Rise to Greatness (59 page)

With that, he dismissed the trio, and Chase made his way home to his mansion at Sixth and E streets, slightly baffled. Eventually it dawned on him that the president would now refuse to accept either Seward’s resignation or his own. The friends of Seward and the friends of Chase would be equally pleased and equally disappointed; as a consequence, Lincoln would keep his cabinet intact and preserve the delicate balance of his administration.

This was exactly right. Though Chase wrote Lincoln a pleading letter arguing that the president should instead accept both resignations, by the time he delivered it Lincoln had already acted. Seward cheerfully agreed to return to work; Chase followed dyspeptically a day later. The crisis was over.

Somehow, from his lowest point, Lincoln had managed by cool cunning to master a situation that days earlier seemed to threaten disaster. He not only survived what Doris Kearns Goodwin called “the most serious governmental crisis of his presidency,” he emerged from it stronger than ever. Reflecting upon his handling of the revolt, Lincoln told John Hay matter-of-factly: “I do not now see how it could have been done better.”

More challenges lay ahead, but all of them would end the same way, with Lincoln “more firmly than ever in the saddle,” as his secretaries put it. The president liked that equestrian metaphor, and later in December he used a variation of it with Senator Ira Harris of New York to explain what it felt like to have Seward and Chase restored to the cabinet and balance maintained in the government. “Now I can ride,” he said. “I have a pumpkin in each end of my bag.”

*   *   *

The country shared none of this confidence—not yet, and not for a long time to come. “The war! I have no heart to write about either it or the political aspect of affairs,” wrote Mary Lincoln’s adviser Benjamin French. “Defeat at Fredericksburg—the Cabinet breaking up—our leading men fighting with each other! Unless something occurs very soon to brighten up affairs, I shall begin to look upon our whole Nation as on its way to destruction.” The stalwart Republican proprietor of the
Chicago Tribune,
Joseph Medill, cataloged the woes of the Union: “Failure of the army, weight of taxes, depreciation of money, want of cotton, increasing national debt, deaths in the army”—the list went on. “All combine to produce the existing state of despondency” and lead to the conclusion that “the war is drawing toward a disastrous and disgraceful termination.”

John Dahlgren waxed eloquent in his journal. “So we can raise larger armies than any other nation, and make generals as fast as paper money. We can be so rich that a thousand millions may be squandered and not be felt. But we cannot make soldiers or leaders.… It is an army of postmasters or other civil placemen with arms in their hands. The nation only wants one man—a General!” Dahlgren was wrong in his lament. The Union was teaching men to be fine soldiers and leaders, but the process took time and the school was harsh and unforgiving.

Even as the gloomy sailor was writing those words, in fact, the one man he pined for—the store clerk on his way to becoming
a General
—was learning a few more lessons the hard way. Ulysses Grant had cleared the Rebels from Oxford, Mississippi, but now his army was sustained by a lifeline of parallel iron rails that grew less reliable with each mile. The Rebel cavalryman Nathan Bedford Forrest looked on that vulnerable railroad like a lion sizing up a limping gazelle. Darting through the Tennessee countryside in the rear of Grant’s army, Forrest broke up the railroad at various points along a sixty-mile stretch and slashed Grant’s telegraph lines so effectively that the general was unable to communicate with the outside world for two weeks. This taught Grant, in his own words, “the impossibility of maintaining so long a line” to supply “an army moving in any enemy’s country.”

As the general pondered his next move, he continued to fret over the unsolved problem of shady cotton traders in his zone of occupation. Despite numerous complaints from the field, Washington had done little to help, and Grant was at the end of his patience. His frustration deepened his reflexive anti-Semitism until finally, on December 17, he dashed off his Order No. 11, one of the most regrettable documents of the war. “The Jews, as a class, violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department … are hereby expelled,” Grant wrote. He directed post commanders throughout his department to find and evict “all of this class of people” within twenty-four hours, and arrest any who remained.

Grant’s adjutant, John Rawlins, saw instantly that the order was grossly unjust and would mar the general’s reputation, but when he tried to talk his superior out of sending it, Grant reportedly barked, “They can countermand this from Washington if they like.”

