McClellan had a robust ego, which saw a due deference to his own great talents in the president’s tentative manner. His attitude toward Lincoln would, from a week after Bull Run, be marked by a contempt McClellan would progressively take fewer and fewer pains to hide. “Isn’t he a rare bird?” he would soon ask a fellow Union general as the president left a meeting.
McClellan was organizationally brilliant and ambitious. The day after the battle Lincoln had signed a bill authorizing the enlistment of five hundred thousand three-year volunteers. McClellan was the brain who would organize, supply, and enthuse them. He built up a set of powerful fortifications around the capital, formed the patriotic volunteer regiments into a new, well-drilled system of brigades and divisions, and endeared himself to the soldiery by giving them confidence. He wanted no interference from the aged General Scott, and would ultimately maneuver him into resigning, clearing the way for his own almost immediate appointment as general in chief. His competence was so great that the whole Union seemed dependent on him, and this—as at least one historian says—gave him a Messiah complex.
He was politically soft on slavery. He also believed with the president that this was a war against the slave-owning class, not against ordinary Southerners, and he shared with Lincoln as well the delusion that there was in fact a Unionist majority among the people of the South whom the Southern aristocracy had tricked into secession. Once Union arms began to prevail, this Unionist mass would rise against the slave owners. McClellan was delighted to know that Lincoln, also, did not see himself as fighting an abolition war but a war to save the Union.
Having built an army in short order, McClellan dallied in moving it against the Confederates in northern Virginia. He feared that General Beauregard had prodigious numbers, 450,000 men, waiting to spring on him should he cross the Potomac. At the end of September, however, when McClellan did send units across, they found Quaker guns, “wooden models.” Embarrassed, the Young Napoleon risked committing a small Union force over the river north of Washington.
On the eve of this endeavor, Mary and Abraham Lincoln entertained on the lawn of the White House one of Lincoln’s old Illinois friends and rivals, after whom he and Mary had named their lost son, Eddie. Edward Baker, now a colonel commanding a raw brigade, was exhilarated at the prospect of the coming action. The next day, upriver near Leesburg, Baker’s brigade came against a Confederate force posted atop a wooded ridge named Ball’s Bluff, and, among seventeen hundred casualties, Baker was killed. Thus, two of Lincoln’s favorite friends had died in Union gestures beyond the Potomac. Ball’s Bluff certainly cured McClellan of trying any further projects that fall.
His elevation to general in chief on November 5 increased his streak of hubris. “I can do it all,” he famously wrote. If anything, McClellan became even more scornful of Lincoln, whom he called “the giraffe.” “He was not a man of very strong character,” McClellan wrote of Lincoln, “and he was destitute of refinement—certainly in no sense a gentleman—he was easily wrought upon by the coarse associates whose style of conversation agreed so well with his own.” McClellan hated the president’s parables.
One night, Lincoln, his friend Secretary of State Seward, and his secretary John Hay waited at General McClellan’s rented house for him to come in. The general returned from a wedding and, entering his home by a side entrance, was told about the distinguished guests waiting for him. McClellan went to bed, leaving them sitting in his parlor. On the way home Hay told the president this was “unparalleled impudence,” but Lincoln advised him that it was best at a time like this not to worry about etiquette or personal dignity. Nonetheless he stopped attending on McClellan and from then on, unless visiting him in the field, would summon his general to the White House.
McClellan was predictably outraged when the president and other members of the cabinet began to suspect his tales of being continually outnumbered. Having read sundry works on strategy, the president presented his own plan, named the Occoquan Plan after the strategic little town in northern Virginia, and involving two columns attacking the Confederate heart-land. As he argued it, “Both points will probably not be successfully resisted at the same time.” McClellan, however, said his own new plan was nearly ready. As McClellan delayed in the East, out in the West another general, Don Carlos Buell, told the War Department that he could not invade eastern Tennessee, where it was believed the pro-Union piedmont and mountain people would rise in large numbers against the Confederacy. The railways were inadequate for the task of transporting his men, said Buell. And so the year drew to its close.
