Rise to Greatness (54 page)

Buckingham set out from Washington aboard a special train on November 7, as snow fell through darkened skies. At Burnside’s tent, some fifty miles west of Washington, he pressed the reluctant general to accept the assignment out of duty—and to prevent it from going to the brash and scheming Joseph Hooker. Successful, Buckingham moved five miles north to Rectortown with McClellan’s replacement in tow. Buckingham and Burnside arrived at the general’s headquarters around eleven
P.M.
and were gone again by eleven thirty, at which point McClellan dashed off an account of the meeting to his wife.

“Another interruption—this time more important,” he wrote. “It was in the shape of dear good old Burnside accompanied by Genl Buckingham … they brought with them the order relieving me from the command of the Army of the Potomac, & assigning Burnside.… No cause is given.”

He continued: “Poor Burn feels dreadfully, almost crazy—I am sorry for him, & he never showed himself a better man or truer friend than now. Of course I was much surprised—but as I read the order in the presence of Genl Buckingham, I am sure that not a muscle quivered nor was the slightest expression of feeling visible on my face, which they watched closely. They shall not have that triumph.

“They have made a dreadful mistake,” McClellan concluded. “Alas for my poor country.” And then, characteristically, the general absolved himself of any responsibility. “If we have failed, it was not our fault.”

The public learned of the great change the next day, and if that huge, lumbering Union army was ever inclined to turn on Washington and depose Lincoln, this was the time. There was grumbling in the ranks, and some rifles flung to the ground in protest, but the long-feared military coup never materialized. Some credit for this must go to McClellan, who behaved impeccably. Whatever questions lingered about the general’s patriotism were more than answered by his dignified departure from command.

On November 10, George McClellan mounted Dan Webster and rode through the ranks one last time. “Gray-haired men came to me with tears streaming down their cheeks. I never before had to exercise so much self-control,” the general wrote. After he passed the last of these straight-backed columns—raw volunteers he had shaped into soldiers—McClellan boarded a railcar as an honor guard fired a final salute. Then the guardsmen crowded around the car and unhooked it from the train. They would not let him go.

At last, the general stepped onto the rear platform and gestured for quiet. “Stand by General Burnside as you have stood by me,” he called out in a ringing tone, “and all will be well.” At that, the soldiers reconnected the car, the train chuffed slowly away, and with it went, in the words of one soldier, “the romance of war.” Robert E. Lee was also sorry to see him go, telling James Longstreet, “we always understood each other so well. I fear they may continue to make these changes until they find someone I don’t understand.”

*   *   *

Midway across the continent, after his frustrating summer on garrison duty and his successful battles with Price and Van Dorn, Ulysses Grant was finally moving again. He wired Washington to let Halleck know that he intended to gather the troops the general in chief had scattered back in June and try to do something aggressive with them. He got no reply, which he correctly took to mean that he should go ahead.

On November 2, Grant set out from Jackson, Tennessee, heading almost due south down the Tennessee and Ohio Railroad line. He was leading 42,000 men and intended to clear the Rebels as he went: away from the railroad crossing at Grand Junction, Tennessee; out of the supply depot in Holly Springs, Mississippi; away from the crossroads town of Oxford; off the Yalobusha River at Grenada. Patching up the railroad along the way, Grant figured he would eventually reach the Mississippi state capital, Jackson, where he could seize control of the road that led to Vicksburg. Cut off, the Confederates would have no choice but to evacuate their last Mississippi River stronghold and, as Lincoln would later put it, “the Father of Waters” would “again [go] unvexed to the sea.”

That was the idea, and Grant’s campaign began smartly as he pushed the Rebels out of Grand Junction on November 8. But a cloud quickly formed over the general’s advancing army, seeded by Lincoln himself. The president had spent a good deal of time in October with an unhappy general from Grant’s command, the Illinois politician John McClernand. McClernand was not just any politician; since the death of his ally Stephen A. Douglas in June 1861, the longtime congressman was arguably the most prominent Democrat in Lincoln’s home state. From the opening days of the war, therefore, he was a special case for the president. After Fort Sumter, Lincoln immediately gave the untrained McClernand a generalship and put him in charge of a brigade of soldiers posted to Cairo, in McClernand’s own congressional district. Since Grant was the Union commander at Cairo, Lincoln’s special case became Grant’s special problem. It fell to him to figure out how to get along with a self-aggrandizing second in command whose military experience was limited to sixty days in the state militia, but whose political sway dominated the immediate neighborhood and stretched all the way to the White House.

