Rise to Greatness (2 page)

Nor was territory the only thing at stake. Secession, if allowed to stand, would deliver a fatal blow to the ideal of constitutional government in a diverse nation. If the U.S. Constitution could be dissolved by a dissatisfied minority, then it was unsustainable for the long run. Such a system could solve only easy problems and survive only mild disagreements. If secession prevailed, the Constitution of Madison, Hamilton, Jay, and Washington would fail the test of great governments, which is the ability to endure, even flourish, through crisis. As the president had recently put it in his annual message to Congress, “The insurrection is largely, if not exclusively, a war upon the first principle of popular government—the rights of the people.” (Two years later, at Gettysburg, he would put the case more memorably.) Southerners maintained that they were fighting for their own rights, especially the right to their lawful property, namely slaves; and to travel with that property through Northern states; and to live without fear that abolitionists would encourage runaways or incite slave uprisings. But many in the North believed that the integrity of the nation came first, for no rights of any kind could be guaranteed by a powerless government. Union, in fact, was the cornerstone of the Constitution, and it said so with the opening words of the Preamble: “We the People, in order to form a more perfect Union…”

In the speeches and posters and banners and newspapers that rallied the soldiers to Washington, the words “Union” and “Freedom” were virtually inseparable. But when the cards of history were still facedown, to believe that the United States would ultimately survive this crisis required a leap of faith, and as the second year of secession began, that leap was increasingly difficult to make. From the days of the Romans to revolutionary France, no republic had ever survived such a calamity. Both experience and history suggested that—with so much at risk and such strong enemies—only a dictatorship could reunite the country.

In the smoke-choked barrooms of Washington’s finest hotels, at the dinner tables of senior Union officers, in the drawing rooms of Washington’s leading politicians, the possibility that a military dictator might soon replace the president was endlessly discussed. McClellan, the Union commander, had toyed with the idea that he might become exactly that sort of savior: “I almost think were I to win some small success now, I could become Dictator,” he wrote to his wife, and he did nothing to discourage the press from assigning him the nickname “the Young Napoleon.” He even posed for official photographs with his hand tucked into his tunic.

Other murmurings around Washington conjured John Frémont delivering the coup d’état. Frémont’s wife, the formidable daughter of Missouri’s legendary senator Thomas Hart Benton, had threatened something along those lines during an angry meeting with the president. Even Charles Sumner, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, found himself pining for a despot. The man in the White House could wield virtually unlimited power in this crisis, Sumner wrote to a friend, “but how vain to have the power of a God, if not to use it God-like.” Whatever face it wore, dictatorship seemed at least as plausible to reasonable people as the notion that a constitutional republic of elected leaders could somehow survive a trial as profound as the Civil War.

As thousands of people made their way to the White House on the first day of 1862, the city swirled with talk of conspiracies and coups, swinging wildly from military mania to existential dread and back again. With the nation sundered by war, the stakes were as plain as the morning’s blue sky: the American experiment was on the brink of failure, a half-finished dream at risk of becoming as forlorn as the abandoned obelisk, as unrealized as the Capitol dome.

*   *   *

That balmy January day began what would prove the most eventful year in American history, and perhaps the most misunderstood. It was the year in which the Civil War became a cataclysm, the federal government became a colossus, and the Confederacy came nearest to winning its independence, yet suffered the key losses that led to its doom. Eighteen sixty-two sounded the death knell of slavery, and it forged the military leaders who would eventually win the war, men like Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, and Farragut. In indelible ink, it fashioned the astounding blueprint of modern America, an America of continental breadth, rapid communication, networked transportation, widespread education, industrial might, and high finance. At the same time, it revealed the dear cost of entry into that future, payable in blood and misery, on battlefields from Shiloh to Sharpsburg, Pea Ridge to Fredericksburg. Most of all, though, 1862 was the year the sixteenth president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, rose to greatness.

As the year approached, one U.S. senator presciently observed: “Never has there been a moment in history when so much was all compressed into a little time.” And never since the founding of the country had so much depended on the judgment, the cunning, the timing, and the sheer endurance of one man.

