Rise to Greatness (38 page)

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Still on that tightrope, Lincoln was acutely aware that tensions were rising across the country in response to the blizzard of abolitionist activity in Congress. Some of those who objected responded with violence: recent days had seen arson in Brooklyn, beatings in Chicago, riots in Indiana and Ohio. The proslavery congressman Clement Vallandigham, of Ohio, warned a crowd of white workers in Dayton that the abolitionists, “having brought on the war, were now trying to bring a horde of negroes into Ohio to take the bread out of their mouths.” In Washington, the
Evening Star
echoed the alarm: “The real object” of employing black men in the army, the paper claimed, was “to aid the scheme of forcing negro social and industrial equality upon the white laborers of the country.” Even in Massachusetts, disgruntled Republicans were trying to mount an election challenge to Senator Sumner, whose term was ending. The mayor of Boston warned Lincoln that the abolitionists of his state, though loud, were small in number, and did not represent the man on the street.

In the face of such intense resistance, would the president press ahead or turn back? The cabinet got its answer the next day, July 22, when Lincoln called the council together again. Before the appointed hour, Chase briefed the president on Union finances. The Treasury was having trouble selling bonds in the wake of the peninsula retreat, and was now some $10 million behind in paying bills. The markets must be reassured of the Union’s will to win, Chase asserted, and he suggested sending this signal by firing McClellan and arming black soldiers. “The President came to no conclusion,” Chase noted.

When the cabinet reconvened—meeting in the White House library rather than in the president’s office—Lincoln greeted them with startling news. In his hand he held two pages, the result of many hours of drafting over several weeks. The president said he wanted the cabinet’s opinion of what he had written; he let them know, however, that his decision in this matter was final. There would be no vote. With that, he launched into the first known reading of his Emancipation Proclamation. Dry, legalistic, and dispassionate, the style of the document gave little hint of the grandeur or boldness of its purpose. The last few words, however, rang bell-like: As of January 1, 1863, “all persons held as slaves” in places where the rebellion continued “shall then, thenceforward, and forever, be free.” Freighted with millions of lives and born from decades of struggle, those final words pointed the war, the Union, and American history in a new direction.

Lincoln would be criticized for the proclamation’s failure to address slavery in the loyal border states, but in this he was hemmed in by Taney and by his own sense of constitutional limits. He had no war powers where there was no insurrection. And as the seven men in the room with him well understood, the president was taking a tremendous step by liberating the entire slave population of the South. As the historian Allen Guelzo has put it, Lincoln was speaking “not just of slaves used in Confederate war service or the slaves of disloyal masters but of all the slaves, without exception, in all rebellious areas. And not merely seized as contraband, or vaguely ‘free,’ but permanently
free,
‘thenceforward, and forever.’”

After Lincoln’s reading of the explosive document, Attorney General Bates was the first to find his voice. He offered his endorsement, with one extraordinary reservation: the proclamation ought to be accompanied by an executive order for the immediate forced deportation, not just of former slaves, but of all blacks from the United States. Bates sought the end of slavery, but he could not imagine a multiracial nation, for he was “fully convinced that the two races could not live and thrive” together. Lincoln did not respond to this proposal.

Postmaster General Montgomery Blair spoke next, focusing on the political dangers of emancipation. The proclamation would “cost the Administration the fall elections,” he warned. Bates and Blair were on the conservative end of Lincoln’s cabinet, but Chase, who sat at the other end of the spectrum, had concerns as well. The Treasury secretary wondered whether the proclamation was too extreme: “Emancipation could be much better and more quietly accomplished by allowing Generals to organize and arm the slaves.” That would begin the process of emancipation without stirring up an insurrection by slaves too impatient to await the arrival of liberating Union troops.