By the fall of 1862, McClernand was itching to have his own army. When the governor of Illinois invited him along on a trip to Washington in October, McClernand quickly accepted. Washington was a place where he knew how to make things happen. Once there, he pursued Lincoln relentlessly. Whenever he had a moment alone with the president, he pressed his desire to recruit and train a new army of men from Illinois and surrounding states, then take that force down the Mississippi from Memphis to capture Vicksburg. It was a big job for an inexperienced soldier, but considering the moment when McClernand had Lincoln’s ear, it’s not surprising that the president would listen to such a plan. After all, Lincoln was in search of aggressive generals, Vicksburg was a prize he very much coveted, and during a difficult election season he did not need John McClernand mad at him.

When McClernand left Washington late that month, he carried the orders he coveted. Signed by Stanton, endorsed by Lincoln, and marked “Confidential,” the papers authorized McClernand to collect troops from Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa for his mission to open the Mississippi. Within days, however, the newspapers caught wind of McClernand’s secret campaign, which is how Grant learned shortly after setting out on his campaign that his special problem was about to get much worse. “Two commanders on the same field are always one too many,” Grant later wrote, “and in this case I did not think the general selected had either the experience or the qualifications for so important a position. I feared for the safety of the troops entrusted to him.” On November 10, when Grant learned that fresh regiments were being told to report to McClernand, he telegraphed Halleck. “Am I to … lay still here while an Expedition is fitted out from Memphis?” he asked. And what about the troops from his army already stationed in Memphis under Sherman: were they to be part of this new “Expedition”?

Grant was relieved when he heard back from the general in chief the next day. “You have command of all troops sent to your Dep[artment],” Halleck wrote, “and have permission to fight the enemy when you please.” Thus encouraged, Grant promptly sent his cavalry toward Holly Springs, which they cleared of Rebels and occupied on November 13.

The next few weeks were highly confusing. Halleck continued to reassure Grant that he had sole command, even as Lincoln and Stanton expressed support for McClernand and his expedition. Worried about losing the upper hand, McClernand sought and received help from his political friends. Grant, trying to thwart McClernand, decided the best strategy was to launch his own river-based Vicksburg campaign under Sherman before McClernand arrived in Memphis to claim his command. It was a mystery: was Lincoln playing a double game, allowing an important politician to cherish a little longer his fantasy that he would be entrusted with one of the most important military objectives of the war? When Lincoln authorized the Illinois congressman’s mission in October, he didn’t know that Grant was about to take the initiative. In urging McClernand forward, he was simply trying to light a fire. Now the pot was boiling, but the president seemed to have little desire to interfere further.

*   *   *

John Pope, once one of Lincoln’s favorite generals, had been banished to Minnesota in early September. By the time he arrived, the crisis was over. On October 9, Pope wired the War Department to report: “The Sioux War may be considered at an end.” Little Crow, reluctant leader of what had become the deadliest uprising by Native Americans in U.S. history, had predicted the outcome: “The white men are like the locusts,” he said; no matter how many settlers the Sioux killed, “ten times ten will come to kill you.” But it was not just the white men; it was their rifles and most of all their cannon that scattered the chief and his warriors.

After being routed at the battle of Wood Lake, Little Crow and some of his men fled into the empty plains of Canada. But hundreds of Sioux left behind were taken prisoner, and Pope reported that he was “anxious to execute a number of them.” Not a small number, either, but every Indian involved in the fighting. Furthermore, Pope found it difficult to determine which of the Sioux had actually been involved: “I don’t know how you can discriminate now between Indians who say they … have been friendly, and those who have not.” In Minnesota, the press and public, too, wanted revenge on the Sioux.