Lincoln did exactly that. When Grant’s order reached Paducah, Jewish merchants there raised a delegation to travel immediately to Washington and protest. As spokesman they chose Cesar Kaskel, the vice president of the recently established Paducah Union League. The men boarded a steamer and started up the Ohio River; within days they were sitting in Lincoln’s office. The president heard their complaint and boiled it down to its biblical essence: “And so the children of Israel were driven from the happy land of Canaan?” he asked good-naturedly.

Kaskel was quick on his feet: “Yes,” he said, “and that is why we have come unto Father Abraham’s bosom, asking protection.”

“And this protection you shall have at once,” Lincoln promised.

Grant’s next lesson was among the most transformative tutorials of the war. Earl Van Dorn, nettlesome as ever, collected what little remained of his Rebel army and marched on the town of Holly Springs, where Grant had stockpiled more than a million dollars’ worth of supplies. Colonel R. C. Murphy guarded the cache with 1,500 Union soldiers, which ought to have been sufficient to defend the depot. But to the surprise of the Confederates, and to Grant’s eternal fury, Murphy took one look at Van Dorn’s motley party and surrendered. What Van Dorn’s men could not eat or haul away from the Federal trove, they smashed and burned.

Abruptly Grant found himself far from his Union friends, with no railroad and no supplies. The people around Oxford were delighted by this twist; Grant later remembered that some of them called on him “with broad smiles on their faces, indicating intense joy, to ask what I was going to do now without anything for my soldiers to eat.” Grant knew what he was not going to do: he wasn’t going to tell his men to starve while they had guns in their hands. Turning the tables, he answered the townspeople by saying that he “had already sent troops and wagons to collect all the food and forage they could find for fifteen miles on each side of the road.” The smiles faded as the locals realized that their farms and stores were about to be stripped. “What are
we
to do?” they demanded. Grant advised them to go someplace more than fifteen miles away, and hope they could find some people in a generous mood.

The success of this improvisation startled Grant. Though the raids by Forrest and Van Dorn soon forced him to turn back temporarily from his goal of Vicksburg, he was “amazed at the quantity of supplies the country afforded.” He kept his men and mules well fed all the way back to their base. “This taught me a lesson which was taken advantage of later,” Grant wrote after the war. That was an understatement: the realization that an army didn’t need an umbilical cord, that it was possible to cut loose from the supply line and move quickly while living off the countryside, led to some of the most successful and decisive campaigns of the war. This was the lesson Grant would apply in his brilliant maneuvers to capture Vicksburg the following spring. It was the lesson Sherman would use to gut Georgia and the Carolinas while capturing Savannah in 1864. And it was the lesson Philip Sheridan would apply when he stripped the Shenandoah Valley that same year, thus robbing Lee of his larder.

Grant’s retreat from Mississippi in December 1862 was not without cost. It was humiliating and demoralizing, and it left Sherman in the lurch when he attacked the Chickasaw Bluffs near Vicksburg on December 29 in the mistaken belief that Grant’s army was still menacing the Rebels from nearby. But that was cheap tuition compared to the value of what Grant learned in Oxford, for arguably no military lesson in the four years of the Civil War did more to decide the outcome.

*   *   *

Mary Lincoln dreaded the approach of Christmas. She enjoyed the shopping, of course; the presidential carriage was a frequent sight around town, Horatio Taft reported, “with its tall driver & footman … standing in front of some Merchant’s door while Mrs. L[incoln] sits in her seat and examines rich goods which the obsequious Clerk brings out to her.” But the holiday season reminded her of the last days of 1861, when the White House rang with the laughter and shouts of four happy boys, two Lincolns and two Tafts. That was also a time when she had been busy putting the finishing touches on her great redecorating project and dreaming of the social triumph she would engineer in February. Now everything had changed. “From this time until spring each day will be almost a gloomy anniversary,” she confided to a friend. To another she wrote: “My precious little Willie is as much mourned over & far more missed (now that we realize he has gone).”

The first lady ended the year with a trip on New Year’s Eve “to see a Mrs. Laury, a spiritualist” who lived in Georgetown. Once again, Willie’s shade was summoned from the great beyond to console his grieving mother. While in the vicinity, Willie took the opportunity—through the medium—to warn his father that “the Cabinet are all enemies of the President, working for themselves, and that they would have to be dismissed.”

