Authors: Doris Kearns Goodwin
All the cabinet members, save Seward, gathered at noon on Tuesday the 2nd. The secretary of state had departed for Auburn the previous week for a long-awaited vacation. Welles, perpetually suspicious of Seward, believed “there was design in his absence,” certain he had left town to avoid the messy controversy over McClellan. More likely, personal considerations dictated the timing of Seward’s journey. Jenny was expecting his first grandchild any day. Will was scheduled to leave with his regiment as soon as the baby was born. And Frances’s favorite aunt, Clara, was dying. When he heard about the defeat at Bull Run, however, he cut his vacation short. He was on his way back to Washington as the cabinet meeting convened.
The session had barely begun when the president was called out for a brief interval. In his absence, Stanton took the floor. Speaking “in a suppressed voice, trembling with excitement,” he informed his colleagues that “McClellan had been ordered to take command of the forces in Washington.” The members were stunned. Lincoln returned shortly and explained his decision, which he had communicated to McClellan at 7 a.m. that morning. “McClellan knows this whole ground,” Lincoln said, and “can be trusted to act on the defensive.” He knew all too well that McClellan had the “slows,” but maintained that there was “no better organizer.” Events, he believed, would justify his judgment.
In the general discussion that followed, Welles recorded in his diary, “there was a more disturbed and desponding feeling” than he had ever witnessed in any cabinet meeting. Lincoln was “extremely distressed,” as were Stanton and Chase. Chase predicted that “it would prove a national calamity,” while Stanton, recognizing that the protest was a dead letter, returned to the War Department “in the condition of a drooping leaf.” The episode produced an estrangement between Stanton and Lincoln that persisted for weeks.
Lincoln was deeply troubled by the knowledge that his cabinet opposed him on a question of such vital importance. According to Bates, he “seemed wrung by the bitterest anguish—said he felt almost ready to hang himself.” The cabinet debacle regarding McClellan, Pope’s defeat, and the gruesome, protracted war itself pressed upon him with an appalling weight, leading him to meditate. “In great contests,” he wrote in a fragment found among his pages, “each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both
may
be, and one
must
be wrong. God can not be
for,
and
against
the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party,” and that God had willed “that it shall not end yet.”
Lincoln’s distress may have been assuaged somewhat by Seward’s return to Washington. Lincoln could speak more frankly with his secretary than with any other member of his cabinet. Reaching the capital on the evening of September 3, Seward drove immediately to the Soldiers’ Home. Unfortunately, Fred Seward wrote, “there were visitors, whose presence prevented private talk.”
“Governor,” Lincoln proposed, “I’ll get in and ride with you a while.” For the next few hours, the two friends drove along the winding carriage ways, “while Seward detailed what he had found at the North, and the President in turn narrated the military events and Cabinet conferences during his absence.”
Seward may have revealed to Lincoln the sad, world-wise reflections he expressed to John Hay two days later. “What is the use of growing old?” he asked. “You learn something of men and things but never until too late to use it.” Referring to the antagonism between McClellan and Pope that had contributed to the disaster at Bull Run, Seward admitted that he had “only just now found out what military jealousy is…. It had never occurred to[him] that any jealousy could prevent these generals from acting for their common fame and the welfare of the country.” As an old seasoned politician, perhaps, he reflected, he “should have known it.”
Though Seward was temporarily unnerved by the events at Bull Run, he remained confident that the North would ultimately prevail—a contagious confidence that must have bolstered Lincoln’s spirits. Whenever faced with desolating prospects, Seward turned to history for guidance and comfort. Recalling the difficult days of the Revolutionary War before independence “enables me,” he once said, “to cherish and preserve hopefulness.” Moreover, unlike his colleagues in the cabinet, Seward did not question that Lincoln possessed the prudence, wisdom, and magnanimity needed to carry the country “safely through the sea of revolution.” Seward’s ability to empathize with Lincoln’s unenviable position must have afforded Lincoln some real measure of comfort. Unlike Stanton and Chase, Seward clearly understood that a president had to work with the tools at his disposal. At this moment, McClellan was one of those tools.
