Mr Lincoln's Army (27 page)

And Lincoln was in the mood to heed the words
of a hard fighter. At bottom his whole problem was summed up in the fact that
the North had the power to win the war but lacked the slugging, driving
generals who would use that power. He could form his own judgments of men, and
he was not persuaded by all the whispers about McClellan's loyalty; what did
bother him about McClellan, from first to last, was McClellan's reluctance to
crowd the enemy into a corner and punch until somebody dropped. Perhaps the
most revealing remark Lincoln ever made about his relationship with McClellan
was one concerning an entirely different general. Earlier that spring Grant
fought the battle of Shiloh—fought it inexpertly, suffering a shameful surprise,
losing many men who need not have been lost. There was a great clamor against
him, he was denounced as an incompetent and a drunkard, and tremendous
political pressure was put on Lincoln to remove him. A. K. McClure, the
Pennsylvania politician who was intimate with Lincoln, was convinced that
Lincoln, as a matter of practical politics, "could not sustain himself if
he attempted to sustain Grant," and late one night he went to the White
House to argue the point. He told Lincoln "with all the earnestness I
could command" that he simply must get rid of Grant. Then, as McClure
described it: "Lincoln remained silent for what seemed a very long time.
He then gathered himself up in his chair and said in a tone of earnestness that
I shall never forget: 7
can't spare this man;
he fights.'"
Lincoln had warned McClellan that there
were political pressures which even the President could not resist; but to
uphold a fighting general he was ready to resist any pressure whatever.
⁹

However
all of that may be, Lincoln and McClellan had their conference. And McClellan
there made his crowning mistake. Having failed to understand that political
considerations could modify the best plans of the best military men in a
democracy at war, he suddenly switched from military planning to political
planning—with disastrous results.

Here he was, barely a week after the battle
of Malvern Hill, with the whole future of the war depending on the speed and
energy with which the army could be repaired and thrown into a new campaign,
with all of the involved problems growing out of that fact resting chiefly on
himself for solution, with his own career, the fate of the army, and the safety
of the country itself depending on what might come out of his talks with the
President: and to the President he gave, not a plan for renewing the fighting,
but a long letter telling him how he should shape the high policy of the war.

It was his desire, McClellan wrote, to
expound his views regarding the rebellion, even though those views "do not
strictly relate to the situation of this army or strictly come within the scope
of my official duties." But the policy he was arguing for must be adopted
by the

President
and put promptly into effect "or our cause will be lost." It was a
policy, he said, both "constitutional and conservative," which would
"receive the support of almost all truly loyal men" and which, it
might be hoped, would even "commend itself to the favor of the
Almighty."

Specifically:
"neither confiscation of property, political executions of persons,
territorial organization of states or forcible abolition of slavery should be
contemplated for a moment." In the fighting, Federal armies should
protect private property and unarmed persons, and there should be no
"offensive demeanor by the military toward citizens"; there should be
no military arrests, except in areas where actual fighting was going on, and
where military government was set up it should be confined to preserving order
and protecting political rights. Military power should never be used to
interfere "with the relations of servitude"; if contraband slaves
were pressed into service, the rights of their owners to compensation should be
recognized. Unless some such policy as this were adopted, the effort to get new
recruits for the army would fail; and if the government should adopt
"radical views" on the slavery issue, the existing armies would
disintegrate.

To put through such a policy, McClellan
added, the President would need a sympathetic general-in-chief for the armies.
He did not ask that place for himself but would willingly serve "in such
position as you may assign me."

Now it is probably true that at least a part
of this letter was aimed at the egregious General Pope, who had celebrated the
assumption of his new command by issuing ferocious orders regarding the treatment
of Rebel civilians within his lines—orders so unduly restrictive that the
government quietly let them become a dead letter. To that extent McClellan was
on sound ground. But there can be no doubt whatever that the final effect of
the letter was to convince Lincoln that McClellan was not the general he could
use to win the war.

For two reasons.

To begin with, Lincoln was reluctantly
concluding that the war could not be won on the first simple flush of
enthusiasm for saving the Union. That would remain the one dominant motive, to
be sure: he was presently to write his famous letter to Horace Greeley declaring
that he would save the Union in any way he could, whether by freeing no slaves,
by freeing just a few, or by freeing all. It was a motive to which he had
remained true despite tremendous pressure from his own party. He had
disciplined General Fremont, first presidential candidate of the Republican
party, for issuing a premature proclamation of emancipation. He had rebuked
former Secretary of War Cameron when that slippery individual, deep in trouble
because of slovenly administration of his office, tried to wrap the
anti-slavery cloak about his bent shoulders. He had disavowed the act of
General David Hunter, another hero of the abolitionists, who tried to proclaim
abolition along the Southern seacoast that spring. Painfully and patiently he
had tried to bring forth some solution for the terrible slavery problem aside
from outright, forcible emancipation. He had persuaded a reluctant Congress to
adopt a joint resolution for compensated emancipation; there had been
something fairly pathetic in his appeal to the people of the slave states to
support such a settlement— "I do not argue; I beseech you to make the
arguments for yourselves. You cannot, if you would, be blind to the signs of
the times."

But the sands were running out. By the end of
the first week of July 1862, the President had just about made up his mind that
some sort of emancipation program was essential as a war measure. (It was less
than a week after this talk with McClellan that he first told Secretary Seward
and Secretary Welles that he had come to this conclusion.) In a sense, Lincoln
had gone down to Harrison's Landing with a draft of the Emancipation
Proclamation in his pocket. Yet here was the general of his most important army
saying that the one thing which he, the President, had decided must be done to
win the war could not and must not be done; telling him, in so many words, that
if the slavery issue were raised the army would not fight—McClellan's army,
made in his own image, bound to him by battle-tested ties of devotion.

