Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (30 page)

Within a day, the president had recovered his composure, and on July 27 Lincoln sat down to draft a more aggressive program for conducting the war, calling for a three-pronged invasion of the Confederacy in Virginia and in east and west Tennessee. To accomplish that, he needed to do some housecleaning: he relieved the unfortunate McDowell of his command and called to Washington as his replacement the commander of the Department of the Ohio, George B. McClellan, who had managed to win some small-scale victories with Ohio volunteers in western Virginia
that summer. Then in November Lincoln rid himself of the lumbering Winfield Scott and promoted McClellan to general in chief of all the Union armies, and in January 1862 he deposed Secretary of War Cameron and replaced him with a steely-eyed lawyer named Edwin M. Stanton.

The naive war, the glory-to-God war, the war of the thousand-colored uniforms, was over. The war in earnest had now begun.

The arrival of George Brinton McClellan on the scene in Washington was a second wind to the demoralized Federal army. At age thirty-five, McClellan was dashing and dapper, the very storybook image of a general, a “Young Napoleon.” To support that image, he brought with him from his years as a railroad executive some substantial and useful experience as an organizer. And organize he did. Numerous three-months’ militia regiments that had been about to go home were reenlisted for three-year terms of service; the streets of Washington were cleared of loitering volunteers by a provost guard or regulars; the regiments were reorganized into brigades, the brigades into divisions, and the divisions into corps, and the corps were given commanders. Uniforms and weapons were given some measure of standardization, discipline and drill were imposed properly, and the bedraggled army encamped around Washington was given a name that would stick to it throughout the war—the Army of the Potomac.

The army responded by giving to McClellan its whole-souled devotion. “For the first time,” wrote Adam Gurowski, a dour expatriate Pole employed by the State Department, “the army… looks martial. The city, likewise, has a more martial look than it had all the time under Scott. It seems that a young, strong hand holds the ribbons.” McClellan made the volunteers feel like real soldiers, and at review after glorious review in the fall of 1861, the men of the Army of the Potomac shouted themselves hoarse for McClellan. “He had a taking way of returning such salutations,” recalled Jacob Dolson Cox, the Ohio state senator turned officer. “He went beyond the formal military salute, and gave his cap a little twirl, which with his bow and smile seemed to carry a little of personal good fellowship even to the humblest private soldier.” McClellan even acquired a portable printing press to haul around on campaign with him so that he could keep his exhortations and advice flowing constantly through the hands of his soldiers. “It was very plain that these little attentions to the troops took well, and had no doubt some influence in establishing a sort of comradeship between him and them. They were part of an attractive and winning deportment which adapted itself to all sorts and ranks of men.”
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At first McClellan received the same response from Lincoln, the cabinet, and Congress. Dinner invitations poured in upon him faster than the time available to schedule them, compliments from young and old were publicly showered upon him, and in a very short while McClellan was being hailed as the savior of the Union—a view that McClellan himself began to share after old Winfield Scott was retired in November and McClellan made general in chief in his place. “By some strange operation of magic I seem to have become
the
power of the land,” McClellan wrote to his wife, Ellen Marcy McClellan, soon after his appointment. “I almost think that were I to win some small success now I could become Dictator or anything else that might please me.”
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Dictator or not, McClellan found an appreciative audience in Abraham Lincoln, for at the time of McClellan’s appointment, he and Lincoln saw the purpose of the war in very much the same terms. Lincoln still believed that secession was a political bubble that only required some measure of squeezing before it popped, and he advocated the application of just enough force to persuade the South that armed resistance was in vain.