Meanwhile, McClellan smugly returned to his old headquarters on the corner next to Seward’s house. “Again I have been called upon to save the country,” he wrote his wife. “It makes my heart bleed to see the poor shattered remnants of my noble Army of the Potomac, poor fellows! and to see how they love me even now. I hear them calling out to me as I ride among them—‘George—don’t leave us again!’ ‘They
shan’t
take you away from us again.’”
McClellan had been restored to command for only two days when Lee, emboldened by his twin victories on the Peninsula and at Bull Run, crossed the Potomac to begin an invasion of Maryland. The Confederate commander mistakenly assumed that the residents of the slave state would rise up in support of his army. In fact, the Marylanders greeted the rebel army with disdain and reserved their enthusiastic welcome for McClellan’s bluecoats, clapping and waving flags as the Federal troops marched through their countryside to engage Lee in battle. When the two armies met, McClellan had another distinct advantage. General Lee’s battle plans had been discovered. A careless courier had used the orders to wrap three cigars and left them behind.
On September 17, the Battle of Antietam began. “We are in the midst of the most terrible battle of the age,” McClellan wrote Mary Ellen in midafternoon as the fighting raged. By day’s end, 6,000 soldiers on both sides were dead and an additional 17,000 had been wounded, a staggering total four times the number of Americans who would lose their lives on D-day during World War II. In the end, the Union Army prevailed, forcing Lee to retreat. “Our victory was complete,” McClellan joyfully reported. “I feel some little pride in having with a beaten and demoralized army defeated Lee so utterly, & saved the North so completely.”
Lincoln was thrilled by initial reports that indicated Lee’s army might be destroyed. Subsequent telegrams, however, revealed that McClellan, flush with victory, had failed to pursue the retreating rebels and allowed Lee to cross the Potomac into Virginia, where he could regroup and replenish men and supplies.
Still, Antietam was a sorely needed victory for the demoralized North. “At last our Generals in the field seem to have risen to the grandeur of the National crisis,” the
New York Times
noted. “Sept. 17, 1862, will, we predict, hereafter be looked upon as an epoch in the history of the rebellion, from which will date the inauguration of its downfall.”
The statement would prove prescient for reasons the
Times
could not have surmised. The victory, incomplete as it was, was the long-awaited event that provided Lincoln the occasion to announce his plans to issue an Emancipation Proclamation the following January. On September 22, he convened a cabinet meeting to reveal his decision. As Chase and Stanton settled on his right and the others sat down on his left, Lincoln attempted to lighten the mood with a reading from the Maine humorist Charles Farrar Browne. Seward alone readily appreciated the diversion, laughing uproariously along with Lincoln at the antics of Artemus Ward. Chase assumed a forced smile, while Stanton’s face betrayed impatience and irritation.
Once his humorous story was done, Lincoln took on “a graver tone,” reminding his colleagues of the emancipation order he had drafted and read to them earlier. He told them that when Lee’s army was in Maryland, he had decided “as soon as it should be driven out” of the state, he would issue his proclamation. “I said nothing to any one; but I made the promise to myself, and (hesitating a little) to my Maker.” While Lincoln rarely acknowledged the influence of faith or religious beliefs, “there were occasions when, uncertain how to proceed,” remarked Gideon Welles, “he had in this way submitted the disposal of the subject to a Higher Power, and abided by what seemed the Supreme Will.” The president made clear he was not seeking “advice about the main matter,” for he had already considered their views before reaching his decision; but he would welcome any suggestions on language. Lincoln then began to read the document that he had revised slightly in recent weeks to strengthen the rationale of military necessity.
Stanton “made a very emphatic speech sustaining the measure,” and Blair reiterated his concerns about the border states and the fall elections, though in the end he filed no objection. Seward alone suggested a substantive change. Wouldn’t it be stronger, he asked, if the government promised not only to recognize but to “maintain” the freedom of the former slaves, leaving “out all reference to the act being sustained during the incumbency of the present President”? Lincoln answered that he had thought about this, but “it was not my way to promise what I was not entirely
sure
that I could perform.” When Seward “insisted that we ought to take this ground,” Lincoln agreed, striking the limiting reference to the present administration.
