay in moving to reinforce Pope, Welles hesitated. He pointedly asked whether Blair had seen the document. Chase replied that his “turn had not come.” At that very moment, while Welles still held the document, Blair walked in. Sensing Chase’s alarm, Welles kept the paper close to his chest until Blair departed only a few minutes later. With the postmaster general out of earshot, Chase entreated Welles not to mention the document to Blair or anyone else.
While Chase was performing his part in the intrigue, Stanton had invited Lincoln and Hay to his K Street home for an impromptu dinner. No clear information on the course of the battle was yet available, though preliminary reports suggested that Pope had gained the advantage. “A pleasant little dinner,” Hay recorded, “and a pretty wife as white and cold and motionless as marble, whose rare smiles seemed to pain her.” In conversation with Lincoln, Stanton was “unqualifiedly severe upon McClellan,” charging that “nothing but foul play could lose us this battle & that it rested with McC. and his friends.” Both Stanton and Lincoln expressed their strong belief in General Pope.
After dinner, the president and Hay went to army headquarters, where General Halleck appeared “quiet and somewhat confident” about the direction of what he considered “the greatest battle of the Century.” Proceeding to Stanton’s office, they found he had dispatched “a vast army of Volunteer Nurses out to the field” to help care for the sick and wounded. “Every thing seemed to be going well,” Hay reported, “& we went to bed expecting glad tidings at sunrise.”
For Stanton, however, much work was in store that evening. If Pope managed to win without McClellan’s aid, it would only strengthen the argument for the young Napoleon’s ouster. When Welles stopped by to get an update from the front, he found Stanton with Smith. Stanton launched into a long diatribe against McClellan, reaching back to the winter doldrums, the “Quaker gun” affair, and the blunders on the Peninsula. When Smith left, Welles recalled, Stanton lowered his voice to a whisper. He had previously learned from Chase that Welles had refused to sign the document. Welles explained that while he, by and large, agreed that McClellan must be removed, he “disliked the method and manner of proceeding.” It seemed “discourteous and disrespectful to the President.” The president, he declared, “had called us around him as friends and advisers to counsel and consult…not to enter into combinations against him.”
Agitated, Stanton exclaimed that “he knew of no particular obligations he was under to the President who had called him to a difficult position and imposed upon him labors and responsibilities which no man could carry, and which were greatly increased by fastening upon him a commander who was constantly striving to embarrass him…. He could not and would not submit to a continuance of this state of things.” Welles sympathized but was highly reluctant to join what seemed a cabal against the president.
The next morning, bleak news from the battlefield discredited the optimistic reports of the previous day. Pope’s army had been crushed. John Hay recorded in his diary that at “about Eight oclock the President came to my room as I was dressing and calling me out said, ‘Well John we are whipped again, I am afraid.’” Once again, as in the aftermath of the First Battle of Bull Run, Washington braced for attack. As rumors spread that General Jackson was crossing the Potomac at Georgetown, thousands of frightened residents began to flee the city. Soldiers straggled in from the front with tales of a demoralized army and units unwilling to fight under Pope. The losses were immense—out of 65,000 men, the Federals had suffered 16,000 casualties. Momentum now clearly belonged to the Confederacy. At the end of June, the New York Times pointed out, “Jeff. Davis, from his chamber at Richmond, listened to the thunder of the cannon of hostile armies battling before his capital.” At the end of August, “Lincoln, from the White House, heard the deep peals of the artillery of the contending hosts which, having now changed location, are struggling for supremacy before the National Capital.”
The devastating defeat put the president in an untenable position. The more he contemplated McClellan’s delay in sending his troops to Pope, the angrier he became. Yet there was no time to indulge in anger while Washington itself was threatened and he sorely needed the best forces at his disposal. He still believed McClellan was best equipped to reorganize the demoralized troops. During his inspection tours at Fort Monroe and Harrison’s Landing, Lincoln had witnessed the soldiers’ devotion to their commander. “There is no man in the army who can man these fortifications and lick these troops of ours into shape half as well as he,” Lincoln told Hay. “Unquestionably he has acted badly toward Pope! He wanted him to fail. That is unpardonable. But he is too useful just now to sacrifice.” When Halleck recommended restoring McClellan’s command over both the Army of Virginia and the Army of the Potomac, Lincoln agreed.
In ignorance of Lincoln’s deliberations, the cabinet vigorously pursued their machinations to oust McClellan. Bates rewrote the protest to soften its tone. Stanton, Chase, Smith, and Bates signed the new document, which Chase again presented to Welles on Monday, September 1. Welles agreed that the new draft was “an improvement,” but still disliked the idea of “combining to influence or control the President.” Chase admitted that the course of action “was unusual, but the case was unusual.” They had to impress upon Lincoln that “the Administration must be broken up, or McC. dismissed.” Furthermore, Chase told Welles that “McClellan ought to be shot, and should, were he President, be brought to a summary punishment.” Welles granted that McClellan “was not a fighting general,” and that “some recent acts indicate delinquencies of a more serious character.” While he would not sign the demand, he told the “disappointed” Chase, he would speak up with “no hesitation” at the cabinet meeting the next day to tell Lincoln that he agreed McClellan should go. Accordingly, Stanton and Chase resolved to withhold their confrontation with Lincoln until the following day.