Lincoln was especially careful not to drag the issue of slavery into the war, although it was a hesitation he did not enjoy. Privately, Lincoln regarded Southern secession as a blow not just against the Union but also against the most basic principles of democratic government, and for Lincoln, slavery was the uttermost negation of a people’s government. No matter what Southerners might claim for their aims in secession, Lincoln was clear that “this is essentially a People’s contest,” in which the Union was struggling to assert the virtues of economic mobility against planter aristocracies, the hopeless caste system of the Southern backwoods and the working-class slum. “On the side of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.”
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But Lincoln dared not push that conviction, or the war, to the point of making it an outright assault on slavery. For one thing (as he repeatedly acknowledged), he had no constitutional authority to emancipate anyone’s slaves; if he tried, the attempt would be at once appealed to the federal courts, and the final desk the appeal would arrive upon would be that of Roger B. Taney, who was still the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and frankly unsympathetic to Lincoln and to emancipation.
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Even
more to the point, Lincoln believed that if the abolition of slavery became a federal war issue, the white Southern nonslaveholders (whom Lincoln still looked upon as closet Unionists) would be backed into an irreversible racial alliance with the planters, in which nonslaveholding whites would defend the slaveholders in order to prevent being put on an equal plane with freed blacks. This situation would, he feared, make them resolve to fight to the finish, resulting in a long, bloody, and expensive war. Lincoln also had to remember that there were still four slave states—Delaware, Kentucky, Missouri, and Maryland—that had not seceded from the Union. Any attempt on his part to expand the war to include the abolition of slavery would drive these border states straight into the Confederacy and render the war unwinnable under any strategic circumstances.

This, then, was why Lincoln had taken such pains in his inaugural address in March to disassociate the federal government from any suggestion that the preservation of the Union would lead to the abolition of slavery. “Apprehension seems to exist among the people of the Southern States, that by the accession of a Republican Administration, their property, and their peace, and personal security, are to be endangered,” Lincoln calmly observed. They need not worry, he assured the country, for “the property, peace and security of no section are to be in anywise endangered by the now incoming Administration.” Four months later, addressing the July emergency session of Congress, Lincoln again strained to reassure the South that his aim in going to war was only to restore the Union, not to interfere with slavery in the Southern states. “Lest there be some uneasiness in the minds of candid men, as to what is to be the course of the government, towards the Southern States,
after
the rebellion shall have been suppressed, the Executive deems it proper to say… that he probably will have no different understanding of the powers, and duties of the federal government, relatively to the rights of the States, and the people, under the Constitution, than that expressed in the inaugural address.”
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Southern states who wanted to rethink their secession ordinances would thus find a bridge back into the Union still standing, and border states that still suspected the intentions of the Republican president would have a reassuring incentive not to join the Confederacy.

George McClellan, as both general in chief of all the Union armies and the commander of the Army of the Potomac, had no argument with Lincoln’s conception of the war’s purposes. He was relieved to find that “the president is perfectly honest & is really sound on the nigger question.” Born and raised in comfortable circumstances in Philadelphia, and a Douglas Democrat by conviction and habit, McClellan genuinely disliked slavery, but without feeling the slightest desire to free African Americans. “When I think of some of the features of slavery I cannot help shuddering,” he wrote to his wife in November 1861, and he vowed that “when the
day of adjustment comes I will, if successful, throw my sword into the scale to force an improvement in the condition of those poor blacks.”

McClellan looked only for a day of adjustment, not a day of judgment; for “improvement,” not freedom. He scorned the secessionists and the abolitionists in equal parts, and promised his wife that “I will not fight for the abolitionists.” He begged his fellow Democrat Samuel Barlow to “help me to dodge the nigger—we want nothing to do with him. I am fighting to preserve the integrity of the Union & power of the Govt” and “on no other issue.”
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On those grounds, McClellan was happy to agree with the president that the purpose of waging war was to nudge the Confederacy back into the Union, not to punish the South, seize its property, or subjugate its people.