The preliminary proclamation, published the following day, brought a large crowd of cheering serenaders to the White House. Though it would not take effect until Lincoln issued the final proclamation on January 1, 1863, giving the rebellious states one last chance to return to the Union, it had changed the course of the war. “I can only trust in God I have made no mistake,” Lincoln told well-wishers from an upstairs window. “It is now for the country and the world to pass judgment on it.” He then called attention to the brave soldiers in the field. While he might be “environed with difficulties” as president, these were “scarcely so great as the difficulties of those who, upon the battle field, are endeavoring to purchase with their blood and their lives the future happiness and prosperity of this country. Let us never forget them.”
The serenaders proceeded to Chase’s house at Sixth and E, where the large crowd listened “in a glorious humor” as Chase spoke. Afterward, an excited group, including Bates and “a few old fogies,” remained inside, drinking wine. “They all seemed to feel a sort of new and exhilarated life,” John Hay observed. “They gleefully and merrily called each other and themselves abolitionists, and seemed to enjoy the novel sensation of appropriating that horrible name.”
Many radicals, including Count Gurowski and William Fessenden, remained wary of Lincoln. Gurowski complained that the proclamation was written “in the meanest and the most dry routine style; not a word to evoke a generous thrill,” while Fessenden remarked that it “did not and could not affect the status of a single negro.” Nevertheless, Frederick Douglass, whose criticism of Lincoln had been implacable, understood the revolutionary impact of the proclamation. “We shout for joy that we live to record this righteous decree,” he wrote in his
Monthly.
Anticipating the powerful opposition it would encounter, he asked: “Will it lead the President to reconsider and retract.” “No,” he concluded, “Abraham Lincoln, will take no step backward.” Intuitively grasping Lincoln’s character, though they were not yet personally acquainted, Douglass explained that “Abraham Lincoln may be slow…but Abraham Lincoln is not the man to reconsider, retract and contradict words and purposes solemnly proclaimed over his official signature…. If he has taught us to confide in nothing else, he has taught us to confide in his word.” Lincoln confirmed this assessment when he told Massachusetts congressman George Boutwell, “My word is out to these people, and I can’t take it back.”
Opposition came from the expected sources: conservatives feared the proclamation would “render eternal the hatred between the two sections,” while Democrats predicted it would demoralize the army. Needless to say, an outcry arose in the South. The
Richmond Enquirer
charged Lincoln with inciting an insurrection that would inevitably lead, as with Nat Turner’s uprising, to slaves being hunted down “like wild beasts” and killed. “Cheerful and happy now, he plots their death,” the paper accused. None of this surprised Lincoln. Analyzing the range of editorial opinion, he “said he had studied the matter so long that he knew more about it than they did.” When Vice President Hannibal Hamlin wrote that the proclamation would “be enthusiastically approved and sustained” and would “stand as the great act of the age,” Lincoln replied that “while commendation in newspapers and by distinguished individuals is all that a vain man could wish, the stocks have declined, and troops come forward more slowly than ever. This, looked soberly in the face, is not very satisfactory.”
A
S
M
C
C
LELLAN RESTED HIS TROOPS
in the vicinity of Antietam, he pondered his situation. Convinced that his military reputation had been fully restored by the recent victory, he believed it was his prerogative to insist that “Stanton must leave & that Halleck must restore my old place to me.” If these two demands were not met, he told his wife, he would resign his commission. Furthermore, he could not bear the idea of fighting for “such an accursed doctrine” as the Emancipation Proclamation, which he considered an “infamous” call for “a servile insurrection.” Indignant, McClellan drafted a letter of protest to Lincoln, declaring himself in opposition. After old friends, including Monty Blair and his father, warned him that it would be ruinous not to submit to the president’s policy, he ultimately decided not to send the letter.