Authors: Doris Kearns Goodwin
McClellan had overestimated his newfound clout. Though Stanton and Chase were so discouraged by the general’s apparently unassailable position that they both considered resigning, Lincoln had made another private decision. If McClellan did not mobilize in pursuit of General Lee, which, as September gave way to October, he showed no sign of doing, he would be relieved from duty.
Hoping that a personal visit would inspire McClellan to action, Lincoln journeyed by train to the general’s headquarters early in October. Though Halleck, fearing danger, opposed the idea, Lincoln was determined to “slip off…and see my soldiers.” As always, he was fortified by his interactions with the troops. As the regiments presented arms to the beating of drums, the president, accompanied by McClellan, slowly rode by, lifting his hat. “The review was a splendid affair throughout,” one correspondent noted. “The troops, notwithstanding their long marches and hard fighting, presented a fine appearance, for which they were highly complimented. The President indulged in a number of humorous anecdotes, which greatly amused the company.”
Sharing McClellan’s quarters for meals and occupying the adjoining tent at night, Lincoln quietly but candidly prompted his general to discard his “over-cautiousness” and plan for future movement. While McClellan conceded in a letter to his wife that Lincoln “was very affable” and “very kind personally,” he rightly suspected that the “real purpose of his visit is to push me into a premature advance into Virginia.”
Lincoln headed back to Washington on Saturday afternoon in high spirits, encouraged by the good condition of the troops. His train stopped at the tiny town of Frederick along the way, where he was greeted by a large crowd of cheering citizens, eager to demonstrate Maryland’s loyalty to the Union. Called upon to speak, Lincoln replied cheerfully that “if I were as I have been most of my life, I might perhaps, talk amusing to you for half an hour,” but as president, “every word is so closely noted” that he must avoid any “trivial” remarks. Nevertheless, before the train pulled away, he delivered a brief, eloquent speech from the platform of his car, thanking soldiers and citizens alike for their fidelity to the Union’s cause. “May our children and our children’s children to a thousand generations,” he said in closing, “continue to enjoy the benefits conferred upon us by a united country, and have cause yet to rejoice under those glorious institutions bequeathed us by Washington and his compeers.”
To ensure that McClellan would not misconstrue their conversations, Lincoln had Halleck telegraph him the following Monday that “the President directs that you cross the Potomac and give battle to the enemy or drive him south. Your army must move now while the roads are good.” Weeks went by, however, and McClellan found all manner of excuses for inaction—lack of supplies, lack of shoes, tired horses. At this last excuse, Lincoln could no longer contain his irritation. “Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have done since the battle of Antietam that fatigue anything?”
“Our war on rebellion languishes,” a frustrated George Templeton Strong wrote on October 23. “McClellan’s repose is doubtless majestic, but if a couchant lion postpone his spring too long, people will begin wondering whether he is not a stuffed specimen after all.” The army’s inaction combined with conservative resentment against the Emancipation Proclamation to produce what Seward called an “ill wind” of discontent when voters headed to the polls for the midterm November elections. The results were devastating to the administration. Though Republicans retained a slight majority in Congress, the so-called “Peace Democrats,” who favored a compromise that would tolerate slavery, gained critical offices in Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. Asked how he felt about the Republican losses, Lincoln said: “Somewhat like that boy in Kentucky, who stubbed his toe while running to see his sweetheart. The boy said he was too big to cry, and far too badly hurt to laugh.”
The following day, with the midterm elections behind him, Lincoln relieved McClellan of his command of the Army of the Potomac. Though the young Napoleon had finally crossed the Potomac, he had immediately stalled again. “I began to fear he was playing false—that he did not want to hurt the enemy,” Lincoln told Hay. “I saw how he could intercept the enemy on the way to Richmond. I determined to make that the test. If he let them get away I would remove him. He did so & I relieved him.”
McClellan received the telegram in his tent at 11 p.m., in the company of the man Lincoln had chosen to succeed him: General Ambrose Burnside. Known as a fighting general, Burnside had commanded a corps under McClellan on the Peninsula and at Antietam. “Poor Burn feels dreadfully, almost crazy,” McClellan told his wife. “Of course I was much surprised,” he admitted, but “not a muscle quivered nor was the slightest expression of feeling visible on my face.”
