Authors: Doris Kearns Goodwin
I
N THE FIRST WEEK OF
M
AY,
Lincoln resolved to end months of frustration with McClellan by personally visiting Fort Monroe. Stanton had suggested that a presidential journey to the tip of the Peninsula might finally spur McClellan to act. On the evening of Monday, May 5, the president arrived at the Navy Yard and boarded the
Miami,
a five-gun Treasury cutter, accompanied by Stanton, Chase, and General Egbert Viele. “The cabin,” Viele recalled, “was neat and cozy. A center table, buffet and washstand, with four berths, two on each side, and some comfortable chairs, constituted its chief appointments.” Since the
Miami
was a Treasury ship, Chase “seemed to feel that we were his guests,” General Viele observed. The treasury secretary even brought his own butler to serve meals, and “treated us as if we were in his own house.”
Both Chase and Stanton began the twenty-seven-hour journey anxious about all the work they had left behind. As the hours passed by, however, they warmed to Lincoln’s high-spirited discourse and began to relax. General Viele marveled how Lincoln was always the center of the circle gathered on the quarterdeck, keeping everyone engrossed for hours as he recited passages from Shakespeare, “page after page of Browning and whole cantos of Byron.” Talking much of the day, he interspersed stories and anecdotes from his “inexhaustible stock.” Many, as usual, were directly applicable to a point made in conversation, but some were simply jokes that set Lincoln laughing louder than all the combined listeners. One of his favorite anecdotes told of a schoolboy “called up by the teacher to be disciplined. ‘Hold out your hand!’ A paw of the most surprising description was extended, more remarkable for its filthiness than anything else.” The schoolmaster was so stunned that he said, “‘Now, if there were such another dirty thing in the room, I would let you off.’
‘There it is,’
quoth the unmoved culprit, drawing
the other hand
from behind his back.”
While the presidential party lounged on the deck, Lincoln playfully demonstrated that in “muscular power he was one in a thousand,” possessing “the strength of a giant.” He picked up an ax and “held it at arm’s length at the extremity of the [handle] with his thumb and forefinger, continuing to hold it there for a number of minutes. The most powerful sailors on board tried in vain to imitate him.”
After the Tuesday luncheon table was cleared, the president and his advisers pored over maps and analyzed the army positions in and around Virginia. Union forces at Fort Monroe occupied the northern shore of Hampton Roads, which connected the Chesapeake to three rivers. Confederate forces on the southern shore still held Norfolk and the Navy Yard. Two months earlier, the rebels had used this strategic foothold to great advantage by sending the powerful nine-gun
Merrimac,
a scuttled Union ship that they had raised and covered with iron plates, into a series of devastating engagements. In the space of five hours, the ironclad had managed to sink, capture, and incapacitate three ships and two Union frigates.
The news had terrified government officials, who feared that the invincible
Merrimac
might sail up the Potomac to attack Washington or even continue on to New York. “It is a disgrace to the country that the rebels, without resources, have built a vessel with which we cannot cope,” General Meigs had grumbled. An emergency cabinet meeting was convened, during which Stanton unfairly faulted Welles for the disaster. His attack was so personal, according to Welles’s biographer, that the navy secretary “found it very difficult for a time even to be civil in [Stanton’s] presence.”
In fact, the navy had been more than adequately prepared to deal with the
Merrimac.
The very next day, the
Monitor,
a strange ironclad vessel resembling a “cheese box on a raft,” engaged the
Merrimac
in battle. Though the little
Monitor
seemed “a pigmy to a giant,” it proved far more maneuverable. Commanded by Lieutenant John L. Worden, who directed two large guns from a revolving turret, the
Monitor
fought the
Merrimac
to a draw and sent the Confederate vessel back to the harbor. When Stanton learned that Worden might lose one eye as a result of the struggle, he said: “Then we will fill the other with diamonds.”
To Herman Melville, as to many others, the battle of the two ironclads marked the beginning of a new epoch in warfare. “The ringing of those plates on plates/Still ringeth round the world,” he wrote. “War yet shall be, but warriors/Are now but operatives.”