To that end, McClellan proposed to incorporate most of the features of Scott’s passive Anaconda Plan into his own strategic initiative. First, McClellan authorized a combined army-navy operation that would secure critical locations along the Atlantic seaboard of the Confederacy. On November 7, 1861, Captain Samuel F. Du Pont steamed into Port Royal Sound, fifty miles south of Charleston, landed a small contingent of Federal soldiers, and cleared the islands of Hilton Head, Port Royal, and St. Helena of Confederates. Two months later, a Federal force of 15,000 men under a Rhode Island inventor, manufacturer, and railroad man named Ambrose E. Burnside landed on Roanoke Island in Hatteras Sound and easily drove off a scattering of Confederate defenders. In April, another naval expedition bombarded Fort Pulaski, at the mouth of the Savannah River, into submission.
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In five months’ time, Federal naval and land forces controlled virtually all of the Atlantic coastline between Savannah and Norfolk, except for Charleston harbor and Wilmington, on the estuary of North Carolina’s Cape Fear River. At the same time, McClellan also authorized Major General Don Carlos Buell, now commanding McClellan’s old Department of the Ohio, to march a small Federal army of 45,000 men through Kentucky and into eastern Tennessee, where (it was assumed) loyal Tennesseans would rise in support of the Union and overthrow the secessionist state government in Nashville. Then McClellan proposed to lead the Army of the Potomac in a major invasion of Virginia, aimed at the capture of Richmond. The result would be “to advance our centre into South Carolina and Georgia; to push Buell either towards Montgomery, or to unite with the main army in Georgia.”
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This was not a bad plan, and in fact it conformed rather handsomely to the indirect methods of campaigning Dennis Hart Mahan had championed at West Point (McClellan had been one of Mahan’s prize pupils at the academy). It aimed at the acquisition of territory, not the expensive confrontation of armies, and even though the Union forces would be forced to operate on exterior lines in coordinating these movements, the Union’s superiority in terms of ships and railroad support would help to overcome that deficit. Politically speaking, McClellan’s plan also had the advantage of carrying the war to those areas that had shown the least fervor for secession and probably would show the least resistance.

There were two factors working against McClellan that no one in a West Point classroom could easily have anticipated, much less corrected, and both of them would help to undercut McClellan and his plan. One of these was McClellan’s simple personal vanity. McClellan had at first been flattered by the attention paid to him by official Washington, but the more he listened and believed the complimentary nonsense heaped upon him by the press, the bureaucrats, and the politicians, the more he began to believe himself superior to all three. “I am becoming daily more disgusted with this administration—perfectly sick of it,” he wrote to his wife, “There are some of the greatest geese in the Cabinet I have ever seen.” Even “the President is an idiot.”
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Two weeks after McClellan succeeded Winfield Scott as general in chief, Lincoln called at McClellan’s temporary headquarters in Washington, only to be told that McClellan was out, though he “would soon return.” Lincoln waited for an hour. But when McClellan at last arrived, the general paid no “particular attention to the porter who told him the President was waiting to see him, went up stairs,” and went to bed. Lincoln’s secretary, John Hay, took this as a “portent of evil to come … the first indication I have yet seen, of the threatened supremacy of the military authorities.” It would not be the last, either. “I have no ambition in the present affairs,” McClellan claimed, “only wish to save my country—& find the incapables around me will not permit it!” His conclusion that the administration was incapable was precisely what fired his ambition, and he began to entertain fantasies about “the Presidency, Dictatorship &c.”
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He grew increasingly uncooperative with the cabinet, especially Lincoln’s new secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton, and increasingly contemptuous of and uncommunicative with Lincoln. “The Genl: it seems, is very reticent,” complained Attorney General Edward Bates. “Nobody knows his plans. The Sec of war and
the President himself are kept in ignorance of the actual condition of the army and the intended movements of the General—if indeed they intend to move at all.” McClellan rationalized this as a necessary security precaution. “If I tell [Lincoln] my plans,” McClellan assured Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs, “they will be in the
New York Herald
tomorrow morning. He can’t keep a secret.” At this point Republicans in Congress began to wonder if McClellan was keeping secrets about more plans than just military ones. On December 31, the newly formed Joint Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War complained to Lincoln about McClellan’s inertia, and in a meeting with the entire cabinet on January 6, the committee urged Lincoln to remove McClellan and reinstate Irvin McDowell.
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