“More than a hundred thousand soldiers are in great grief to-night,” the correspondent for the
National Intelligencer
reported as General McClellan bade farewell to his staff and his troops. With all his officers assembled around a large fire in front of his tent, he raised a glass of wine. “Here’s to the Army of the Potomac,” he proposed. “And to its old commander,” one of his officers added. “Tears were shed in profusion,” both at the final toast and when McClellan rode past the lines of his troops. “In parting from you,” he told them, “I cannot express the love and gratitude I bear for you. As an Army you have grown up under my care…. The glory you have achieved, our mutual perils & fatigues, the graves of our comrades fallen in battle & by disease, the broken forms of those whom wounds & sickness have disabled—the strongest associations which can exist among men, unite us still by an indissoluble tie.”
Lincoln’s choice of Burnside proved unfortunate. Though he was charismatic, honest, and industrious, he lacked the intelligence and confidence to lead a great army. He was said to possess “ten times as much
heart
as he has
head.”
On December 13, against Lincoln’s advice, the new commander led about 122,000 troops across the Rappahannock to Fredericksburg, where General Lee waited on the heavily fortified high ground. Caught in a trap, the Union forces suffered 13,000 casualties, more than twice the Confederate losses, and were forced into a humiliating withdrawal.
Lincoln tried to mitigate the impact of the defeat, issuing a public letter of commendation to the troops: “The courage with which you, in an open field, maintained the contest against an entrenched foe…[shows] that you possess all the qualities of a great army, which will yet give victory to the cause of the country and of popular government.” Even as he did the “awful arithmetic” of the relative losses, Lincoln realized, as he told William Stoddard, “that if the same battle were to be fought over again, every day, through a week of days, with the same relative results, the army under Lee would be wiped out to its last man, the Army of the Potomac would still be a mighty host, the war would be over, the Confederacy gone.”
T
HE TRAIN OF RECRIMINATIONS
that followed the Fredericksburg defeat led to a crisis for the administration that left Lincoln “more depressed,” he said, “than by any event of [his] life.” Radical Republicans on Capitol Hill began to insist that unless a more vigorous prosecution of the war were adopted, conservative demands for a compromise peace would multiply and the Union would be restored with slavery intact. The midterm elections, they argued, demonstrated growing public dissatisfaction with current tactics—the writing, clearly, was on the wall.
On the afternoon of Tuesday, December 16, all the Republican senators caucused in the high-ceilinged Senate reception room, hoping to devise a unified response to the disastrous situation. Without sweeping changes in the administration, they agreed, “the country was ruined and the cause was lost.” Hesitant to publicly attack Lincoln in the midst of war, they focused their fury on the man they considered the malevolent power behind the throne—William Henry Seward. For months, Chase had claimed “there was a back stairs & malign influence which controlled the President, and overruled all the decisions of the cabinet,” a hardly veiled reference to Seward. In private letters that had quickly become public knowledge, Chase had repeatedly griped about Lincoln’s failure to consult the cabinet “on matters concerning the salvation of the country,” intimating that his own councils would have averted the misfortunes now facing the country and the party.
In Republican circles, word spread that Seward was a “paralizing influence on the army and the President.” He was rumored to be the “President
de facto,”
responsible for the long delay in dismissing McClellan that led to stagnation and loss on the battlefield. Seward was said to have hindered Lincoln’s intention to make the war a crusade for emancipation, and was deemed responsible for the resurgence of the conservatives in the midterm elections. In sum, Seward’s insidious presence “kept a sponge saturated with chloroform to Uncle Abe’s nose.”
In the minds of the majority of the Republicans gathered together in the reception room that December afternoon, these rumors had congealed into facts. As one senator after another rose to speak of Seward’s “controlling influence upon the mind of the President,” Ben Wade suggested that they “should go in a body and demand of the President the dismissal of Mr Seward.” Duty dictated that they exercise their constitutional power, as William Fessenden professed, to demand “that measures should be taken to make the Cabinet a unity and to remove from it any one who did not coincide heartily with our views in relation to the war.” As the rhetoric grew more heated, Senator James W. Grimes of Iowa introduced a resolution proclaiming “a want of confidence in the Secretary of State” and concluding that “he ought to be removed from the Cabinet.”