As the president and his advisers huddled over maps of Fort Monroe, Norfolk, and the surrounding area, they could not understand why McClellan had not ordered an attack on Norfolk immediately after his occupation of Yorktown. The Confederate retreat up the Peninsula had left the city and the Navy Yard vulnerable. Though the
Monitor
had held its own against the
Merrimac,
there was no assurance that this feat would be repeated. If Norfolk were captured, perhaps the
Merrimac
could be captured as well. With McClellan and his troops about twenty miles away, Lincoln and his little group came to a decision of their own. If General John E. Wool, commander of Fort Monroe, had sufficient forces at his disposal, an
immediate
attack should be made on Norfolk. Disconcerted by the prospect, the seventy-eight-year-old General Wool insisted on consulting Commodore Louis Goldsborough, since the navy’s warships would have to immobilize the Confederate batteries before any troops could be safely landed.
In the black of night, the
Miami
could not easily pull aside the
Minnesota,
Goldsborough’s flagship, so Lincoln’s party climbed into a tugboat and approached the port side of the
Minnesota.
The steps leading up to the deck were very “narrow,” Chase wrote, “with the guiding ropes on either hand, hardly visible in the darkness. It seemed to me
very
high and a little fearsome. But etiquette required the President to go first and he went. Etiquette required the Secretary of the Treasury to follow.” Stanton, climbing immediately behind Chase, must have overcome even greater trepidation, for an accident when he was younger had left one leg permanently damaged and he suffered, besides, from frequent attacks of vertigo. Fortunately, they all made it aboard without mishap. Though Lincoln was probably unfamiliar with Commodore Goldsborough, Chase had known him for several decades—the distinguished naval officer had won the hand of William Wirt’s daughter, Elizabeth, at a time when Chase had not been deemed an appropriate suitor.
Goldsborough approved the idea of attack in theory, but feared that so long as the
Merrimac
was still a factor, it was too risky to carry troops across the water. Lincoln disagreed, and orders were given to begin shelling the Confederate batteries. Before long, “a smoke curled up over the woods,” Chase recalled, “and each man, almost, said to the other, ‘There comes the
Merrimac,’
and, sure enough, it was the
Merrimac.”
However, upon spying the
Monitor,
accompanied by a second powerful ship, “the great rebel terror paused—then turned back.” The next day, Lincoln, Chase, and Stanton each personally surveyed the shoreline to determine the best landing place for the troops. Under a full moon, Lincoln went ashore in a rowboat. He walked on enemy soil and then returned to the
Miami.
Once the best spot was chosen, Chase pushed for an immediate attack, worried that McClellan might appear and delay the attack. The next night, the convoys headed for shore.
They discovered that the rebels had decided to evacuate Norfolk and scuttle the
Merrimac
to keep it out of Union hands soon after the shelling began. As the Union troops moved uncontested into the city, Chase, accompanying Generals Wool and Viele, heard the soldiers shouting “cheer after cheer.” In the city center, they were met by a delegation of civilian authorities who formally surrendered Norfolk to General Viele. The general remained in City Hall as military governor of the region.
It was after midnight when Chase and General Wool finally returned to the
Miami.
Lincoln and Stanton, after waiting nervously all evening for their return, had just retired to their rooms. “The night was very warm,” Lincoln recalled, “the moon shining brightly,—and, too restless to sleep, I threw off my clothes and sat for some time by the table, reading.” Hearing a knock at Stanton’s door, which was directly below his own, he guessed that “the missing men” had come back at last. Minutes later, Chase and General Wool came to Lincoln’s room. Eschewing ceremony, Wool happily announced: “Norfolk is ours!” Stanton, who had “burst in, just out of bed, clad in a long nightgown,” was so jubilant over the news that “he rushed at the General, whom he hugged most affectionately, fairly lifting him from the floor in his delight.” Lincoln recognized that the scene “must have been a comical one,” with Stanton clad in a nightgown that “nearly swept the floor” and he himself having just undressed. Nevertheless, they “were all too greatly excited to take much note of mere appearances.” Beside the capture of Norfolk, the destruction of the fearsome
Merrimac
would open the supply lines from Washington to the peninsula.
