A Treasury of Great American Scandals (10 page)

Just as “the Eaton malaria” had splintered the president and vice president, along with most of the cabinet, it opened deep fissures within Jackson's own family as well. His niece and nephew, Emily and Andrew Donelson, served not only as his hostess and secretary respectively, but also as companions to the widowed president. Much to his horror, though, the Donelsons decided to follow Washington society in their treatment of Peggy Eaton. Jackson was convinced that they had become enemy operators of Calhoun and the rest. “That my Nephew and Nece [sic] should permit themselves to be held up as the instruments, and
tools,
of such wickedness, is truly mortifying to me,” the president fumed in a letter. He even contemplated firing Andrew Donelson as his secretary. “I Know I can live as well without them, as they can without me, and I will govern my Household, or I will have
none.
”

The Donelsons were sent to an unofficial exile in Tennessee, and the president was left to shuffle around the Executive Mansion all alone. Lonely as he was, he was not about to budge on the Eaton issue. “Better to put up with the separation for a short time,” he wrote, “than to come on and introduce again those scenes here that has cost me so much pain, which first and last has almost destroyed me, and this too produced by my dearest friends [the Donelsons], uniting with and pursuing the advice of my worst enemies.”

The Eaton scandal, which dominated his administration for more than two years, so exhausted the president that he longed to lie in a grave next to his beloved wife, Rachael. “I only wish if it pleased the will of providence, that I was by her side,” he wrote, “free from all the deception and depravity of this wicked world. Then my mind would not be corroded by the treachery of false friends, or the slanders of professed ones.” Relief only came after the mass resignations from his cabinet and the departure of the Eatons from Washington. (Eaton had joined Van Buren in tendering his resignation, thus allowing Jackson to save face while clearing the way for the ouster of the anti-Eaton cabinet members.) As President Jackson tried to put the whole Eaton mess behind him and start fresh, a new toast became popular in Washington: “To the next cabinet—may they all be bachelors—or leave their wives at home.”

The storm had passed, but Washington had not seen the last of the woman at the center of the hurricane. Peggy Eaton eventually came back to the capital, and after the death of her husband in 1856, set tongues wagging once again when she married, at age fifty-nine, a nineteen-year-old Italian dance instructer named Antonio Buchignani. The marriage seemed to be a happy one, at least until Buchignani ran off to Italy with all her money as well as her granddaughter. Left in poverty, Peggy nevertheless remained a fixture in Washington—a curious remnant of an earlier era when the issue of one woman's reputation was almost enough to destroy a presidency.

Peggy O'Neale Timberlake Eaton Buchignani died in 1879 at a home for destitute women. She was buried in the capital's Oak Hill Cemetery next to John Eaton. A newspaper commenting on her death and on the irony of the situation editorialized: “Doubtless among the dead populating the terraces [of the cemetery] are some of her assailants [from the cabinet days] and cordially as they may have hated her, they are now her neighbors.”

A Not So Civil War

 

 

 

 

As war was raging between the American North and South, a behind-the-scenes struggle erupted between President Abraham Lincoln and his general, George McClellan. Both leaders were firmly entrenched in their respective positions, but the markedly different styles in which they approached their conflict showed just what kind of men they really were. Lincoln, facing enormous pressure over Union setbacks and defeats early in the Civil War, grew increasingly frustrated by McClellan's hesitation to confront the enemy—what he called the general's chronic case of “the slows.” Yet despite his serious concerns, the president tried to motivate McClellan with respectful suggestions and gentle cajoling, often deferring to his superior military experience. It didn't work. McClellan treated his commander-in-chief with barely disguised contempt, ignoring his orders and requests, and calling him, among other things, “an idiot” and “nothing more than a well-meaning baboon.”