All the cabinet members, save Seward, gathered at noon on Tuesday the 2nd. The secretary of state had departed for Auburn the previous week for a long-awaited vacation. Welles, perpetually suspicious of Seward, believed “there was design in his absence,” certain he had left town to avoid the messy controversy over McClellan. More likely, personal considerations dictated the timing of Seward’s journey. Jenny was expecting his first grandchild any day. Will was scheduled to leave with his regiment as soon as the baby was born. And Frances’s favorite aunt, Clara, was dying. When he heard about the defeat at Bull Run, however, he cut his vacation short. He was on his way back to Washington as the cabinet meeting convened.
The session had barely begun when the president was called out for a brief interval. In his absence, Stanton took the floor. Speaking “in a suppressed voice, trembling with excitement,” he informed his colleagues that “McClellan had been ordered to take command of the forces in Washington.” The members were stunned. Lincoln returned shortly and explain
ed his decision, which he had communicated to McClellan at 7 a.m. that morning. “McClellan knows this whole ground,” Lincoln said, and “can be trusted to act on the defensive.” He knew all too well that McClellan had the “slows,” but maintained that there was “no better organizer.” Events, he believed, would justify his judgment.
In the general discussion that followed, Welles recorded in his diary, “there was a more disturbed and desponding feeling” than he had ever witnessed in any cabinet meeting. Lincoln was “extremely distressed,” as were Stanton and Chase. Chase predicted that “it would prove a national calamity,” while Stanton, recognizing that the protest was a dead letter, returned to the War Department “in the condition of a drooping leaf.” The episode produced an estrangement between Stanton and Lincoln that persisted for weeks.
Lincoln was deeply troubled by the knowledge that his cabinet opposed him on a question of such vital importance. According to Bates, he “seemed wrung by the bitterest anguish—said he felt almost ready to hang himself.” The cabinet debacle regarding McClellan, Pope’s defeat, and the gruesome, protracted war itself pressed upon him with an appalling weight, leading him to meditate. “In great contests,” he wrote in a fragment found among his pages, “each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong. God can not be for, and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party,” and that God had willed “that it shall not end yet.”
Lincoln’s distress may have been assuaged somewhat by Seward’s return to Washington. Lincoln could speak more frankly with his secretary than with any other member of his cabinet. Reaching the capital on the evening of September 3, Seward drove immediately to the Soldiers’ Home. Unfortunately, Fred Seward wrote, “there were visitors, whose presence prevented private talk.”
“Governor,” Lincoln proposed, “I’ll get in and ride with you a while.” For the next few hours, the two friends drove along the winding carriage ways, “while Seward detailed what he had found at the North, and the President in turn narrated the military events and Cabinet conferences during his absence.”
Seward may have revealed to Lincoln the sad, world-wise reflections he expressed to John Hay two days later. “What is the use of growing old?” he asked. “You learn something of men and things but never until too late to use it.” Referring to the antagonism between McClellan and Pope that had contributed to the disaster at Bull Run, Seward admitted that he had “only just now found out what military jealousy is…. It had never occurred to[him] that any jealousy could prevent these generals from acting for their common fame and the welfare of the country.” As an old seasoned politician, perhaps, he reflected, he “should have known it.”
Though Seward was temporarily unnerved by the events at Bull Run, he remained confident that the North would ultimately prevail—a contagious confidence that must have bolstered Lincoln’s spirits. Whenever faced with desolating prospects, Seward turned to history for guidance and comfort. Recalling the difficult days of the Revolutionary War before independence “enables me,” he once said, “to cherish and preserve hopefulness.” Moreover, unlike his colleagues in the cabinet, Seward did not question that Lincoln possessed the prudence, wisdom, and magnanimity needed to carry the country “safely through the sea of revolution.” Seward’s ability to empathize with Lincoln’s unenviable position must have afforded Lincoln some real measure of comfort. Unlike Stanton and Chase, Seward clearly understood that a president had to work with the tools at his disposal. At this moment, McClellan was one of those tools.
Meanwhile, McClellan smugly returned to his old headquarters on the corner next to Seward’s house. “Again I have been called upon to save the country,” he wrote his wife. “It makes my heart bleed to see the poor shattered remnants of my noble Army of the Potomac, poor fellows! and to see how they love me even now. I hear them calling out to me as I ride among them—‘George—don’t leave us again!’ ‘They shan’t take you away from us again.’”
