Team of Rivals (76 page)

Seward had argued this very issue with his zealous wife for many months. At home in June, he had apparently suggested that the preservation of republican institutions must supersede the immediate abolition of slavery. Though he had fought slavery all his life, Seward hesitated when faced with the possibility that moving too precipitously toward abolition might destroy the republic itself and all that it stood for on the stage of world history. He had no doubt that slavery would eventually be brought to an end. Indeed, he believed the future of slavery had been “killed years ago” by the progress of civilization. “But suppose, for one moment,” he later explained, “the Republic destroyed. With it is bound up not alone the destiny of a race, but the best hopes of all mankind. With its overthrow the sun of liberty, like the Hebrew dial, would be set back indefinitely. The magnitude of such a calamity is beyond our calculation. The salvation of the nation is, then, of vastly more consequence than the destruction of slavery.”

Frances profoundly disagreed with this balancing equation, asserting there could be no “truly republican” institutions with slavery intact—“they are incompatible.” Sometime during that long, anxious summer, she recorded her exhortations in a note to her husband. “Whatever may be the principles in the determination of the President in this matter,” she wrote, “you owe it to yourself & your children & your country & to God to make your record clear.” If the president refused to act on slavery, “it would be far better for you to resign your place tomorrow than by continuing there seem to give countenance to a great moral evil.”

Frances had no intimation that Lincoln’s views on the relationship between emancipation and republican institutions had already evolved beyond those of her husband. For despite the continued criticism of his inaction on slavery, Lincoln kept his proclamation concealed until victory could offer the propitious moment. Everything depended on the success of his army.

L
INCOLN PINNED HIS HOPES
for the victory that would allow him to issue his Emancipation Proclamation on the newly assembled Army of Virginia, headed by General John Pope. In the Western theater, Pope had demonstrated the aggression McClellan lacked. Early August 1862, Halleck ordered McClellan to withdraw his entire army by steamship from Harrison’s Landing to Aquia Creek and Alexandria, thus ending the Peninsula Campaign. Once there, McClellan was to rendezvous with Pope, who would be pushing south from Manassas toward Richmond along the interior route Lincoln had initially favored. Joined together, the two armies would substantially outnumber General Lee’s forces.

But McClellan stalled, fearing that Pope would be placed in charge of the merged army. He argued ferociously against the move, warning Halleck it would “prove disastrous in the extreme.” His only hope, he confided to his wife, was that he might “induce the enemy to attack” before he reached Washington and was relieved of his command. After delaying for ten days with strategic protests and claims of insufficient transports, he grudgingly began his withdrawal on August 14, not reaching Aquia Creek until August 24.

Realizing that he would be overpowered by the combined armies, General Lee moved north from Richmond to engage Pope before McClellan reached him. By August 18, the Confederate forces, under Generals Stonewall Jackson and James Longstreet, had come within striking distance of Pope. Only the Rappahannock River, midway between Washington and Richmond, separated the two forces. From the security of the northern riverbank, Pope waited in vain for McClellan’s troops to reinforce what everyone hoped would be a major offensive.

Lee capitalized brilliantly on McClellan’s delay. Leaving Longstreet’s forces in front of Pope, he sent Jackson behind Pope’s lines to capture the Union’s supply base at Manassas Junction and then assemble in the woods near the old Bull Run battlefield. In a state of confusion, Pope left the Rappahannock and headed north, where he would encounter the combined forces of Lee, Longstreet, and Jackson. “What is the stake?” Seward wrote Frances. “They say that it is nothing less than this capital; and, as many think, the
cause also.”
While soldiers on both sides waited for the fighting to begin, a comet appeared in the northern sky. Lincoln, so familiar with Shakespeare, doubtless recalled Calpurnia’s ominous warning to Caesar: “When beggars die there are no comets seen/The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.”

Although McClellan agreed to send two corps to Pope, he continued to delay, awaiting word on his own status as commander. If his troops were integrated into Pope’s army, he told his wife on August 24, he would “try for a leave of absence!” Everything would change, however, if “Pope is beaten, in which case they may want me to save Washn again.”

The Second Battle of Bull Run began in earnest on Friday, August 29. When the wind blew from the west, “the smell of the gunpowder was quite perceptible,” the
Evening Star
reported, and the “distant thunder” of cannonfire was plainly audible throughout Washington. Crowds gathered on street corners and huddled in the great hotels. In the absence of reliable information from the front, rumors flew. At one moment, newsboys announced that “Stonewall Jackson was captured with 16,000 of his men.” Minutes later, it was said that Jackson had crushed Pope and was heading north to capture Washington. Stories of victory and defeat for each side “alternated in about equal proportions.”

