Authors: David Von Drehle
Prodded, McClellan launched into a litany of reasons why his army could not move. The first steps should be taken in Kentucky, he said, once again steering the pressure toward Buell and Halleck to divert it from his own army. He dismissed McDowell’s idea for a move on Manassas, asserting that the Confederates had 175,000 troops in the area (this was more than three times the actual number). When Chase asked bluntly where and when McClellan would move, the general declined to answer, hinting that Lincoln would leak the information to stir up some favorable press. It was McClellan himself who could not keep a secret: the next day he summoned a reporter from the sympathetic
New York Herald
and laid out his plans in a long interview. This astonishing breach was, in the words of one biographer, “the largest official leak of military secrets in the entire course of the Civil War.”
In the days and weeks that followed, Lincoln continued to hear from impatient Republicans urging that McClellan be sacked. For the time being, though, the weather shielded the general in chief from danger. Hardly a day passed without some rain, sleet, or snow—sometimes all three. “The streets and crossings are worse than I have ever seen them,” one Washington resident wrote in his diary. The mud was nearly impassable. McClellan’s army couldn’t have moved on those roads even if the general had suddenly turned vigorous.
* * *
Although the war machine was mired, Washington pulsed with energy. “The city was in a fearful condition—swarming not only with troops, but with vagabonds, vampires, and harpies of every description,” one visitor noted. Not since the days of the Founders had a Congress gathered with such a crowded and fateful agenda. On January 14 and 15, Chase convened a conference of leading financiers and key congressional committee chairmen to hammer out the details of a modern economy. Within a week, Congress approved the framework for $150 million in new taxes, and bankers agreed to support up to $300 million in new government bonds. Opposition to paper money was quickly eroding.
Given their magnitude, the economic issues alone would have strained an ordinary Congress, but in 1862 they were only the beginning. With the departure of the Southern Democrats, the new Republican majority seized a once-in-a-lifetime chance to reshape the nation to its own vision. Legislation long stalemated by partisanship could finally be passed. Abolitionists introduced a bill to confiscate the property—the slaves—of Southern traitors and set them free; another bill called for the end of slavery in the District of Columbia. Speaker of the House Galusha Grow of Pennsylvania renewed his proposal to give free homesteads in the West to any pioneers willing to live on the land and improve it. Vermont’s Justin Morrill proposed to grant large parcels of federal land to the states to fund colleges and universities for the children of farmers and workingmen. The Union faced the flames of destruction, yet Congress was looking beyond the disaster to a future of hardworking homesteaders and an educated middle class.
Perhaps no order of business more clearly captured this optimistic and opportunistic bent than the transcontinental railroad. This massive and forward-looking project had been stalled for years by squabbling between Northern and Southern factions over an acceptable route. Now Congress was more determined than ever to get the railroad started and thus bind the West securely to the Union—a tangible sign, wrought in iron and timber, that the United States had not forgotten its continental ambitions or lost confidence in its industrial might.
The various congressional actions and the prospect of all those millions of dollars and millions of acres drew eager men irresistibly to the capital. The laws passed in 1862 would create fountains of wealth; the only questions were how large the fortunes would be and who would get them. A few words added to one bill or struck from another could make all the difference. As never before, hordes of boosters and bribe spreaders and ballyhoo artists descended on Washington in search of their piece of the future.
The White House bustled as well. Lincoln’s oldest son, Bob, was home from Harvard for a holiday. Willie and Tad were the happy owners of a new pony. Lincoln held weekly levees—open house receptions—on Tuesday nights, and Nicolay estimated that more visitors had passed through the city and shaken a president’s hand during those January days than ever before in the nation’s history. On two clear evenings, the president arranged tests of incendiary artillery shells on the grounds south of the White House. Thousands of spectators watched in awe and delight as the bombs rained fire from midair. Mary Lincoln, meanwhile, was busy with preparations for the grandest party the city had ever seen, a midnight buffet for four hundred invited guests in early February. When the invitations to her gala went out, Mary made the chosen extremely happy and left a much larger group of excluded Washingtonians desperately jealous.
