Rise to Greatness (51 page)

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In England, news of the battle of Antietam stunned the public. “The effect upon the popular mind … has already been quite considerable,” Charles Francis Adams wrote to Seward early in October. Having predicted the fall of Washington, the British newspapers were now reporting Lee’s retreat, and the most prevalent reaction, Adams wrote, was “surprise.” The invincibility of the Rebels, which had seemed so manifest in mid-September as they advanced on every front, was once again in doubt. Lord Palmerston immediately began to have second thoughts about putting his nose into such a violent quarrel. Prominent lawmakers and members of the cabinet underlined the prime minister’s misgivings by warning that Britain would be dragged into the war. When Lincoln’s proclamation arrived close behind the unexpected battlefield report, the fine points of the U.S. Constitution confused many people, but the chief implication was obvious: the American conflict had a new aspect. “The whole matter is full of difficulty,” Palmerston wrote to Russell, “and can only be cleared up by some more decided events between the contending armies.”

Russell disagreed. The foreign minister was now bent on creating a united European front to end the war, and his enthusiasm spread to the chancellor of the exchequer, William Ewart Gladstone. As tribune of Britain’s Liberal Party he had no truck with slavery. And he dreaded the mischief that might follow if the United States fractured. But Gladstone was convinced that the South could never be forced back into the Union. Unaware that the prime minister was getting cold feet, Gladstone was delighted to hear that a serious effort was at last being mounted to stop the carnage in North America and prevent riots in cotton-starved England. He was so delighted, in fact, that he couldn’t resist hinting at the intervention plan during a speech on October 7 in Newcastle. “We may have our own opinions about slavery,” he bellowed, trying to be heard in a hall that swallowed his words. “We may be for or against the South, but there is no doubt that Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South have made an army; they are making, it appears, a navy; and they have made what is more than either—they have made a nation!” The roar of the crowd testified to the weariness of people who had been waiting in vain for the mills to reopen and for trade to resume with luxury-loving Southern planters.

Adams was angry when he read Gladstone’s words in the next day’s newspapers, especially the reference to a Confederate navy. He knew very well that Davis and his fellow Rebels weren’t making their navy by themselves. The shipwrights of Liverpool were doing it for them, while the British government turned a half-blind eye, secretly pleased by the prospect of sapping U.S. power on the seas. The Confederate cruiser
Alabama,
fresh from the river Mersey, was busy raiding and sinking Union merchant vessels off the Azores, and more ships were in the works. Adams protested to Russell, but like the other formal complaints the ambassador registered against the flagrant partisanship in the shipyards, this one was stifled in bluster and legalese.

Continuing his push for intervention, Russell filed a strong memo in favor of action. But then the foreign minister’s effort stalled. Under pressure from others in his party, Gladstone backpedaled, saying that in Newcastle he had merely been expressing a personal opinion, not an official position. Most important, it became clear that Palmerston had made up his mind. “We must continue merely to be lookers-on,” the prime minister said, “till the war shall have taken a more decided turn.”

But as Palmerston cooled, across the English Channel the idea of intervention was heating up again. Henri Mercier reported from Washington that the Emancipation Proclamation threatened to bring on a race war that would wipe out the American cotton industry for years to come. This radical initiative was, in his view, driving the border states away from the Union and swelling the popularity of the Democrats. Now was the moment, Mercier urged, for Europe to step in.

The envoy’s dispatch arrived in Paris at about the same time as a letter from Leopold I of Belgium, making the case for mediation. Because Leopold was a relative and close adviser of Queen Victoria, Louis-Napoleon took this letter to be a signal of Britain’s readiness to step in. He promptly summoned the Confederate emissary, John Slidell, to a meeting.

Slidell was initially elated to find the emperor on the verge of action, but his heart sank when Napoleon announced that he wanted Russia and England to join him. By now the Southerner had come to understand an essential truth about the European powers: they were incapable of forming a true partnership. The Russian czar favored the North as a counterweight to established European powers. The British wanted a quick end to the war, but not one that risked their own safety, and they could not find their way into an effective alliance with France, their eternal foes. Now Slidell tried once again to persuade the emperor to take the plunge alone, to be sole author of Southern independence, in exchange for which the Confederate States would help him build a new Latin American empire.