But not without its having been a very difficult December. Mary had gathered around herself a salon of fashionable and racy men with whom she met in the Blue Room, one of the three parlors of the White House—“My beau monde friends of the Blue Room,” she called this group. It consisted of Governor Newell of New Jersey, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Fox, and a remarkable fellow called the Chevalier Wikoff. Henry Wikoff was not only a former British agent but a friend of every notable European political figure, from Austria’s Klemens von Metternich to Great Britain’s prime minister, Lord Palmerston, to Camillo di Cavour, one of the leaders of the movement for Italian unification. He had also spent time in an Italian prison for abducting an heiress, an experience he had turned into a best-selling book. He carried with him the glamour of places more remarkable and elegant than either Springfield, Illinois, or Washington, D.C. He was also able to persuade the press, notably the New York Herald, the best-selling newspaper of its day, to praise Mrs. Lincoln’s social skills, presence, and charm.
In December the text of an as-yet-embargoed presidential address to Congress appeared in the New York Herald. Congress suspected, as Abraham must have, that Wikoff had somehow gotten it from Mary Lincoln. This offered a great chance for vengeance to all those who disliked Mary for her extravagant refurbishing of the White House, her taste for Empress Eugénie-style dresses, and her supposed influence over Lincoln. The House Judiciary Committee summoned Wikoff, in the hope he would confirm that Mary Todd Lincoln had leaked the speech.
Mary was vulnerable to a degree that could have created a disabling national scandal. She had, for example, entered into an arrangement with Watt, the head gardener of the White House, to pad the books on wages and nursery expenses, creating on one occasion a largely fictional purchase of one thousand dollars’ worth of seeds and splitting the sum with him. She still suffered, as one of Lincoln’s secretaries noticed, from an astonishing polarity of impulses. Her extravagance on furnishings and dresses would be succeeded by sudden panic attacks of frugality, when she tried to sell the manure from the White House stables as a buffer against coming postpresidential poverty. All this might now be revealed by the Judiciary Committee, if Wikoff would identify his source for the speech he had sent to the Herald.
Another member of the Blue Room salon, Gen. Dan Sickles, a gifted New York Democratic operator who had, the year before Lincoln’s election, shot his wife’s lover dead outside the White House and been acquitted, left his brigade on the Potomac and came to town to defend Wikoff. Sickles skillfully shifted the blame for the leaked document to the head gardener, threatening him with prosecution for his embezzlement if he did not accept responsibility for the purloined speech. Watt did so, and Lincoln and Mary were saved acute embarrassment. Mary was able to go on to redecorate the White House by means both earnest and crafty. And her seamstress, Lizzie Keckley, a liberated slave, supplied her with dresses made of the finest fabrics for the winter season.
On the international level, December 1861 was also fraught. An overzealous commander in the U.S. Navy intercepted the British vessel Trent on the open sea and took off it two Confederate commissioners who were on their way to London. The British were outraged by this high-handed act and dispatched redcoats by the thousands to Canada, in case it became necessary to declare war on the United States. For a time it looked as though the Union would be fighting on two fronts—against the Confederacy and the Brit
ish—and as much as that delighted certain enemies of Britain, such as Navy Secretary Welles and Secretary of State Seward, and as much as the Irish in the Union army were excited by the prospect, Lincoln was desperate to get the incident behind him. His constituents, however, would not forgive him if he simply backed down before Lord Palmerston. Lincoln gathered his cabinet in a special meeting at the White House on Christmas Day at which, on the basis of McClellan’s advice that the Union could not win against both the Rebels and the British, the administration reluctantly agreed to release the Rebel commissioners, James Mason and John Slidell, to continue their journey.
One benefit of the new year would be that Simon Cameron, under a shadow for the way he awarded military contracts, was persuaded to become minister to St. Petersburg. Lincoln could finally replace him with Edwin Stanton, the famed attorney and former Buchanan cabinet member who had once treated Abraham with some dismissiveness in a patent case in Cincinnati over reapers. Lincoln’s gift for letting go of grudges would be rewarded, for Stanton became a loyal and gifted secretary of war.