Grief was the president’s companion as well, though he managed to keep the upper hand. Just before Christmas, Lincoln learned of yet another friend killed in battle. William McCullough had been a court clerk in Bloomington, Illinois. The president knew what he meant to his family. On December 23, in a letter to McCullough’s daughter, Lincoln wrote: “In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares. The older have learned to ever expect it.” Endurance, he counseled, was the medicine for grief, and time the therapy. Reassuring her that she was “sure to be happy again,” he told the girl: “I have had experience enough to know what I say.” Never one to hide from sorrow, Lincoln spent a bittersweet Christmas Day visiting the hospitals of Washington, which were now full with the wounded of Fredericksburg.

The last days of 1862 slipped away. Lincoln salved the hurt feelings of the outfoxed Senate Republicans by agreeing to bend the Constitution to create a new state: West Virginia. Conservatives pleaded with him to block the statehood bill. They dreaded the precedent of dividing a state against its will. After long deliberation, Lincoln signed the legislation, thus rewarding the mountain loyalists while punishing the Rebels in Richmond.

On December 26, a cheer went up in Minnesota when thirty-eight Sioux dropped from a giant scaffold. (One more warrior had been spared at the last minute.) The largest mass execution in American history, it proved to be sufficient vengeance. As Lincoln had calculated, the citizens of the state did not rampage for more blood.

On December 30, the brave little
Monitor
sank in high seas, the victim of bad weather, not Confederate guns. The next day, Lincoln gave his support to an ill-fated project to colonize Ile à Vache, an island off the coast of Haiti. As a consequence, some five hundred black Americans would suffer, and many of them die, at the failed colony, in a tragic fiasco that would finally close the book on Abraham Lincoln’s worst idea.

As the old year ticked down, millions of people wondered whether Lincoln would actually go through with his commitment to emancipate the slaves. Would he quail at the last minute from such a momentous step? Was it all a bluff, or was there perhaps some secret compromise in the works to reunite the country and preserve the peculiar institution? Shortly before New Year’s Day, Charles Sumner paid a visit to the White House to look the president in the eye and test his resolve. Lincoln assured the senator that once he took a position, he was difficult to move. Questioned again during the last week of December, Lincoln declared that “he could not stop the proclamation if he would, and would not if he could.”

Some urged him to reconsider. Browning enlisted a Massachusetts conservative, Benjamin Franklin Thomas, to call on Lincoln “and have a full, frank conversation with him in regard to the threatened proclamation of emancipation,” which they both believed to be “fraught with evil, and evil only.” After his appeal, Thomas reported back: “The President was fatally bent upon his course, saying that if he should refuse to issue his proclamation there would be a rebellion in the north, and that a dictator would be placed over his head within the week.”

As the deadline approached, Lincoln worked with his cabinet to refine every word. His decision to exempt thirteen Louisiana parishes from the proclamation led to some awkward language, and in one cabinet meeting Montgomery Blair argued that such a minor matter should be left out. “As this was destined to be read as a great historical document, it was a pity to have its unity, completeness, and direct simplicity marred by such a trifle of detail,” Blair contended. Both Seward and Chase agreed. Pacing by the fireplace, Lincoln said he had promised political leaders in that part of Louisiana that he would count their territory as loyal if they would hold an election for members of Congress. They had done so, and now he was keeping his promise.

Chase objected that Congress was unlikely to recognize those new members. Lincoln stopped his pacing and wheeled on the Treasury secretary. “Then I am to be bullied by Congress am I?” he snapped. Obviously the cabinet crisis had left a sore spot. “I’ll be damned if I will.”

*   *   *

The day after Christmas, in central Tennessee, General William Rosecrans, Buell’s replacement, departed Nashville with some 47,000 men, marching down the road toward Chattanooga. Rosecrans looked like the marble bust of a Greek emperor and hailed from a distinguished military family in Ohio. At West Point, he had rescued a plebe named Grant from hazing. Bred to be a soldier, “Old Rosy” had waited forty-three years to lead a great army. After long preparation, he was ready to try to bring eastern Tennessee back into the Union fold.