When the triumphant trio returned to Washington, reporters noted that Stanton was “conveyed home seriously ill.” Physicians feared at first that he was suffering from one of the bouts of vertigo that immobilized him for days at a time. He soon recovered, however, and enjoyed the sweetness of victory in what the Civil War historian Shelby Foote has called “one of the strangest small-scale campaigns in American military history.”
Unusually buoyant, Chase expressed greater admiration for the president than he ever had before or ever would again. “So has ended a brilliant week’s campaign of the President,” Chase wrote, “for I think it quite certain that if he had not come down, Norfolk would still have been in possession of the enemy, and the
Merrimac,
as grim and defiant and as much a terror as ever. The whole coast is now virtually ours.”
Not surprisingly, McClellan refused to credit the president for the return of Norfolk to the Union. “Norfolk is in our possession,” he flatly declared to his wife; “the result of my movements.”
T
HE DAY AFTER
Lincoln’s triumphant return, Navy Secretary Welles invited Seward, Bates, and their families to join him and his wife for a six-day cruise along the coast of Virginia, now cleared of rebel forces and the menacing
Merrimac.
“We had two pilots and thirteen sailors,” Fred Seward informed his mother. “Wormley and his cook and waiters, two howitzers, and two dozen muskets, coal and provisions for a week, field glasses and maps.” The armed navy steamer took them to Norfolk and the Gosport Navy Yard, where they viewed the ruins of the
Merrimac.
They proceeded up York River to McClellan’s new headquarters at West Point, thirty miles from Richmond. The cabinet colleagues enjoyed an easy camaraderie as the steamer moved from one river to the next. They consumed hearty meals, sang patriotic songs to the music of a navy band, and joked with one another. When Seward discovered that rats had eaten a tie and socks belonging to Bates, he composed a humorous poem, complete with sketches, to commemorate the occasion.
By day, they went ashore and wandered through the seaboard towns now in possession of the Union armies. “Virginia is sad to look upon,” Seward wrote to his wife, “not merely the rebellion, but society itself, is falling into ruin. Slaves are deserting the homes intrusted to them by their masters, who have gone into the Southern armies or are fleeing before ours. There is universal stagnation, and sullenness prevails everywhere.” Like Lincoln, Seward was always sensitive to the devastation of war. Despite his satisfaction at the recent Union successes that had subdued this part of Virginia, he was disquieted by the bleakness he encountered. “We saw war, not in its holiday garb,” he told Fanny, “but in its stern and fearful aspect. We saw the desolation that follows, and the terror that precedes its march.”
The steamer reached McClellan’s camp at about 3 p.m. on May 13. Approaching the shore, Fred Seward was amazed to find that “a clearing in the woods” had been “suddenly transformed into a great city of a hundred thousand people, by the advent of McClellan’s Army and its supporting fleet.” McClellan escorted the party ashore, where they reviewed thousands of his troops and discussed the general’s plans.
Though McClellan considered such visits “a nuisance,” he convinced his official guests that, if properly reinforced, he would soon prevail in a decisive fight “this side of Richmond,” which would be “one of the great historic battles of the world.” McClellan’s high-spirited, well-disciplined troops and the gigantic size of the operation were impressive to all. “At night,” Fred Seward observed, “the long lines of lights on the shore, the shipping and bustle in the river made it almost impossible to believe we were not in the harbor of Philadelphia or New York.”
After the meeting with McClellan, Seward advised Lincoln by telegraph that McDowell’s forces should be sent to the York River to reinforce McClellan “as soon as possible.” Lincoln and Stanton agreed. McDowell was ordered to move his entire force from the vicinity of Washington to the peninsula. For weeks, McClellan’s Democratic supporters had publicly criticized the president and secretary of war for retaining McDowell’s force out of irrational fear for Washington. Yet now that McClellan stood to have his demands met, he told Lincoln that he wouldn’t receive McDowell’s men unless it was clear that he would have absolute authority over them. McClellan considered McDowell a radical on the issue of slavery and despised him personally, calling him an “animal” in a letter to his wife. Lincoln assured McClellan by telegraph that he was in command.