These were disquieting days for the president. The manager of the War Department telegraph office recalled that Lincoln spent long hours in the crowded second-floor suite awaiting bulletins from the front, “prepared to stay all night, if necessary.” He wired various generals, including McClellan, who had set up his headquarters at Alexandria, requesting news from Manassas. McClellan responded immediately, providing advice rather than information. The president now had only two options, McClellan counseled. Either he must “concentrate all our available forces to open communication with Pope,” or he should “leave Pope to get out of his scrape & at once use all our means to make the capital perfectly safe.”

On Saturday morning, John Hay met the president at the Soldiers’ Home and rode with him to the White House. During the ride, Lincoln “was very outspoken in regard to McClellan’s present conduct,” saying that “it really seemed to him that McC wanted Pope defeated.” He was particularly incensed, Lincoln told Hay, by McClellan’s advice to “leave Pope to get out of his own scrape.”

Lincoln’s condemnation was mild, however, compared to the rage Stanton directed toward the general he now considered a traitor. McClellan’s delay in bringing his troops to Pope’s defense prompted the secretary of war to approach General Halleck for an official report. He asked Halleck to specify the exact date upon which McClellan had received orders to withdraw from the James, and to render an opinion as to whether the order was obeyed with a promptness commensurate with national safety. Halleck replied that the order given on August 3 “was not obeyed with the promptness I expected and the national safety, in my opinion, required.”

Armed with Halleck’s report, Stanton took Chase into his confidence. The two old friends decided that McClellan must be removed at once, and that they would have to force Lincoln’s hand. Agreeing that verbal arguments with Lincoln were “like throwing water on a duck’s back,” they decided that “a more decisive expression must be made and that in writing.” Stanton volunteered to draft a remonstrance against McClellan, to be signed, if possible, by a majority of the cabinet. They would present it to Lincoln with the inference that General McClellan’s continued command would lead to the resignation of some cabinet members, and even the dissolution of the administration. Meanwhile, Stanton and Chase journeyed to Bates’s F Street home, hoping to enlist his support. Finding that he was out, they left word for him to call on Chase the following morning.

When Bates stopped by the Treasury office early Saturday morning, Chase was delighted to learn that he was in full agreement regarding McClellan. “Never before was there such a grand army, composed of truly excellent materials, and yet,” Bates complained, “so poorly commanded.” To his mind, McClellan had “but one of the three Roman requisites for a general, he is young. I fear not brave, and surely not fortunate.” Moreover, Bates agreed with Chase and Stanton that “unless there be very soon a change for the better, we [the administration] must sink into contempt.” Certain now that Bates was a staunch ally in the cause of McClellan’s dismissal, Chase proceeded to the War Department, where Stanton had completed a first draft of the letter.

The scathing document, written in Stanton’s distinctive back-sloping script with words added and erased, declared that the undersigned were “unwilling to be accessory to the waste of natural resources, the protraction of the war, the destruction of our armies, and the imperiling of the Union which we believe must result from the continuance of George B. McClellan in command.” It charged McClellan with willful “disobedience to superior orders,” which had “imperiled the army commanded by General Pope.” Chase made several suggestions for changes, affixed his signature above Stanton’s, and promised to bring it to Bates, Smith, and Welles.

Having long since lost faith in McClellan, Smith was persuaded immediately to add his signature. Climbing the narrow stairs to the navy secretary’s second-floor office later that afternoon, Chase reached him just as he was preparing to leave for the day. After reading the document, Welles assured Chase that he believed McClellan’s “withdrawal from any command was demanded,” but he “did not choose to denounce McC. for incapacity or declare him a traitor,” as the document seemed to proclaim. Even when Chase repeated the damning facts of McClellan’s fatal delay in moving to reinforce Pope, Welles hesitated. He pointedly asked whether Blair had seen the document. Chase replied that his “turn had not come.” At that very moment, while Welles still held the document, Blair walked in. Sensing Chase’s alarm, Welles kept the paper close to his chest until Blair departed only a few minutes later. With the postmaster general out of earshot, Chase entreated Welles not to mention the document to Blair or anyone else.

While Chase was performing his part in the intrigue, Stanton had invited Lincoln and Hay to his K Street home for an impromptu dinner. No clear information on the course of the battle was yet available, though preliminary reports suggested that Pope had gained the advantage. “A pleasant little dinner,” Hay recorded, “and a pretty wife as white and cold and motionless as marble, whose rare smiles seemed to pain her.” In conversation with Lincoln, Stanton was “unqualifiedly severe upon McClellan,” charging that “nothing but foul play could lose us this battle & that it rested with McC. and his friends.” Both Stanton and Lincoln expressed their strong belief in General Pope.

