Authors: David Von Drehle
Far more dependable as highways to supply and transport Union forces were the great rivers; thus the Ohio, the Mississippi, and the many navigable waterways flowing into them provided the third means of exploiting the South’s terrain. Lincoln knew from deep experience that the American interior was “a frontier of rivers,” for he had spent his young manhood all over the waterways of the West. The first dollar he ever earned was for ferrying passengers to a steamboat on the Ohio River; a year later, he steered a flatboat from Rockport, Illinois, on the Ohio, down the Mississippi to New Orleans. At twenty-one, he forded the Wabash River when it was swollen with rain, wrestling his family’s oxen through the roiling waters. At twenty-two, he built another flatboat, launched it in the Illinois River, and once more made the long, looping, oxbowed trip down the Mississippi to New Orleans. Attempting to prove that a steamboat could travel the Sangamon River, Lincoln got stuck at the little town of New Salem, Illinois, where he soon began his political career—on a platform of improving rivers for navigation. He even received a patent on an invention for lifting steamboats over shoals.
Lincoln had seen the western rivers in flood and in drought, and he knew their moods and seasons. Now, as president, he saw that the rivers crisscrossing the South could substantially offset the problem of inadequate roads. If “evidences of progress” were needed, the rivers could open the way.
For months, buyers from the army and navy had been bustling around river wharfs from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Cairo, Illinois, purchasing steamboats to serve as troop transports and cargo ships. Lincoln took particular interest in a frantic construction project in and around St. Louis, where a boatwright and bridge builder named James Eads was creating a fleet of steam-powered, ironclad gunboats designed to navigate in shallow water and carry an array of heavy cannon. The Eads boats, dubbed “turtles,” were ungainly things, ugly but tough. By early January there were seven turtles in the water, all nearing completion.
Yet Lincoln was impatient for his “brown water navy” to get moving. The Confederates weren’t waiting idly for the attack. They were building forts on the rivers, and they had their own ironclad gunboats under construction in New Orleans.
* * *
Fog lay thick in the Washington swamplands on January 10; the streets melted into soupy ooze. Lincoln convened the cabinet again, this time for one of its gloomiest meetings yet, a freewheeling ventilation of fears and frustrations over the fact that nearly two weeks had gone by since the New Year’s Eve session and still they knew nothing of McClellan’s intentions. Attorney General Bates wondered aloud whether McClellan had any real plans at all; he then repeated his well-worn speech to Lincoln, urging him to trust his judgment and assert his authority, somehow failing to see that this was exactly what Lincoln was trying to do. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles echoed the sentiment; like many navy men, he enjoyed thinking that all the army needed was a swift kick. Lincoln replied by explaining that generals are not the sort of men who respond well to scolding and kicking.
The meeting came to a close and again nothing had been accomplished. By now the president was nearly beside himself. It was all meetings and telegrams and hand-wringing, but still no action. Lincoln fled the White House and strode across the lawn to the War Department, where he entered the office of Montgomery Meigs, quartermaster general, one of the most competent staff officers in the country. There, Lincoln expressed his profound frustration. “The people are impatient; Chase has no money and tells me he can raise no more; the General of the Army has typhoid fever. The bottom is out of the tub,” Lincoln declared. “What shall I do?” Though prone to his own occasional crises of confidence, Meigs proved sturdy that day, offering the distraught president a concrete plan. It was a variation on the maneuver that Lincoln employed on New Year’s Day: skip past McClellan and deal directly with the next level of generals. Meigs told the president he should convene a council of war.
A hand-picked group gathered that evening at the White House. Chase was invited, as was Secretary of State Seward. Two generals from McClellan’s Army of the Potomac were summoned, one a friend of the general and one a rival. Meigs was a little late in arriving, along with Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, the only member of Lincoln’s cabinet with a West Point education. The secretary of war, Simon Cameron, was conspicuously missing; in his place was a deputy, Peter Watson.