Like many presidential families, the Lincolns never fit comfortably into Washington society. Though Mary very much wanted to make her mark, the president cared not at all about joining the capital’s exclusive circles. Some society matrons scorned the Lincolns as frontier rubes, but even those who might have embraced the newcomers were unable to get close to them. To people who saw the Lincolns out on the town, it was obvious that the president and first lady were not eager to engage in casual conversation.
On January 23, for instance, the Lincolns spent an evening at the Washington Theater, watching a performance of Verdi’s
Il Trovatore.
But the president found it impossible to relax or forget. Others could thrill to the “Anvil Chorus”; Lincoln could not stop worrying about the navy’s failure to finish the flotilla of mortar gunboats that Halleck needed for the western rivers. The city around him seemed to be rushing headlong toward the future, but he felt the loss of every passing day like a lash.
* * *
The morning after the opera, across the ocean in Paris, U.S. ambassador William Dayton was ushered into a private meeting with the French foreign minister, Edouard Thouvenel. The situation in Europe, soothed briefly by the settlement of the
Trent
crisis, was sour again. One of Dayton’s best sources was reporting that Emperor Louis-Napoleon, Napoleon III, was preparing a speech for the opening of the French legislature in which he would call for the European powers to intervene on behalf of the Confederacy. It was now Friday; the emperor’s cabinet would meet on Saturday to discuss this fateful step, and the speech would be delivered on Monday.
The emperor, a nephew of the great general, was despised by members of the Lincoln administration. An “unscrupulous adventurer,” one confidant of the president called him, who had “no admirers among the garrison of the White House.” It was said that Louis-Napoleon rued his uncle’s decision to sell the vast French territory of Louisiana to the shrewd Thomas Jefferson, and that nothing would please him more than to see the power created by the Louisiana Purchase split up, with France reestablished in North America. He was, in fact, sending troops to Mexico at that very moment—ostensibly to collect on old debts, but well-founded rumor had it that he intended to install a puppet government.
Dayton’s mission, daunting for even the most experienced diplomat, was to persuade the foreign minister that the emperor should defer his call for intervention. But William Dayton was not an experienced diplomat. He couldn’t even speak French. He was a New Jersey lawyer and politician whose backbone had impressed Lincoln years earlier, an antislavery man from a state full of Southern sympathizers, a Republican from a Democratic stronghold. Whether this courage and independence would serve him well in high-stakes diplomacy was an open question.
Dayton began the discussion with a gambit suggested by the secretary of state. Seward’s idea was to play on centuries of hostility between France and England, in hopes of driving a wedge between the two countries that would prevent them from taking joint action now. For decades, the French had grumbled about the unchallenged power of the Royal Navy, yet in the dispute over the
Trent,
England had defended the right of neutral ships to sail unmolested. For the first time, the bully of the seas had insisted that navies must honor treaties and respect other nations’ vessels. Wasn’t this the moment, Dayton asked Thouvenel, to drive home the point and call for even more formal restrictions on the use of naval power? Dayton assured the French minister that the United States would support its old ally France in any effort to shackle Britain’s navy with tighter international rules.
Thouvenel was quick to respond. What about naval blockades—shouldn’t they be restricted as well? The question was hardly academic. Lincoln’s blockade of Southern ports was beginning to bite: the French were extremely worried that their textile mills would be idled by lack of cotton, while their luxury exports could not reach the wealthy planters of the South. But Seward had anticipated this question in his last dispatch to Dayton. The quickest way to open the Southern ports, Dayton answered, was to support Lincoln’s efforts to put down the rebellion.
But what about Charleston harbor? Thouvenel demanded. In recent weeks, the Union had deliberately sunk a “stone fleet” of weighted ships to obstruct the channel leading to the harbor. The European press was in an uproar over this supposed barbarity, claiming that the port was ruined forever. “One of the principal objects of my visit,” Dayton responded smoothly, “is to correct erroneous impressions as to this matter.” He proceeded with all his lawyer’s skill to explain how easy it would be to remove the sunken hulks when the war was over, if storms and tides didn’t move them first. Besides, he added, similar military tactics had been employed around the world since ancient times. Deftly turning the tables, Dayton pointed out that the Confederates were sinking vessels in various river channels to close them to Union gunboats.