1

NEW YEAR’S DAY

Abraham Lincoln stood that morning in sunlight slanting through the tall windows of the Blue Room, taking his place at the head of a receiving line with his wife, Mary. For most Washingtonians, this open house was their first chance to see the new president up close. He cut such a strange figure, all angles and joints and imperfect proportions: giant feet, impossibly long limbs, enormous forehead, pendulous lip. His huge hands were stuffed into white kid gloves—like twin hams, he was liable to joke. Some tall men slouch self-consciously, but not Lincoln. He had always been proud of his physique, and enjoyed challenging other men to contests of strength, which he inevitably won. He used his size subtly to intimidate, even as he used his humor to put people off guard. At fifty-two, Lincoln was 180 pounds of muscle on a six-foot-three-and-three-quarter-inch frame, and he wore his black suit narrowly tailored to fit his sinewy shoulders and thin waist. He would soon be wasting away, losing as much as thirty pounds in three years, but for now Lincoln was still the virile figure of his campaign propaganda, the rail-splitter whose blend of brain and brawn reflected America’s favored image of itself: strong, bright, and independent.

His friend and occasional bodyguard Ward Hill Lamon stood close to Lincoln that day. Lamon, too, was a strong and solid man, but in the eyes of the artist Alfred Waud, sketching the scene from the corner of the room, he looked ordinary beside the looming, dominant president. Lincoln had a shambling animal force about him, which some found appealing and others found unsettling. Women were constantly flirting with him; at the same time, some of Washington’s leading Democrats referred to him as “the gorilla.” Countering this force was his gentle, sorrowful expression, which was, according to a painter who studied him for a portrait, “remarkably pensive and tender, often inexpressibly sad, as if the reservoir of tears lay very near the surface.”

Magnetic, keenly sensitive, often able to understand others better than they understood themselves, Lincoln was, nevertheless, profoundly isolated, and this was a source of his sadness. He “never had a confidant,” his law partner and biographer William Herndon wrote. “He was the most reticent and mostly secretive man that ever existed.” Lincoln usually masked this isolation behind jokes and anecdotes and apparent bursts of candor. But even his brief descriptions of his youth strike a note of profound loneliness; he was, he once wrote, “a strange, friendless, uneducated, penniless boy.” His mother died when he was nine; soon afterward, Lincoln’s father abandoned him and his sister in the wilderness, to be cared for only by a slightly older cousin. The father returned months later to find the Lincoln children filthy, poorly fed, and in rags. Now, four decades later, Abraham Lincoln was no longer a lonely genius on a raw frontier, but he bore the internal scars of a boy who learned not to let others too close.

As eleven
A.M.
approached—the hour when Washington’s dignitaries would greet the president—a throng of visitors formed into a long line winding down Pennsylvania Avenue. Stationed at intervals, maintaining order, were uniformed officers of the new District of Columbia police department. (The capital had never before been large enough to warrant its own force.) The police opened a path through the crowd for members of Congress, cabinet secretaries, ambassadors, and generals. The carriage of Attorney General Edward Bates rolled up the curved driveway, past a mossy statue of Thomas Jefferson, and came to a stop at the tall doors. A Jovian man with thick gray hair swept back from his stern face, Bates took his place near the head of the line of dignitaries, and soon found himself reaching out to shake the president’s hand. The master politician was an ardent hand-shaker, taking a half step forward and leaning into the grip while locking on with his blue-gray eyes. But as Bates felt his hand swallowed up and heard Lincoln greet him in his surprisingly high and reedy voice, he harbored unnerving doubts about this man’s ability to meet the crisis.

The previous evening, Bates had been struck by how rudderless the president seemed, his apparent weakness revealing itself as never before during an extraordinary meeting at the White House. Coming at the end of a year of low moments, this was perhaps the lowest. With his cabinet gathered around him, Lincoln was forced to reveal under questioning by an aggressive delegation from Congress—the Joint Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War—just how little he actually knew about the plans and operations of the Union armies. After the meeting, Bates sat up late into the night, confiding his fears to his diary.