Cameron had become an insufferable obstacle to Union progress, a crucial department head who could not be counted on. His management of the War Department was impotent and widely seen as corrupt. He was so notorious for his habit of leaking vital information that the navy implored Lincoln to exclude him from meetings to plan the recapture of New Orleans. But because Cameron was head of a powerful political machine in the vital state of Pennsylvania, he had to be handled carefully. By this time, Lincoln had decided to fire Cameron as soon as he found a replacement, but he had confided this plan only to Seward.
Lincoln opened the meeting with a soliloquy that proved his patience had worn thin. He offered a detailed recitation of woes, from the collapse of government finances, to the pressure from congressional radicals, to the lack of cooperation between Halleck and Buell. Most of all, there was the problem of McClellan, who once again had refused to see him. Lincoln must talk to someone, and so, he told the two generals, he was turning to them. If McClellan was not going to use the army, Lincoln said tartly, he “would like to borrow it,” as long as he “could see how it could be made to do something.”
Not surprisingly, the generals—Irwin McDowell and William B. Franklin—provided two very different responses. McDowell, the Republican favorite, proposed a fresh march on Richmond by way of Manassas; in other words, he wanted to pursue the same strategy that had failed so disastrously the previous summer. Franklin, a member of McClellan’s clique of senior officers, countered by suggesting that the Army of the Potomac should instead move south by water, taking ships down Chesapeake Bay to flank the Confederates, land to the east of Richmond, and move quickly on the Rebel capital.
Finally the cat was out of the bag: this was the secret plan that McClellan had been hatching. But Franklin was forced to acknowledge that it was far from mature; of the two strategies, only McDowell’s could be executed quickly. Lincoln’s options, then, were to wait some more, or fight another battle at Bull Run against an enemy that was, for all the war council knew, stronger than ever. Stymied again, he asked the generals to gather more information and return for yet another meeting.
This cannot have felt like a turning point. Hemmed in and oppressed, Lincoln had an overpowering sense that he could afford to take only the smallest, most careful steps. According to Herndon, who paid a visit to Washington around this time, the president cryptically confided: “Traitors are under me, around me, and above me. I do not know whom to trust and must move slowly and cautiously.”
Yet the ad hoc council marked a significant shift. Too much pressure for action was building; Lincoln had jostled too many generals and rubbed too many sensitive egos for the situation to remain frozen. Tiny fissures, almost imperceptible, were beginning to appear in the Union position, cracks that would soon widen. For one thing, McClellan’s letter to Halleck, dictated from his sickbed, evidently made an impression. Halleck was enough of a professional soldier to understand that when the president and the general in chief were both instructing him to send an expedition southward, he ought to launch some boats and march some troops. McClellan’s letter to Buell, meanwhile, had reached Louisville and made a similar impression there.
But Lincoln didn’t know that the ice was beginning to break, so he kept chipping away.
* * *
January 11 was a fine Saturday, warm and pleasant. The Taft boys were visiting; though the president’s sons were notorious for barging in on their father as he held cabinet meetings or pondered state papers, today Willie, Tad, and their two friends thundered up the stairs and clambered out onto the roof, where they put the finishing touches on the quarterdeck of an imaginary warship. Pretending to be sailors in a fleet commanded by Commodore Abraham Lincoln, the four boys took turns scanning the Potomac and its yonder shore through a spyglass, alert for signs of enemy activity.
Thus protected, the president worked at his desk. He had at last found his way out from under the Cameron problem, and now he crafted an artful pair of letters to his secretary of war. One letter fired the man, and the other tried to make him feel good about it.
The U.S. ambassador to Russia, a flamboyant abolitionist named Cassius Marcellus Clay, had asked to return from St. Petersburg to lead troops into battle. The prospect of General Clay excited few people other than the man himself, for he was impulsive and emotional, notorious for brawling and dueling. But the opening in Russia created a suitable post for a former secretary of war. Lincoln’s first letter to Cameron, written for public consumption, briskly informed him that he would be nominated for the Russian mission two days hence. This letter would show the public that the president was serious about cleaning up the War Department. But Lincoln knew that Cameron would read the official letter as “a dismissal, and, therefore, discourteous,” according to Salmon Chase, and the president understood that an offended Cameron was a dangerous Cameron. So he wrote a second, longer letter, which he marked private. In this one, Lincoln nursed Cameron’s wounded pride, assuring the ousted secretary of his esteem and friendship. This deft bit of diplomacy was successful: Cameron resigned without public complaint.