Slidell’s efforts were for naught. Just as the invasion of the border states had been the South’s best chance for military victory, so were these busy weeks of October the high tide of Rebel hopes for European support—and the tide quickly receded. As he told Slidell he would do, Napoleon proposed a joint effort, and as Slidell feared would happen, the proposal failed. England backed away, unwilling to risk war with the United States; Russia demurred, not wanting to offend the North; and France, finding itself alone, returned to the sidelines with a Gallic shrug.

A week after Slidell’s interview with the emperor, William Dayton met for the first time with the new French foreign minister. The American envoy was pleased to learn that no further initiative was being contemplated. France “wish[ed] that the war could be ended,” said Edouard Drouyn de L’Huys mildly, and “reserved to herself the right to express this wish” in some formal way in the future. Dayton considered this enigmatic statement for a moment and then asked: “What will be the consequences” if Washington were to ignore such a wish?

The new minister, a veteran diplomat who had spent years in London, spoke perfect English. “Nothing,” he replied.

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By now a week had melted away since McClellan was ordered to move, and other than sending cavalry to chase helplessly after J. E. B. Stuart, he had done nothing. On October 13, Lincoln took up pen and paper for one last try to get through to his difficult general. The result was his longest and most closely argued letter to the general, striking in its grasp of military tactics—the fruit of almost a year of close and costly study. Remarkably, despite all McClellan’s slights, aspersions, and tantrums, Lincoln still had the patience to make his case respectfully and candidly.

And what was his case? That Northern men were a match for Southern men. That they could march as fast and fight as hard, if only McClellan would have faith in them. Lincoln asked whether the general recalled their conversation at Sharpsburg, when Lincoln had warned him about what he termed “over-cautiousness.” Well, this was what he meant by the word: “when you assume that you cannot do what the enemy is constantly doing.” Instead of being over-cautious, Lincoln continued, “should you not claim to be at least his equal in prowess, and act upon the claim?”

The president then cited several examples. There was McClellan’s recent telegram to Halleck, calling again for railroad improvements before the Army of the Potomac could move south. Lincoln pointed out that Lee had only half as many wagons as McClellan did, and was sending them twice as far to reach the nearest railroad depot. Yet somehow Lee got along without commencing a major construction project that would consume the rest of the year. Why couldn’t McClellan do the same?

Lincoln now made the case for launching the footrace mentioned in Halleck’s orders a week earlier. Set out toward Richmond on a straight line, he suggested, drawing supplies from Washington. Watch Lee come chasing behind on the longer, curving valley route, and then seize an opportunity to launch an attack through a gap in the Blue Ridge Mountains. “If we never try, we shall never succeed,” Lincoln urged.

Next he shifted gears slightly. Suppose that McClellan’s worst fear, expressed in his wires to the War Department, came true. What if, instead of racing south to pursue the Army of the Potomac, Lee moved north again toward Pennsylvania? That would be a godsend, Lincoln suggested. “You have nothing to do but to follow, and ruin him!”

This rigorous letter provided a clear window into Lincoln’s orderly mind. He reasoned from hard data: specific mileages, waypoints, roads and rivers. He used clear metaphors drawn from mathematics: Lee must march on the arc of the circle while McClellan could march on the chord. He considered possible flaws in his argument and answered each one. Binding it all together was his stoic self-reliance, a faith that fortune smiled on those who shouldered the responsibility and dared to make the attempt, to
try.
Lincoln closed by restating his challenge to Little Mac to have more faith in his army. “It is all easy if our troops march as well as the enemy,” he concluded, “and it is unmanly to say they can not do it.”

Lincoln showed the letter to Vice President Hamlin before he sent it away. He had scant hope it would do any good—he told a visitor he would fire McClellan now if not for the possible impact on the elections. And indeed, even before the letter could be delivered, McClellan displayed another sign of his deep-seated insecurity. His cavalry was no match for Stuart’s, he complained in a message to Halleck. Irritated, Lincoln told Halleck to convey the following response: “If the enemy had more occupation south of the river, his cavalry would not be so likely to make raids north of it.”