A military tribunal was established to sort through the prisoners, and Pope admonished its members not to “allow any false sympathy for the Indians to prevent you from acting with the utmost rigor.” On November 7, Pope sent Lincoln the names of more than three hundred Sioux prisoners who had been found guilty by the tribunal and sentenced to hang. In all of American history there had never been a mass execution on any comparable scale. Only Lincoln stood in the way.

The president had heard enough from Pope to know that a number of horrific crimes had been committed against innocent men, women, and children, but he strongly suspected that many of those now condemned had been railroaded and did not deserve to die. A plea from Minnesota’s governor, Alexander Ramsey, only added to the sense that the state authorities intended to sacrifice the prisoners to satisfy a mob. “I hope the execution of every Sioux Indian condemned by the military court will be at once ordered,” Ramsey wrote Lincoln. “It would be wrong upon principle and policy to refuse this. Private revenge would … take the place of official judgment” if the executions were delayed.

On November 10, as McClellan was bidding farewell to the Army of the Potomac, the president replied that he would take the risk. He was not willing to sanction a massacre masquerading as justice. In a telegram to Pope, Lincoln wrote: “Please forward, as soon as possible, the full and complete record of these convictions. And if the record does not fully indicate the more guilty and influential … please have a careful statement made on these points and forwarded to me.”

No doubt Pope considered this terse rebuke a further humiliation, for his pique showed in his reply. “The only distinction between the culprits is … which of them murdered most people or violated most young girls,” Pope wrote. “All of them are guilty,” and “the people … are exasperated … and if the guilty are not all executed I think it nearly impossible to prevent the indiscriminate massacre of all the Indians—old men, women, and children.” The irritated Pope sent the court records to Washington.

When the documents arrived, Lincoln assigned two lawyers from the attorney general’s office to review each case. It was time-consuming work: the names of the Sioux were strange and confusing, and the events described were chaotic. The examination was still under way when Pope again wired Lincoln to warn of possible lynch mobs. “Organizations of Inhabitants are being rapidly made with the purpose of massacring these Indians,” he reported.

Still, Lincoln refused to be rushed, so Governor Ramsey tried another tack a few days later. Would Lincoln lift his stay of execution if Ramsey took responsibility for the hangings? “Nothing but the Speedy execution of the tried and convicted Sioux Indians will save us here from Scenes of outrage,” he declared. “If you prefer it turn them over to me & I will order their Execution.” On November 28, two members of Congress from Minnesota arrived in Washington to plead with Lincoln in person. A bloodbath was about to take place, they urged. He must stop it by allowing the executions to proceed.

Lincoln was hard at work that day on his annual message to Congress, which was due two days later. In Lincoln’s time, this report was a vitally important document, a long and detailed accounting of government operations, as well as the president’s blueprint for the future. Weeks of preparation went into each one. With the nation in the midst of a devouring civil war, Lincoln’s 1862 message had to be perfectly calibrated in every word, phrase, and echo. The president told his visitors he could not put the message aside to deal with the Sioux prisoners—nor would he wash his hands of their fates. The people of Minnesota must wait a bit longer for his answer.

*   *   *

During her trip to New York and Boston earlier that same month, Mary Lincoln became annoyed because her husband had made no effort to communicate with her. “I have waited in vain to hear from you,” she wrote on November 2, “yet as you are not given to letter writing, will be charitable enough to impute your silence, to the right cause.”

Mary reported that she was doing what she loved to do—shopping, and receiving homage from “all the distinguished in the land.” She mentioned that her trip had nearly been spoiled by “one of my severe attacks,” but now she was herself again, dragging nine-year-old Tad to the tailor for a fitting, and in search of just the right “fur wrappings for the coachman’s carriage trappings.” She summarized the political intelligence she had gathered—people wanted action from the army—and passed along the news that Tad had lost a tooth. Most importantly, she could not understand why her husband wouldn’t take time to jot a note. Perfect “strangers come up from [Washington] & tell me you are well,” but she had heard nothing from the man himself. “One line, to say that we are occasionally remembered will be gratefully received,” she wrote, and then closed by passing along a request that the president find a job for a friend of a favorite department store owner.