After dinner, the president and Hay went to army headquarters, where General Halleck appeared “quiet and somewhat confident” about the direction of what he considered “the greatest battle of the Century.” Proceeding to Stanton’s office, they found he had dispatched “a vast army of Volunteer Nurses out to the field” to help care for the sick and wounded. “Every thing seemed to be going well,” Hay reported, “& we went to bed expecting glad tidings at sunrise.”

For Stanton, however, much work was in store that evening. If Pope managed to win without McClellan’s aid, it would only strengthen the argument for the young Napoleon’s ouster. When Welles stopped by to get an update from the front, he found Stanton with Smith. Stanton launched into a long diatribe against McClellan, reaching back to the winter doldrums, the “Quaker gun” affair, and the blunders on the Peninsula. When Smith left, Welles recalled, Stanton lowered his voice to a whisper. He had previously learned from Chase that Welles had refused to sign the document. Welles explained that while he, by and large, agreed that McClellan must be removed, he “disliked the method and manner of proceeding.” It seemed “discourteous and disrespectful to the President.” The president, he declared, “had called us around him as friends and advisers to counsel and consult…not to enter into combinations against him.”

Agitated, Stanton exclaimed that “he knew of no particular obligations he was under to the President who had called him to a difficult position and imposed upon him labors and responsibilities which no man could carry, and which were greatly increased by fastening upon him a commander who was constantly striving to embarrass him…. He could not and would not submit to a continuance of this state of things.” Welles sympathized but was highly reluctant to join what seemed a cabal against the president.

The next morning, bleak news from the battlefield discredited the optimistic reports of the previous day. Pope’s army had been crushed. John Hay recorded in his diary that at “about Eight oclock the President came to my room as I was dressing and calling me out said, ‘Well John we are whipped again, I am afraid.’” Once again, as in the aftermath of the First Battle of Bull Run, Washington braced for attack. As rumors spread that General Jackson was crossing the Potomac at Georgetown, thousands of frightened residents began to flee the city. Soldiers straggled in from the front with tales of a demoralized army and units unwilling to fight under Pope. The losses were immense—out of 65,000 men, the Federals had suffered 16,000 casualties. Momentum now clearly belonged to the Confederacy. At the end of June, the
New York Times
pointed out, “Jeff. Davis, from his chamber at Richmond, listened to the thunder of the cannon of hostile armies battling before his capital.” At the end of August, “Lincoln, from the White House, heard the deep peals of the artillery of the contending hosts which, having now changed location, are struggling for supremacy before the National Capital.”

The devastating defeat put the president in an untenable position. The more he contemplated McClellan’s delay in sending his troops to Pope, the angrier he became. Yet there was no time to indulge in anger while Washington itself was threatened and he sorely needed the best forces at his disposal. He still believed McClellan was best equipped to reorganize the demoralized troops. During his inspection tours at Fort Monroe and Harrison’s Landing, Lincoln had witnessed the soldiers’ devotion to their commander. “There is no man in the army who can man these fortifications and lick these troops of ours into shape half as well as he,” Lincoln told Hay. “Unquestionably he has acted badly toward Pope! He wanted him to fail. That is unpardonable. But he is too useful just now to sacrifice.” When Halleck recommended restoring McClellan’s command over both the Army of Virginia and the Army of the Potomac, Lincoln agreed.

In ignorance of Lincoln’s deliberations, the cabinet vigorously pursued their machinations to oust McClellan. Bates rewrote the protest to soften its tone. Stanton, Chase, Smith, and Bates signed the new document, which Chase again presented to Welles on Monday, September 1. Welles agreed that the new draft was “an improvement,” but still disliked the idea of “combining to influence or control the President.” Chase admitted that the course of action “was unusual, but the case was unusual.” They had to impress upon Lincoln that “the Administration must be broken up, or McC. dismissed.” Furthermore, Chase told Welles that “McClellan ought to be shot, and should, were he President, be brought to a summary punishment.” Welles granted that McClellan “was not a fighting general,” and that “some recent acts indicate delinquencies of a more serious character.” While he would not sign the demand, he told the “disappointed” Chase, he would speak up with “no hesitation” at the cabinet meeting the next day to tell Lincoln that he agreed McClellan should go. Accordingly, Stanton and Chase resolved to withhold their confrontation with Lincoln until the following day.