Fessenden asked for a vote, which clearly indicated that an overwhelming majority of the thirty-one senators were in favor. Seward’s friend New York senator Preston King objected that the resolution was not only “hasty and unwise” but also “unjust to Mr. Seward, as it was predicated on mere rumors.” Several others agreed. Orville Browning argued that he “had no evidence the charges were true,” and therefore could not vote for the resolution. Moreover, this “was not the proper course of proceeding” and would likely provoke a “war between Congress and the President, and the knowledge of this antagonism would injure our cause greatly.” Recognizing that “without entire unanimity our action would not only be without force but productive of evil,” Fessenden agreed to adjourn until the following afternoon to “give time for reflection.”
Though the proceedings were to be kept secret, Preston King felt compelled to acquaint Seward with the situation. That evening, he went to Seward’s house. Finding his old colleague in the library, he sat down beside him and told him all that had transpired. Seward listened quietly and then said, “They may do as they please about me, but they shall not put the President in a false position on my account.” Asking for pen and paper, he wrote out his resignation as secretary of state and asked his son Fred and King to deliver it to the White House.
Lincoln scanned the resignation “with a face full of pain and surprise, saying ‘What does this mean?’” After listening to Senator King’s description of the overwrought emotions that had created “a thirst for a victim,” Lincoln walked over to Seward’s house. The meeting was painful for both men. Masking his anguish, Seward told Lincoln that “it would be a relief to be freed from official cares.” Lincoln replied: “Ah, yes, Governor, that will do very well for you, but I am like the starling in [Laurence] Sterne’s story, ‘I can’t get out.’”
Lincoln straightaway understood that he was the true target of the radicals’ wrath. “They wish to get rid of me, and I am sometimes half disposed to gratify them,” he told Browning two days later. He described the chatter setting forth Seward’s controlling influence over him as “a lie, an absurd lie,” that one “could not impose upon a child.” Seward was the one man in the cabinet Lincoln trusted completely, the only one who fully appreciated his unusual strengths as a leader, and the only one he could call an intimate friend. Still, he could scarcely afford to antagonize the Republican senators so essential to his governing coalition. He had to think through his options. He had to learn more about the dynamics of the situation.
Seward was greatly “disappointed,” Welles sensed, “that the President did not promptly refuse to consider his resignation.” The hesitation compounded the pain of the unexpected assault from his old colleagues on the Hill, leaving him noticeably “wounded, mortified, and chagrined.” Fortunately, Frances had journeyed to Washington the week before to look after their son Will, who had contracted typhoid fever in his army camp six miles from the capital. Fanny, who had just turned eighteen, remained in Auburn with Jenny and the baby. The two women were due to leave Auburn for Washington a few days later to join the family for Christmas.
As Fanny and Jenny were packing their things, Fred sent a hurried telegram to Fanny: “Do not come at present.” Fred, too, had offered his resignation as assistant secretary of state, and Frances followed his telegram with a letter telling Fanny that her father “thought he could best serve his country at present by resigning,” and that they were all leaving shortly for Auburn. Disconcerted by her father’s abrupt departure, Fanny worried greatly. “It seemed to me that if he were to leave,” she noted in her diary, “the distracted state of affairs would prey upon his spirits all the more. I had a vague fear that he would come home ill, and longed to see him with my own eyes, safe. Spent a restless & uncomfortable night.”
In some ways, Seward had exacerbated his own situation. His gratuitous comments about the radicals had made him enemies on Capitol Hill. Charles Sumner was particularly offended by a careless remark in one of the secretary’s dispatches to London, suggesting that the mind-set of the men in Congress was not so different from that of the Confederates. Furthermore, it is not unlikely that Seward’s pridefulness had led him occasionally to make immodest claims regarding his influence in the administration. Yet, despite such indiscretions, he was steadfast and loyal to the president. Having relinquished his own future ambitions, he had fought tirelessly to advance the fortunes of his chief and serve the country he loved.