McClellan had been restored to command for only two days when Lee, emboldened by his twin victories on the Peninsula and at Bull Run, crossed the Potomac to begin an invasion of Maryland. The Confederate commander mistakenly assumed that the residents of the slave state would rise up in support of his army. In fact, the Marylanders greeted the rebel army with disdain and reserved their enthusiastic welcome for McClellan’s bluecoats, clapping and waving flags as the Federal troops marched through their countryside to engage Lee in battle. When the two armies met, McClellan had another distinct advantage. General Lee’s battle plans had been discovered. A careless courier had used the orders to wrap three cigars and left them behind.
On September 17, the Battle of Antietam began. “We are in the midst of the most terrible battle of the age,” McClellan wrote Mary Ellen in midafternoon as the fighting raged. By day’s end, 6,000 soldiers on both sides were dead and an additional 17,000 had been wounded, a staggering total four times the number of Americans who would lose their lives on D-day during World War II. In the end, the Union Army prevailed, forcing Lee to retreat. “Our victory was complete,” McClellan joyfully reported. “I feel some little pride in having with a beaten and demoralized army defeated Lee so utterly, & saved the North so completely.”
Lincoln was thrilled by initial reports that indicated Lee’s army might be destroyed. Subsequent telegrams, however, revealed that McClellan, flush with victory, had failed to pursue the retreating rebels and allowed Lee to cross the Potomac into Virginia, where he could regroup and replenish men and supplies.
Still, Antietam was a sorely needed victory for the demoralized North. “At last our Generals in the field seem to have risen to the grandeur of the National crisis,” the New York Times noted. “Sept. 17, 1862, will, we predict, hereafter be looked upon as an epoch in the history of the rebellion, from which will date the inauguration of its downfall.”
The statement would prove prescient for reasons the Times could not have surmised. The victory, incomplete as it was, was the long-awaited event that provided Lincoln the occasion to announce his plans to issue an Emancipation Proclamation the following January. On September 22, he convened a cabinet meeting to reveal his decision. As Chase and Stanton settled on his right and the others sat down on his left, Lincoln attempted to lighten the mood with a reading from the Maine humorist Charles Farrar Browne. Seward alone readily appreciated the diversion, laughing uproariously along with Lincoln at the antics of Artemus Ward. Chase assumed a forced smile, while Stanton’s face betrayed impatience and irritation.
Once his humorous story was done, Lincoln took on “a graver tone,” reminding his colleagues of the emancipation order he had drafted and read to them earlier. He told them that when Lee’s army was in Maryland, he had decided “as soon as it should be driven out” of the state, he would issue his proclamation. “I said nothing to any one; but I made the promise to myself, and (hesitating a little) to my Maker.” While Lincoln rarely acknowledged the influence of faith or religious beliefs, “there were occasions when, uncertain how to proceed,” remarked Gideon Welles, “he had in this way submitted the disposal of the subject to a Higher Power, and abided by what seemed the Supreme Will.” The president made clear he was not seeking “advice about the main matter,” for he had already considered their views before reaching his decision; but he would welcome any suggestions on language. Lincoln then began to read the document that he had revised slightly in recent weeks to strengthen the rationale of military necessity.
Stanton “made a very emphatic speech sustaining the measure,” and Blair reiterated his concerns about the border states and the fall elections, though in the end he filed no objection. Seward alone suggested a substantive change. Wouldn’t it be stronger, he asked, if the government promised not only to recognize but to “maintain” the freedom of the former slaves, leaving “out all reference to the act being sustained d
uring the incumbency of the present President”? Lincoln answered that he had thought about this, but “it was not my way to promise what I was not entirely sure that I could perform.” When Seward “insisted that we ought to take this ground,” Lincoln agreed, striking the limiting reference to the present administration.
The preliminary proclamation, published the following day, brought a large crowd of cheering serenaders to the White House. Though it would not take effect until Lincoln issued the final proclamation on January 1, 1863, giving the rebellious states one last chance to return to the Union, it had changed the course of the war. “I can only trust in God I have made no mistake,” Lincoln told well-wishers from an upstairs window. “It is now for the country and the world to pass judgment on it.” He then called attention to the brave soldiers in the field. While he might be “environed with difficulties” as president, these were “scarcely so great as the difficulties of those who, upon the battle field, are endeavoring to purchase with their blood and their lives the future happiness and prosperity of this country. Let us never forget them.”
The serenaders proceeded to Chase’s house at Sixth and E, where the large crowd listened “in a glorious humor” as Chase spoke. Afterward, an excited group, including Bates and “a few old fogies,” remained inside, drinking wine. “They all seemed to feel a sort of new and exhilarated life,” John Hay observed. “They gleefully and merrily called each other and themselves abolitionists, and seemed to enjoy the novel sensation of appropriating that horrible name.”