Lincoln’s dismissal of Cameron went smoothly because he had found another Pennsylvanian to fill the post. But his outgoing and incoming secretaries of war shared little besides their home state; substituting Edwin M. Stanton for Simon Cameron was like replacing a butter knife with a buzz saw. Warned that the energetic, headstrong lawyer might “run away with the whole concern,” Lincoln countered with a story of a preacher whose sermons were so passionate that folks had to put bricks in the preacher’s pockets to keep him from flying away. “I may have to do that with Stanton,” he said, “but if I do, bricks in his pocket will be better than bricks in his hat.”
Yet Stanton was not an obvious choice. At a time when congressional Republicans were complaining about Democrats in key positions, Stanton was one more Democrat, and he was tainted by his service as attorney general in the do-nothing administration of the previous president, James Buchanan. Lincoln’s adviser Montgomery Blair warned darkly that Stanton was not to be trusted. And the president’s own experience of Stanton would have seemed to rule out any hope of an appointment. Years earlier, Lincoln had been retained as one of several lawyers helping to defend a manufacturer of reaping machines against the powerful McCormick Company in a patent dispute. Stanton was the star of the manufacturer’s defense team, and he had gone to great lengths to humiliate Lincoln when the case finally went to trial. Calling him “that damned long armed Ape,” Stanton refused to seat Lincoln at counsel’s table, or even to let him eat breakfast with the legal team.
But Lincoln had a short memory for slights, especially slights that might hamper his larger aims. His favorite expression, according to John Hay, was “I am in favor of short statutes of limitations in politics.” As he once observed: “Perhaps I have too little [resentment], but I never thought it paid. A man has not time to spend half his life in quarrels. If any man ceases to attack me, I never remember the past against him.” To Lincoln, a grudge was a waste of resources: if a person could be useful to him, he cared little whether the man was a friend or a foe. Nor did Lincoln much care what individuals thought about him. Hay once scoffed when someone suggested that Lincoln was a modest man. No modest man becomes great, Hay insisted. Lincoln’s typical reaction to criticism, the secretary noted, was to brush it aside as ignorance. “I know more about it than them,” he would say.
Stanton also had a crucial supporter. During the final months of Buchanan’s term, as secession mania spiked across the South and members of Buchanan’s cabinet plotted with the Rebels, William Seward had used his seat in the Senate to try to save the Union and stop the rush toward war. This effort to find a compromise left the senator’s more radical Republican friends disillusioned, but it gave Seward a behind-the-scenes view of Stanton. He saw a man desperate to snuff the rebellion and furious in his contempt for the Southern rabble-rousers. Stanton was tireless in funneling intelligence from inside Buchanan’s cabinet to Seward, and Seward came to trust Stanton’s energy, determination, and loyalty. And by now, Lincoln had come to trust Seward.
McClellan, meanwhile, had received reports of Lincoln’s war council of the previous evening; characteristically, he immediately suspected a conspiracy to strip him of power. He dispatched one of his most trusted staff officers, Colonel Thomas Key, to seek Chase’s help. The Treasury secretary advised Key that McClellan should stop flaunting his personal disrespect for Lincoln and pay the honor due the office of the presidency. The general should make regular reports to Lincoln, in person or through an aide, rather than waiting for the president to come to him. McClellan did not accept advice easily, but this time he tried.
He emerged from his sickroom the next morning, January 12, and appeared unannounced at the White House. For the first time, the general sketched his secret plan for the president. It was much as William Franklin had outlined it at the war council: put the army on boats, steam southward past the rebels at Manassas, and land in the rear of General Joseph E. Johnston’s Confederate army. From there, the Federals would march on Richmond. It was a sound strategy in almost every respect, but Lincoln remained skeptical. The Confederates were entrenched just a day’s march from Washington, with batteries effectively blockading the Potomac. What if, instead of retreating to defend Richmond, they waited until McClellan set off, and then attacked Washington? The Union could not afford to lose the capital even for a few days, not with European powers itching for a chance to declare Confederate victory.