Bragg, meanwhile, was slipping away in the West, and Buell seemed content to watch him go. “It is rather a good thing to be a Major General and in command of a Department,” Nicolay wrote with caustic irony. “One can take things so leisurely!” Halleck conveyed the president’s frustration in a message to Buell: “He does not understand why we cannot march as the enemy marches, live as he lives, and fight as he fights.… Your army must enter East Tennessee this fall.” Buell’s answer, such as it was, rested on the premise that Confederate soldiers were better able to endure hardship than the Federals.

That reply marked the end of Buell’s command, this time for good. Lincoln might be stuck with McClellan for the moment, but he wasn’t stuck with Buell. He would not tolerate an inferiority complex at the top of the Union armies. Lincoln dismissed the slow-marching general and replaced him with another Ohioan: William Rosecrans, from Grant’s command.

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“We are all blue here,” Nicolay reported on October 14 as election results arrived from Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. Democrats made large strides in each of these key states, overshadowing more encouraging news from Iowa, where Senator James Grimes exulted in a big Republican victory—“twice our usual majority,” he estimated—and predicted a similar landslide in Wisconsin. Grimes gave the credit to the Emancipation Proclamation, but clearly it was an open question whether the public would ultimately support the decree. Lincoln distracted himself from the election returns by commissioning an unusual gift for Tad: he instructed the Bureau of Ordnance to manufacture a miniature, fully functional brass cannon, “a little gun that he can not hurt himself with.”

Such pleasures of office were few, even as unwelcome responsibilities multiplied. Among them was the job of reviewing military death sentences. Lincoln felt compelled to undertake this effort: in times of war and revolution, governments often become casual about death, but the president was determined not to let that happen to him. The records of military commissions and courts-martial piled up on his desk with ominous speed. “I must go through these papers and see if I cannot find some excuse to let these poor fellows off,” he told one visitor on the eve of what he called a “butcher-day.” Such a day came along in late October and after a good deal of reading and creative thinking he managed to find plausible pretexts for sparing three lives. A prisoner from New Mexico, Jose Maria Rivas, spoke only Spanish, so Lincoln reasoned that he might not have known what he was saying when he confessed to being a “spy.” A man in Memphis, Sely Lewis, probably was a smuggler, but the president ruled that the military court had no jurisdiction over his case. And Private Conrad Zachringer, who threw his lieutenant to the ground, then beat and throttled him—well, he was drunk and probably didn’t know what he was doing.

The authority to grant high offices also came freighted with pain, for Lincoln rarely pleased one man without disappointing at least one other. In October, he took on the excruciating task of deciding which of his friends he would name to the Supreme Court. In late spring he had filled a second vacancy on the court by naming a Kentucky-bred Iowan, Samuel Miller, to the seat left empty after the death of Peter Daniel, one of the
Dred Scott
justices. Now he had a third vacancy to fill, and he at last was at liberty to choose a justice from Illinois. Two men intensely desired the appointment to the court, Orville Browning and David Davis. Davis was arguably Lincoln’s most effective political supporter, as close to a campaign manager as Lincoln had. And Browning had been his frequent visitor, adviser, and confidant through the tumultuous first half of 1862. It was Browning who had rushed with his wife, Eliza, to be with the Lincolns when Willie died, and Browning who had taken on the job of arranging the funeral.

Browning had the support of Attorney General Bates and a number of his Republican Senate colleagues. Lincoln agonized over the choice but appeared to have made up his mind when a story circulated that he had remarked: “I do not know what I may do when the time comes, but there has never been a day when if I had to act I should not have appointed Browning.” When those words reached Illinois, Davis’s supporters had no doubt that they were authentic. “No man but he could have put the situation so quaintly,” one recalled. Naturally, they were outraged that the president would turn his back on the Bloomington judge who had done the hard work of organizing Lincoln’s campaign for the nomination in 1860.