Over Christmas and New Year’s, Lincoln pressed his own strategic plan for the prosecution of the great conclusive campaign against the Rebels. Stung, McClellan at last produced a revised plan of his own—a movement toward New Orleans, an attack on Georgia, and, for the Army of the Potomac, a shift south, down the Chesapeake Bay to Urbanna on the Rappahannock. This would outflank the Confederates at Manassas and enable Richmond to be captured.
There were generals in the West doing positive things. A fellow Illinois man, former West Pointer, store manager, and problem drinker, Ulysses Simpson Grant, took his men along the Tennessee River, backed by a flotilla of gunboats, and captured Fort Henry. Ten days later his force seized Fort Donaldson on the Cumberland River. This put the Confederacy in retreat, out of western Kentucky and western Tennessee. Gen. Don Carlos Buell captured Nashville on February 28, Gen. Samuel R. Curtis defeated the Rebels in Arkansas, and Gen. John Pope—one of the officers who had escorted Lincoln across the country to his inauguration—captured New Madrid and set siege to Island Number Ten on the Mississippi. Not long after, on April 6, General Grant was attacked, and with some skill he fought a great and bitter battle at Shiloh on the Tennessee, a two-day affair involving twenty thousand casualties in total, at the close of which the Confederates withdrew. The Rebels’ resistance had been so horrifying that it convinced Grant that there would be no easy settlement to the conflict, and that the only viable basis for a peace would be the unconditional surrender of the secessionist states.
In early February 1862 Mary Lincoln enjoyed a grand moment as a hostess, having organized a magnificent party in the White House. The Washington Star said it was “the most superb affair of its kind ever seen.” But the Lincolns’ son Willie was upstairs with a terrible fever. Two weeks after this night of nights, Willie died—possibly of typhoid fever from the foul waters into which the district’s burst sewage mains had flowed. He had been Mary’s favorite, as little Tad, with his speech defect and hyperactivity, was Lincoln’s. Not that Lincoln himself had anything other than an intense love for the precocious Willie, who could call out train timetables and name connecting railroads all the way from Chicago to Boston.
Mary found it almost impossible to absorb Willie’s death. Lincoln would come to worry about her sanity, and for its sake, he allowed her to take part in séances in the hope that she might communicate with Willie again. Mediums, such as a charlatan named Lord Colchester, were admitted to the Red Room of the White House, where they would go into trances in which dead Union generals supposedly returned to give the president advice. Lincoln bore their advice and flimflam bravely, tolerating the presence of the mediums for Mary’s sake. It was of course an era when spiritism, “spirit-rapping,” was a widespread enthusiasm even among members of the cabinet. Mary’s seamstress, Lizzie Keckley, believed readily that the dead could return with messages, and did little to dissuade Mary. And Lincoln himself was grateful for the help of Gen. Dan Sickles, who sometimes accompanied Mary to séances and kept an eye on her. Again, the preposterous behavior of the grief-afflicted Mary attracted comment.
The successes in the West made Lincoln and others believe that one masterstroke in Virginia would win Richmond and bring the rebellion to a close. But even Lincoln began to believe, as McClellan delayed, that some Democratic generals didn’t really want anything drastic to happen to the Confederacy, fearing that a great victory would encourage the administration to emancipate slaves. When McClellan did probe across the river on March 9, again finding Quaker guns in considerable number, the congressional Joint Committee for the Conduct of the War demanded the man’s dismissal. Lincoln was not ready to do so, since a definite plan of attack was about to be implemented.
But the grounds for McClellan’s trying to outflank the Confederates by going to Urbanna no longer existed—the Confederates had abandoned Manassas Junction. So the Young Napoleon decided to move his army even farther down the coast, to Fort Monroe. It was a good plan, for Fort Monroe was southeast of Richmond, and at the tip of the peninsula up which McClellan intended to move rapidly on the Confederate capital. But instead of doing that, he frittered his men away in a siege of York-town. Lincoln and Salmon P. Chase had come down to Fort Monroe early in the campaign, late April to early May, to see what was holding McClellan up. “I think it is the precise time for you to strike a blow,” Lincoln advised him:
By delay the enemy will relatively gain upon you. . . . You will do me the justice to remember I always insisted, that going down the Bay in search of a field, instead of fighting at or near Manassas, was only shifting, and not surmounting, a difficulty—that you would find the same enemy, and the same or equal intrenchments, at either place. . . . I beg to assure you that I’ve never written you, or spoken to you, in greater kindness of feeling than now, nor with a fuller purpose to sustain you, so far as is in my most anxious judgment. I consistently can. But you must act.