Thouvenel seemed impressed. He wondered whether America’s ambassador in London had explained all this to the British. And why, he asked, didn’t the Americans get these explanations into the press? Dayton could sense that he was gaining ground, so he took out a map of the United States and invited Thouvenel to have a look. Mixing a bit from Seward’s dispatches with a dollop from the newspapers, then infusing the whole with his own best guesses, Dayton sketched a broad military campaign to capture ports and force open rivers and cut railroads vital to the Confederacy. He made the task of subduing the rebellion—a task most Europeans considered hopeless—seem plausible. All the United States needed was “a little time,” Dayton begged. “Having gotten on our armor, foreign governments must give us a chance.”
This subtle performance, running the octaves from classic power politics to earnest pleading, from cool logic to the kindling of ancient grudges, went on for ninety minutes. Dayton left the sumptuous room feeling more confident than he had in months. If he had perhaps promised more than the United States could deliver, well, there had been no choice. With the emperor preparing his incendiary speech, “things had arrived at such a pass … that something must be done,” he reported to Seward. During his meeting with Thouvenel, the foreign minister had visibly softened, and that was all that mattered.
Dayton waited until the following Monday to complete his dispatch to Washington so that he could include a report on the emperor’s speech. Evidently, the administration’s arguments had worked; though the emperor briefly lamented the war, he did not call for European intervention. Louis-Napoleon’s “reference to our country is all that we could ask or expect,” Dayton boasted, but then he added a warning. This victory could not endure without clear progress on the military campaign, progress he had promised to Thouvenel. “If weeks more shall pass away and spring shall open and nothing yet have been done” to win the war, “the impression will, I fear, become fixed in the European mind that our efforts to suppress the insurrection are hopeless.”
* * *
Abraham Lincoln did not need William Dayton to tell him that. Yet his generals all had reasons why they couldn’t start fighting: the roads were too wet, the men were too green, the rebels were too numerous, the armies lacked horses or wagons or muskets or cannon. Each explanation was reasonable in itself; taken together, they were ruinous. The year was already nearly a month old, but Lincoln’s difficulty had only become more acute.
And so on January 27, the same day that his ambassador summarized the emperor’s speech, Lincoln did some writing of his own. Two weeks earlier, he had toyed with the idea of leading the troops into battle. He would not do that—not yet, anyway—but this would be the next closest thing. “President’s General War Order No. 1,” he wrote on his official letterhead. “Ordered that the 22nd Day of February 1862”—George Washington’s Birthday—“be the day for a general movement of the Land and Naval forces of the United States against the insurgent forces.”
As an exercise in military strategy, this order was crude at best. Who knew whether conditions in Washington and Cairo and the Gulf of Mexico would all favor an advance on any given day a few weeks hence? Yet as an assertion of presidential authority over the military, it was both blunt and extraordinary. Once the secret order was issued to all the president’s top commanders, no one fighting for the Union could doubt Lincoln’s intention to direct the conduct of the war personally.
To one enterprising young general itching to strike a blow, Ulysses Grant, Lincoln’s order was precisely what he was looking for. Grant immediately renewed his request for permission to assault the river forts in Tennessee, though he had no intention of waiting for Washington’s Birthday.
3
FEBRUARY
In his inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln made a statement that would only later become controversial: “One section of our country believes slavery is
right
and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is
wrong
and ought not to be extended. This is the only substantial dispute.” The fact that slavery was the crux and cause of the war did not mean, however, that Northerners were ready to fight and die to end slavery. In early 1862, Lincoln believed that most people in the North cared “comparatively little about the Negro, and [were] anxious only for military successes.” As he reminded a visiting abolitionist toward the end of January: “We didn’t go into the war to put down slavery. To act differently at this moment would, I have no doubt, not only weaken our cause but smack of bad faith.… The first thing you’d see would be a mutiny in the army.”