The meeting would have rattled anyone’s confidence, even had confidence not already been in such short supply. What happened that evening was simple enough: Congress flexed its muscles. The potential for tension between the legislative and executive branches was built into the Constitution, but that tension was made worse by the timing of the war. Congress was not in session when the Rebels fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861, so the president—who had been in office only a little more than a month—was free to set the country’s war machinery in motion, and he promptly issued a flurry of executive orders and called for troops to be mustered. In July, the legislators convened long enough to be told that they needed to raise some $300 million for the war, a staggering amount given that the entire federal budget was less than $80 million. By the time Congress returned in December, the price tag had doubled, to some $50 million per month.

Bristling with pent-up frustration and ambition, the senators and representatives surveyed the war effort and saw only confusion, corruption, failure, and delay. This was a Congress of unusual clarity and appetite: after years of stalemate, of southern lawmakers thwarting northern agendas and vice versa, the South’s secession had broken the logjam. The awakening power of the 37th Congress invigorated the members of the newly appointed Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, and when they marched into Lincoln’s workroom on New Year’s Eve, they were champing at the bit.

The committee’s chairman was Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio, “Bluff Ben,” a fiery abolitionist who believed that Lincoln was too soft on the war because he sympathized with slave owners. Twice in recent months, the president had overruled abolitionists in the military as they rushed to proclaim freedom for slaves. The first to do so was John Frémont, a hero in the president’s fledgling Republican Party. When Lincoln voided Frémont’s proclamation of freedom for slaves in Missouri, he outraged many of the same people who had worked to elect him just a year earlier. “The President has lost ground amazingly,” wrote Senator William P. Fessenden of Maine. Then, in December, Lincoln had instructed government printers to destroy a report issued by Secretary of War Simon Cameron, in which Cameron called for emancipating slaves and arming them as Union troops. Again, the antislavery vanguard howled.

Lincoln endured the outrage because he believed the Union could not be saved without support from loyal slaveholders, especially those in his birthplace, Kentucky. That state was the strategic core of the country: Kentucky controlled the Ohio River and guarded the eastern flank of Missouri, another loyal slave state located on a key waterway. If Kentucky left the Union, and if Missouri followed, the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers would fall under Confederate control, strangling American commerce. “I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game,” Lincoln once said.

This sensible view made little impression on Senator Wade, who was neither strategic nor pragmatic. He was a man of passions who drank hard and swore often. To Wade, Lincoln’s slow and calculating approach to slavery provided clear evidence of weak character in a man who, as Wade once put it, was “born of ‘poor white trash’ and educated in a slave state.”

Now, in the flickering glow of gas lamps, as the last hours of 1861 ticked away, Wade opened the meeting with a dire accusation. “Mr. President, you are murdering your country by inches in consequence of the inactivity of the military and the want of a distinct policy in regard to slavery.” The barrage continued from there. Why, the committee members demanded, had there been no movement of Union forces in the two months since the disastrous battle at Ball’s Bluff, where the Rebels drove Union forces into the Potomac River, and bodies washed all the way to the Georgetown waterfront? Why were so many of the Union’s leading generals members of the opposition Democratic Party? Was their lack of progress a sign of traitorous sympathy for the Confederates? Most important, what plans existed for attacking the rebels, and when would they be launched?

The interrogation of the president and his cabinet went on for some ninety minutes. Between the committee’s hostile questions and the unsatisfying answers from Lincoln and his advisers, a “strange and dangerous” fact dawned, as Edward Bates noted: no one really knew what the generals were up to. “The secretary of war and the President are kept in ignorance of the actual condition of the army and [its] intended movements,” the attorney general confided to his diary. Meanwhile, the rest of Lincoln’s cabinet, Bates mused, came off as an assortment of chattering, uncooperative men, “each one ignorant of what his colleagues are doing.” The blame for these sad truths, he concluded, lay with Abraham Lincoln, “an excellent man, and, in the main wise; but he lacks will and purpose, and, I greatly fear, he has not the power to command.”