McClellan's total lack of regard for the president was glaringly demonstrated one evening late in 1861 when Lincoln came to his home to discuss strategy. McClellan was not in, so Lincoln decided to sit and wait. The general eventually returned, but ignored a porter's announcement that the president was there to see him and went straight up to his room. After about half an hour had passed, Lincoln sent up a message that he was still waiting. He was told, on McClellan's orders, that the general had retired for the evening and would not be receiving company. The president chose not to react to the gross affront, saying, “It was better at this time not to be making points of etiquette and personal dignity.” Yet despite his forbearance on this occasion, Lincoln's patience with his general was fraying rapidly.

It snapped early the next year after a particularly humiliating debacle near Harper's Ferry, Virginia, when canal boats McClellan had ordered as anchors for a temporary bridge across the Potomac River proved too large to fit through the locks of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. “Why in tarnation . . . couldn't [McClellan] have known whether a boat would go through that lock, before he spent a million of dollars getting them there?” President Lincoln exploded. “I am no engineer, but it seems to me that if I wished to know whether a boat would go through a . . . lock, common sense would teach me to go and measure it. I am almost despairing at these results. Everything seems to fail.” Lincoln concluded his rant by articulating the ultimate source of his frustration with McClellan: “The general impression is daily gaining ground that the General does not intend to do anything.” He had a point there.

Things had seemed so promising when George McClellan, at thirty-four, was appointed head of the Army of the Potomac after the stunning Union defeat at the first battle of Bull Run at the beginning of the Civil War. Charged with defending Washington and building a force that would help crush the Confederacy, he was hailed as the “Savior of the Republic” and called “the Young Napoleon.” The handsome young general cut a dashing figure astride his mount, reviewing troops that would come to adore him. (Lincoln, in contrast, looked “like a scare-crow on horseback,” as an observer once described him riding next to McClellan.)

“I find myself in a new & strange position here,” the general wrote his wife. “By some operation of magic I seem to have become
the
power of the land.” Unfortunately McClellan actually seems to have believed this, quickly showing himself to be utterly dismissive of his civilian superiors—especially the president. Furthermore, he thought God had ordained him to his position—a belief rarely conducive to collaboration and compromise—and refused to discuss his strategies and agenda. At one council meeting, for example, he pronounced that “no General fit to command an army will ever submit his plans to the judgment of such an assembly . . . there are many here entirely incompetent to pass judgment upon them.”

Lincoln might not have minded McClellan's obstinate refusals to reveal his plans if he thought he actually had any. While the newly appointed general had done a fine job fortifying the capital and reorganizing and strengthening the Army of the Potomac, he seemed to lose momentum after that. And this is what concerned the president most. He wanted his general to take the offense against rebel forces in Manassas, Virginia, but McClellan always had an excuse for delay: His men were not yet strong enough to fight, or they would be facing Confederate forces of far greater numbers and strength. A frustrated Lincoln noted wryly at one point that if General McClellan was not going to use his army, he “would like to
borrow
it, provided he could see how it could be made to do something.”

Finally the president demanded action; he ordered McClellan to advance on Manassas, site of the disastrous Union defeat at the first battle of Bull Run. McClellan objected, of course, but he did offer a detailed plan of his own—at last. He proposed attacking the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, from the eastern waterways. Lincoln had grave reservations about the plan, particularly the potential exposure Washington would face with its defenders engaged further south, but he reluctantly agreed. To assuage his concerns about the defense of Washington, however, the president held back about one-quarter of the troops McClellan intended to use in the Richmond campaign. The general was outraged. “It is the most infamous thing that history has recorded,” he wrote his wife with more than a touch a drama. “The idea of depriving a general of 35,000 troops when actually under fire!” He later claimed his entire plan was paralyzed by the president's decision. “It compelled the adoption of another, a different and less effective plan of campaign,” McClellan later wrote in a self-justifying report on his tenure as commander of the Army of the Potomac. “It made rapid and brilliant operations impossible,” he continued. “It was a fatal error.”

To Lincoln, the reduction in troops was just another excuse McClellan used so as not to have to confront the enemy, and the president just wasn't buying it. He reminded his general that even after a portion of his troops were held back, he still had 100,000 at his command. “I think you better break the enemies' line . . . at once,” Lincoln demanded. Indignant, McClellan wrote his wife: “I was much tempted to reply that he had better come and do it himself.”