But it was Seward who offered the most persuasive objection. Though he didn’t say it, Seward believed that a proclamation was unnecessary. As he later explained his thinking, the “death knell” of slavery “was tolled when Abraham Lincoln was elected president”; the passage of time and the friction of war would do the rest. But now he confined his concerns to a single point: he told the president and his fellow cabinet members that the timing was wrong. “The depression of the public mind, consequent upon our repeated reverses, is so great that I fear the effect of so important a step,” Seward declared. To issue this extreme statement when the Union had been set on its heels could wreck American foreign policy. Europe would read Lincoln’s words as encouraging an uprising of slaves against their masters. England and France would fear the destruction of the cotton industry for years to come. Moreover, Europe would scoff at the notion that the commander in chief of a retreating army could claim dominion over his enemy’s slaves. “It may be viewed as the last measure of an exhausted government, a cry for help … [a] last
shriek
on the retreat,” he predicted, and foreign intervention would likely result. Seward suggested waiting “until you can give it to the country supported by military success.”

For all his reflection, Lincoln had not thought of this angle. As he later recalled, “the wisdom of the view of the Secretary of State struck me with very great force.” He decided to wait for a battlefield victory, which he hoped to achieve as soon as he straightened out the deployment of forces in Virginia.

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Lincoln had all but ignored McClellan since their conversations at Harrison’s Landing. As the days passed in silence, the general gradually deduced that an ill wind was blowing. The president’s failure to answer his treatise on war policy almost certainly meant that Lincoln’s thinking was moving in a very different direction. His paranoia rising, McClellan suspected a new conspiracy to deny him reinforcements and then fire him for failing to advance. “I am confident that [Lincoln] would relieve me tomorrow if he dared to do so,” Little Mac wrote to this wife. “His cowardice alone prevents it. I can never regard him with other feelings than those of thorough contempt—for his mind, heart & morality.” To his political friend Samuel Barlow, he complained, “I know nothing, absolutely nothing as to the plans and intentions of the Gov[ernmen]t.” What he did know, he added, was “that the rascals will get rid of me as soon as they dare—they all know my opinion of them. They are aware that I have seen through their villainous schemes & that if I succeed my foot will be on their necks.”

McClellan’s belief that the war could be contained and civilized was unshaken by the ordeal of the Seven Days battles. This genteel fantasy led him to send an apologetic letter to the proprietor of the large tobacco plantation where Robert E. Lee’s mother had grown up. Located not far from McClellan’s Berkeley headquarters, Shirley was the oldest plantation in the country; the current owner, one of Lee’s cousins, was complaining that the recent battles had damaged the estate and cost him eighteen runaway slaves. McClellan replied: “I have done my best to secure protection to private property, but I confess that circumstances beyond my control have often defeated my purposes.” Though Little Mac opposed the rebellion, he was decidedly in favor of the culture that spawned it. Writing to his wife, he indulged himself in a reverie of a golden age, an era “when abolitionists were not dreamed of [and] … psalm singing yankees were animals as rare as camelopards & black swans. I suspect [the Southerners] had a pretty good time, interrupted only by chills & fever, bad luck in gambling [and] the trouble of providing for their woolly headed dependents.”

McClellan also took dangerous comfort in “letters from the North urging me to march on Washington” and seize control of the government. Leading antiwar Democrats, including former mayor Fernando Wood of New York, sailed to Harrison’s Landing for long talks with the disgruntled general, and a foul climate of conspiracy settled over Berkeley plantation. When Ambrose Burnside, a friend of McClellan’s and the hero of Albemarle Sound, went to Harrison’s Landing to get a firsthand look at the army, he was shocked at what he heard. A group of division commanders, important men with stars on their shoulders, spoke openly one evening about turning on Washington and toppling the government. “I don’t know what you fellows call this talk, but I call it flat Treason, by God!” Burnside scolded.

McClellan seemed to enjoy flirting with the idea of an insurrection of his own. “If they leave me here neglected much longer I shall feel like taking my rather large military family to Wash[ington] to seek an explanation,” he wrote his wife. And later: “I do not believe that any nation was ever accursed with such a set of people as those who now rule in Wash[ington].” Mary Ellen McClellan only encouraged him: “I almost wish you
would
march up to Washington & frighten those people a little. I long to have the time come when you can have your revenge.”

