Lincoln Part 35

VII

Lincoln's military plans bore equally meager results. After McClellan's demotion the President and the Secretary of War, neither of whom had any significant military experience, found themselves swamped by administrative detail as they tried to direct huge armies spread over half a continent. Yielding finally to suggestions from both Chase and Bates, Lincoln decided he needed his own military adviser, and he called on the sixty-four-year-old veteran Ethan Allen Hitchc.o.c.k. The grandson of the Revolutionary hero Ethan Allen, Hitchc.o.c.k had become a soldier mainly because family tradition demanded it, and, more interested in Swedenborg than in strategy, he retired from active duty in 1855 to devote his time to religious and philosophical investigations. Summoned to Was.h.i.+ngton in March, he learned from Stanton that the President wanted his a.s.sistance. The next day Lincoln told him of the pressures to remove "the traitor McClellan"-as his enemies called him-and explained that as President he was "the depository of the power of the government and had no military knowledge." In his sickbed, recovering from two hemorrhages, the general thought he was asked to take McClellan's place as commander of the Army of the Potomac, but he did not perhaps get the message exactly right. The old general was reluctant. He wanted no post, and he recognized that neither Lincoln nor Stanton knew what they would like him to do. Unwillingly he accepted a staff appointment in the War Department, where his advice was of little use to either the President or the Secretary of War.

Left to manage on their own, Lincoln and Stanton received little encouraging news from any front. In the West at Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River the Confederates came close to routing Grant's army in the battle of s.h.i.+loh (April 67). The timely arrival of Buell's forces helped to save the day. In the end, s.h.i.+loh was a great Union victory, but the 13,000 Federal casualties marked this as the bloodiest engagement yet in the war. Halleck blamed Grant for the losses, and there was strong sentiment to have him removed. Lincoln overruled the objections with the quiet comment "I can't spare this man; he fights." But with Grant's reputation under a shadow, Halleck now took personal command of the heavily depleted Western army and began a slow and c.u.mbersome march toward Corinth, Mississippi.

In the East progress was no more rapid. Fremont said that he could not move until his newly established Mountain Department received reinforcements and more supplies. The President had little to give him because McClellan was taking most of the Army of the Potomac down the Potomac to use in his Peninsula campaign, in which neither Lincoln nor Stanton had much faith. Stanton circulated reports of McClellan's disloyalty-only to declare sanctimoniously that of course he did not believe these imputations on the general. Lincoln said he had no reason to doubt McClellan's fidelity, yet he told Browning that he was "not fully satisfied with his conduct of the war-that he was not sufficiently energetic and aggressive." Offering a shrewd thumbnail character sketch, the President judged that McClellan "had the capacity to make arrangements properly for a great conflict, but as the hour for action approached he became nervous and oppressed with the responsibility and hesitated to meet the crisis."

Harboring such doubts, Lincoln had stipulated that McClellan must not embark on his campaign without leaving behind a sufficient force to make Was.h.i.+ngton "entirely secure." That requirement led to an unsolvable conflict between them. Lincoln was never able to make the general comprehend the political importance of the security of the national capital. McClellan, for his part, failed to convince the President that the best way to defend Was.h.i.+ngton was to attack Richmond.

Before leaving for the Peninsula, McClellan, as directed, held a council of war, and his corps commanders recommended that a force of 40,000 or 50,000 men was needed to protect the capital. McClellan believed he was carrying out this directive by stationing 22,000 men in and around Was.h.i.+ngton and by posting other troops nearby-at Mana.s.sas, at Warrenton, in the Shenandoah Valley, and on the lower Potomac-all in close proximity if the capital should be attacked. But he never explained his thinking to Lincoln and, except for quickly pa.s.sing a paper under Hitchc.o.c.k's nose, did not show anybody his troop disposition before he sailed for the Peninsula. Stanton, still new in his job and always highly nervous, feared for the safety of Was.h.i.+ngton and asked Hitchc.o.c.k and General James Wadsworth, commandant of the forces in the capital, to verify that McClellan had followed the President's order to leave the capital secure. Both agreed that he had not. On April 3, Lincoln ordered McDowell's corps-approximately one-third of the army McClellan had hoped to muster on the Peninsula-held back for the defense of Was.h.i.+ngton.

After that there was endless bickering between McClellan and the civilian authorities in Was.h.i.+ngton. The general found the Confederates entrenched at Yorktown on the Peninsula and, as usual vastly overestimating the enemy's strength, demanded reinforcement. Without McDowell's men, he felt unable to carry the Confederate lines and settled down to besiege their fortifications. Impatiently Lincoln reminded him that, even after McDowell's corps was held back, he had 100,000 troops at his command and suggested: "I think you better break the enemies' line... at once." Furious, McClellan wrote his wife, "I was much tempted to reply that he had better come and do it himself."