McClellan sulked about this urging, and told his wife, “I was much tempted to reply that he had better come and do it himself.”
Though by the end of May, on the edge of the swamps of the Chickahominy River, McClellan won a great battle at Fair Oaks, a position from which his scouts, climbing trees, could see the domes and steeples of Richmond, he then let his men stand still a month in their encampments in the turpentine forests, ensuring that many of them would succumb to malaria, typhus, and dysentery.
As McClellan tarried, a former Union colonel, now a Confederate general, by the name of Robert E. Lee took over command of the Rebel troops on the peninsula. McClellan persuaded himself that he was so outnumbered by Lee that his best option now was to save his army. Thus he ordered a retreat away from Richmond down to Harrison’s Landing on the James River, from which Union shipping could protect and resupply his men.
The astonishing impertinence of an accusatory letter McClellan wrote the president, late at night on the retreat to Harrison’s Landing, appalled even Lincoln. “I know that a few thousand men more would have changed this battle from a defeat to a victory—as it is the Govt. must not and cannot hold me responsible for the result. . . . If I save this army now I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you or any other persons in Washington—you have done your best to sacrifice this Army.” McClellan’s excuse for adopting this tone was based in part on a telegram Lincoln sent on July 1, telling him that he could not be reinforced “for your present emergency. . . . If you are not strong enough to face the enemy you must find a place of security, and wait, rest, and repair.”
McClellan’s accusation was that Lincoln had deliberately kept back reserves around Washington, whereas the truth was that the president had done his best to strip the Washington defenses down to twenty-six thousand men. In the face of these accusations, Lincoln again showed enormous forbearance, some of which may have been caused by the fact that the army loved McClellan and might help him in a march on Washington and the declaration of a benign dictatorship.
Lincoln was convinced, though, that
if by magic he could reinforce McClellan with 100,000 men today, he [McClellan] would be in ecstasy over it, thank him for it, and tell him that he would go to Richmond tomorrow; but that when tomorrow came he would telegraph that he had information that the enemy had 400,000 men and that he could not advance without reinforcements.
Lincoln came down by steamer again to visit McClellan, this time at Harrison’s Landing. But by now the only option, particularly given McClellan’s frame of mind, was to withdraw. For, having saved their capital, Lee and Stonewall Jackson intended to go rampaging northward toward Manassas again. Though many wanted McClellan sacked, Lincoln still wondered about the potential effect on the army. He made a concession to his cabinet by taking overall command away from McClellan and making the dour Henry Halleck, “Old Brains” to the troops, general in chief.
12
BY MEANS OF forced marches, Lee was back in northern Virginia again. Only the earliest returning fragments of the Army of the Potomac were made grudgingly available by McClellan for General Pope’s Army of Virginia, which was charged with stopping the fast-moving Rebels. Pope was despised by the Young Napoleon. He was a Republican, and had been one of the president’s bodyguards from Springfield to Washington.
The Rebels attacked him at Manassas, and Pope failed to perform well, losing sixteen thousand casualties and leaving Lee and Jackson free to threaten Washington. In September 1862, following Pope’s defeat, Attorney General Bates described Lincoln as being “in deep distress . . . wrung by the bitterest anguish.” The cabinet was united yet again in wanting McClellan dismissed for his unhelpfulness and his willingness to let Pope “get out of his trouble alone.” But still Lincoln would not accede. He believed there were serious doubts that the army would fight for anyone other than McClellan. Lincoln was in a sense the general’s prisoner. Soon the Young Napoleon was reluctantly returned to full command of both the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Virginia.