The general only partly understood his own situation. He was correct that Lincoln had decided to be rid of him, but he was wrong about what was causing the delay. It wasn’t cowardice; Lincoln was waiting on the travel plans of Henry Halleck. The day after the president left McClellan at Harrison’s Landing, he secretly elevated Halleck to the vacant post of general in chief. Halleck was delayed in reaching Washington, however, by Morgan’s cavalry raid in Kentucky. When he finally arrived, on July 23, Lincoln steered him straight to Berkeley plantation, and at the same time made Halleck’s promotion public.

McClellan’s meeting with the new commander was predictably awkward. Little Mac considered the appointment a “slap in the face” and resented being placed under “a man whom I know by experience to be my inferior.” For the moment, Halleck’s assignment was merely to size up the situation and decide what to do next. He could restart the campaign with a realistic number of reinforcements, or he could pull the Army of the Potomac back from the peninsula. The president had also told him that he could keep McClellan or fire him, “as he pleased.” Lincoln had at long last concluded that this general would never be the man to win a hard war. To Orville Browning, he said: “If by magic [I] could reinforce [McClellan] with 100,000 men today he would be in an ecstasy over it, thank [me] for it, and tell [me] that he would go to Richmond tomorrow,” but “when tomorrow came he would telegraph that he had certain information that the enemy had 400,000 men, and that he could not advance without reinforcements.”

Halleck was arguably in no position to criticize another general for begging reinforcements, not after his own endless calls for more men as he inched his way to Corinth. But Halleck’s mind was set against McClellan for other reasons. The disposition of Union troops in Virginia now violated basic principles of military science as laid out in Halleck’s own textbook. McClellan’s army was linked to the newly combined force under John Pope by “exterior lines”—military terminology for lines of communication longer and less compact than those of the enemy. Worse, the Confederates, with their “interior lines,” were poised between the two Union forces and thus in a strong position to concentrate first against one and then against the other. Given that the Federals still believed that the Rebels outnumbered them, this situation seemed extremely risky. To mitigate the danger, Halleck had already advised Lincoln by telegraph that the Virginia campaign must to be reorganized under a single general.

As the two men talked strategy, McClellan suggested that he make an end run around Lee to cut Richmond’s supply line at Petersburg, but Halleck would not approve the idea. Instead, Little Mac promised Halleck that he would march up the north bank of the James and seize Richmond as soon as he received 25,000 fresh troops—but even so, McClellan continued to wring his hands over the superiority of the enemy. Somehow the populous North was unable to spare a man, but in McClellan’s mind the much-smaller South could add thousands to its Virginia army day after day.

McClellan’s request for yet more reinforcements persuaded Halleck that the president was correct: Little Mac would never feel ready. On August 3, Halleck ordered the evacuation of the army, thus bringing the Peninsula Campaign—launched with such high hopes—to an ignominious end. Predictably, McClellan felt that this disaster was in no way his fault. As he assured his wife: “I cannot feel that I have any intentional error to reproach myself with.”

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The rise of Henry Halleck and John Pope was a repudiation of George McClellan and the entire eastern command. And in case anyone missed that point, the victor at Island No. 10 ground his boot into the faces of the eastern generals with a pompous introduction to his new Army of Virginia. “I have come to you from the West, where we have always seen the backs of our enemies,” Pope declared. “I desire you to dismiss from your minds certain phrases, which I am sorry to find so much in vogue amongst you. I hear constantly of ‘taking strong positions and holding them,’ of ‘lines of retreat,’ and ‘bases of supplies.’ Let us discard such ideas. The strongest position a soldier should desire to occupy is one from which he can most easily advance against the enemy.” Pope didn’t stop there; he seemed not to want to stop at all. Every line, every word, was an attack: “Let us study the probable lines of retreat of our opponents, and leave our own to take care of themselves. Success and glory are in the advance, disaster and shame lurk in the rear.”

Reading these words, McClellan seethed: this “paltry young man who wanted to teach me the art of war … [will] be badly whipped.” Boastful though he was, however, Pope gave voice to a growing desire in the North for a more aggressive approach to the war. He struck that chord again when he issued orders—following Lincoln’s lead—to take what his army needed from enemy territory and arrest disloyal civilians while confiscating their slaves. “The temper of the North has undergone another change,” John Dahlgren informed his diary. The Seven Days battles had forged a new “determination to persevere” and the public “will forbear less than before.”