Though Lincoln was clearly dissatisfied with McClellan's “sluggishness of action,” as he told his friend Orville Hickman Browning, he wrote his general a letter intended to soothe his tender feelings and implore action. Only the Confederates benefitted by delay, he noted. “And, once more let me tell you, it is indispensable to
you
that you strike a blow.
I
am powerless to help this.” Lincoln added a note of admonition in an otherwise conciliatory letter: “You will do me the justice to remember I always insisted, the going down the [Chesapeake] Bay in search of a field, instead of fighting at or near Manassas, was only shifting, and not surmounting, a difficulty—that we would find the same enemy, and the same, or equal, intrenchments [
sic
], at either place.” The president then concluded, “I beg to assure you that I have never written you, or spoken to you, in greater kindness of feeling than now, nor with fuller purpose to sustain you. . . .
But you must act.
”

McClellan didn't bother to reply. He was unrepentant about the ultimate failure of his campaign to capture Richmond, blaming, once again, the refusal of Washington to provide the necessary troops. Lincoln thought otherwise. “If by magic [I] could reinforce McClelland [
sic
] with 100,000 men today,” he remarked, “he would be in ecstasy of it, thank [me] for it, and tell me that he could go to Richmond tomorrow, but that when tomorrow came he would telegraph that he had certain information that the enemy had 400,000 men, and that he could not advance without reinforcements.”

After the Richmond debacle, McClellan sat at Harrison's Landing on the James River, stewing and immobile. A master of self-delusion, he saw the hand of God in the losses he had accumulated. “If I had succeeded in taking Richmond now,” he wrote, “the fanatics of the North might have been too powerful & reunion [with the South] impossible.” And of course he continued to believe President Lincoln had it in for him. “I am confident that he would relieve me tomorrow, if he dared do so,” McClellan wrote his wife. “His cowardice alone prevents it. I can never regard him with other feelings than those of thorough contempt—for his mind, heart & morality.”

In a tiff, McClellan refused an order to get back to the vicinity of Washington and assist in General John Pope's Army of Virginia advance on Manassas. His refusal contributed to another demoralizing Union loss at the second battle of Bull Run in late August 1862. The president was devastated. “I am almost ready to say . . . that God wills this contest,” he wrote, “and wills that it shall not yet end.” Lincoln was forced to abandon the idea of an aggressive war against the Confederacy and return to a defensive posture. For this he needed McClellan, the man he called “the chief alarmist and grand marplot of the Army.” Though the president was weary of his general's “weak, whiney, vague and incorrect despatches” and considered his failure to join Pope unforgivable, he knew McClellan was a superb organizer and the only one who could revive the army's shattered spirits. “I must have McClellan to reorganize the Army and bring it out of chaos,” he said, over the vigorous protests of his cabinet advisors. “We must use what tools we have,” he told them. Nevertheless, a final clash between Lincoln and McClellan was looming large.

It came after the battle of Antietam. Although McClellan managed to repel Confederate General Robert E. Lee's advance across the Potomac into Maryland, it was a squandered victory—and a lucky one, too. Ezra A. Carman, an Antietam veteran and the author of the most detailed tactical study of the battle, noted that “more errors were committed by the Union commander than in any other battle of the war.” For Lincoln, McClellan's greatest sin was allowing Lee's forces to slip back across the Potomac largely intact. The president believed an opportunity to crush the Confederates had been wasted, and was incensed that McClellan was not pursuing Lee into Virginia.

The general, however, was quite satisfied with himself after Antietam, “knowing that God had in his mercy a second time made me the instrument of saving the nation.” While the enemy was left as strong as ever, as the general himself acknowledged, he was still pleased: “I have shown that I can fight battles &
win
them!” Yet after this particular battle the general was pooped, and when it came to his failure to pursue the retreating rebels, he called upon the arsenal of excuses he had used so often in the past. “The real truth is that my army is not yet fit to advance,” he claimed. “These people [in Washington] don't know what an army requires & therefore act stupidly.”