And
in the second place, McClellan's letter forced Lincoln to ask just who was running
the country, anyway—the civil administration or a general? Obviously, if he
accepted McClellan's advice, the general was running it. At that early date
Lincoln was bumping into the ominous fact that when democracy makes all-out war
the way is always open for military persons to take control on the plea that
the military problem can't be solved unless all related political problems are
adjusted, Procrustes-fashion, to fit. There had been plenty of talk for a year
and more about the need for a dictator, whether in shoulder straps or frock
coat. Some of it had been pumped into McClellan's own ears by none other than
his present bitter enemy, Mr. Stanton. McClellan was by no means the only
general who had been beguiled by such talk, nor was Stanton the only beguiler,
and Lincoln knew it. Indeed, Lincoln's administration had not been a month old
before Secretary Seward had given the President a letter, blandly offering to
take over the job of running the government himself; did this letter of
McClellan's, closing with the courteous disclaimer of any personal ambition,
remind the President of that earlier letter of Seward's? The parallel is
striking.

Whatever Lincoln might have thought as he
read the general's remarkable letter, he gave nothing away. He thanked
McClellan politely for it, put it in his pocket, and went back to Washington.
Three days later he plucked General Halleck out of the lines along the
Mississippi, brought him to Washington, and made him general-in-chief of the
nation's armies.

And McClellan wrote to his wife that he had
given the President the letter and that "if he acts upon it the country
will be saved." He sent her a copy, asking her to preserve it as a
document important to the record—a document proving, McClellan felt, "that
I was true to my country, that I understood the state of affairs long ago, and
that had my advice been followed we should not have been in our present
difficulties."

Which is as it may be. It is doubtful if
McClellan ever realized exactly what effect his letter had, or why such an
effect might have been expected. He was acting, those days, with an incredible
innocence. Understanding politics not at all, he put himself inextricably into
politics; having given Lincoln a letter which was enough to destroy his own position,
he now had to make certain that his enemies in Washington would be able to put
the worst possible interpretation on it. He entertained in his camp Fernando
Wood, recently mayor of New York, and one of the leaders in what was just
beginning to be called the Copperhead movement.

Wood was a character any administration man
might well look upon with suspicion. When the Southern states began to secede
at the end of 1860 and the beginning of 1861, Wood had proposed that New York
City itself secede and become some sort of free city on the coast, friendly to
the new Confederacy, bringing from Lincoln the dry comment that the time hardly
seemed ripe for the front door to detach itself and set up housekeeping by
itself. Wood was by now the complete exemplar of those Northern Democrats who
let their old sympathy for the South, their dislike of anti-slavery agitation,
and their basic political opposition to the Republicans carry them over to the
very edge of being pro-Confederate rather than pro-Union. Like many another
Northern general—U. S. Grant, for a random example—McClellan was a Democrat
and always had been; but he could not see now that under all the circumstances
it was not quite politic for him to confer with Fernando Wood while his army
recuperated from defeat within gunshot of Lee's outposts.

He talked politics with Wood, who felt and
said that McClellan would be a good presidential candidate. He seems to have
prepared for Wood a letter outlining his political views; a letter apparently
embodying much the same points as were expressed in his letter to Lincoln, but
dangerously susceptible to misinterpretation when given by the commanding
general to a reckless conniver like Wood. McClellan showed the letter to one
of his closest friends, General William F. Smith—"Baldy" Smith to the
army, a good soldier and a stoutiy loyal citizen. Smith, according to the
surviving reports, read it and found the remnants of his hair standing on end;
handed it back with the startled remark that "it looks like treason"
and would be the ruin of McClellan and all who were close to him. On Smith's
urging, McClellan destroyed the letter. His enemies in Washington, of course,
never saw the letter and never knew just what had passed between Wood and
McClellan; but they knew that Wood had visited McClellan, they knew that talk
of McClellan as the next President was beginning to circulate, and they did
know Wood.

After Wood left, Halleck came down for a
conference. McClellan was stiffly polite; he considered Halleck an inferior
person, in which he was quite correct, and he wrote to his wife that his
self-respect would permit him to remain in command of the army "only so
long as the welfare of the Army of the Potomac demands—no longer." That
tie with the army had become by now the only thing that counted: "I owe a
great duty to this noble set of men, and that is the only feeling that retains
me.
...
I owe no gratitude to any but
my own soldiers here; none to the government or to the country." The
conversation with Halleck was inconclusive. McClellan was left with the feeling
that his army would be reinforced and would be ordered to resume its advance on
Richmond, and Halleck also seems to have promised that McClellan would
ultimately be put in command of Pope's army as well as his own. This McClellan
took with a grain of salt. He wrote home that as far as he could see the
authorities "intend and hope that my army may melt away under the hot
sun."

Then the blow fell. At the end of July,
Halleck telegraphed that reports from Pope indicated a lessening of Rebel
strength around Richmond and suggested a reconnoissance in force by McClellan.
Hooker's division, accordingly, was sent forward to the old battlefield of
Malvern Hill, and McClellan prayed that the Rebels would incautiously
attack—then, with a counterattack, he might create an opening for a real
advance on Richmond. But the Rebel attack did not develop, a sputtering of
small-arms fire along the picket lines died away in the thickets, and Hooker
was withdrawn, furious, like Kearny earlier, swearing that a determined push
would have taken the Confederate capital. McClellan himself was hopeful and
wired Halleck that if he were properly reinforced he believed he could march
his army to Richmond in five days; but Halleck replied that there were no
reinforcements to send and bluntly told him that it had been decided to
withdraw the entire army from the James to the upper Potomac—McClellan must get
busy, send his sick north at once, and put his army on the transports as fast
as he could.