Lincoln told Browning that he was "dissatisfied with McClellan's sluggishness of action," but he tried to soothe the general's feeling with a fuller explanation why McDowell's troops had been detained. For all his charity, he could not refrain from adding a word of self-justification: "You will do me the justice to remember I always insisted, that going down the Bay in search of a field, instead of fighting at or near Mana.s.sas, was only s.h.i.+fting, and not surmounting, a difficulty-that we would find the same enemy, and the same, or equal, intrenchments, at either place." The President a.s.sured the general that he would do his best to sustain the army, and he ended with a warning: "But you must act."

Relations between the general and his commander-in-chief were strained but not broken. After reevaluating the forces left to defend Was.h.i.+ngton, Lincoln detached Franklin's division from McDowell's corps and sent it to reinforce the army on the Peninsula. Grateful for this evidence of the President's "firm friends.h.i.+p and confidence," McClellan told Montgomery Blair that he was now convinced "that the Presdt had none but the best motives." He promised soon to report a success that would be "brilliant, although with but little loss of life."

On May 3, when the Confederates withdrew from Yorktown and McClellan began his long-planned advance up the Peninsula, Lincoln decided to move closer to the scene of operations. Accompanied by Chase and Stanton and escorted by General Egbert L. Viele, he boarded the Treasury Department's new revenue cutter, the Miami, sailed down the Potomac, and the next day arrived at Fort Monroe, where seventy-eight-year-old General John E. Wool commanded the garrison. After learning that McClellan would not join them because his army had just defeated the Confederates at Williamsburg and was pus.h.i.+ng them back toward Richmond, the President and his a.s.sociates decided that the time had come to liberate Norfolk, on the south side of the James estuary, where the hulking Merrimack was sheltered, still a threat to the Union navy.

Though the professional soldiers in General Wool's command advised that it was impossible to land troops anywhere near Norfolk because shoals would prevent boats from getting closer than a mile to the sh.o.r.e, Chase was determined to see for himself and, using the Miami and a tugboat, got very near to land. He reported his finding to Lincoln, who had been studying the maps and thought he had discovered another landing site nearby. Under a bright moon Lincoln and Stanton sailed in the tugboat right up to the sh.o.r.e, while Chase aimed the long-range guns of the Miami to protect them if they were attacked. The President insisted on climbing out on what Virginians called their "sacred soil" and, in bright moonlight, strolled up and down on the beach.

After showing that a landing was possible, Lincoln did not partic.i.p.ate in the invasion the next day but remained at Fort Monroe attending to other business. That evening he heard how Chase had gone ash.o.r.e, led the Union troops, and received the surrender of Norfolk. A huge explosion told the President's party that the Merrimack, abandoned by the Confederates, had been blown up. "So," Chase wrote to his daughter, "has ended a brilliant week's campaign of the President, for I think it quite certain that if he had not come down, [Norfolk] would still have been in possession of the enemy and the Merrimac as grim and defiant and as much a terror as ever."

The episode was of no particular importance except perhaps to confirm the distrust of professional military men that both Lincoln and Stanton shared. But the President would not allow his little adventure to be used to McClellan's discredit. Afterward, over dinner at General Wool's headquarters, when someone made a slurring reference to the commander of the Army of the Potomac, Lincoln rebuked him: "I will not hear anything said against Genl. McClellan, it hurts my feelings."

But McClellan, feeling victory almost within his grasp, was not so generous, and he insisted on reversing some of Lincoln's recent decisions. He had never liked the corps arrangement that the President had forced him to accept and now, claiming that it "very nearly resulted in a most disastrous defeat" at Williamsburg, planned to remove "incompetent commanders" of corps and divisions. Reluctantly Lincoln allowed McClellan to suspend the corps organization, though he reminded the general that it was based "on the unanimous opinion of every military man I could get an opinion from, and every modern military book, yourself only excepted." He warned McClellan that his actions would be perceived "as merely an effort to pamper one or two pets, and to persecute and degrade their supposed rivals" and asked whether he had considered the implications of reducing the rank of Generals Sumner, Heintzelman, and Keyes all at once.

McClellan continued to complain that he did not have enough men to confront the overwhelming Confederate force. He never ceased asking Lincoln for McDowell's army corps that had been held back to defend Was.h.i.+ngton (though he did not want McDowell himself, whom he regarded as an enemy who fed the Committee on the Conduct of the War material hostile to McClellan). Unwilling to leave Was.h.i.+ngton exposed, Lincoln thought he found a way to defend the capital while reinforcing McClellan: he would have McDowell's corps advance overland toward Richmond in such a way as to connect with the right wing of McClellan's forces on the Peninsula. But because he retained a residual distrust of McClellan's judgment, he instructed McDowell to operate not as a part of McClellan's force but as an independent cooperating army. As he expected, McClellan resisted the plan. He insisted that the reinforcements should be sent by water, and he announced that since he outranked McDowell that general would, under the sixty-second article of war, have to obey his orders.

To make sure McDowell understood his mission, the President went down to Aquia Creek, accompanied by Secretary Stanton and John A. Dahlgren, a naval officer to whom he had taken a great liking. When they reached the Potomac Creek, McDowell called their attention to a trestle bridge his men were erecting a hundred feet above the water in that deep and wide ravine. "Let us walk over," exclaimed the President boyishly, and though the pathway was only a single plank wide, he led the way. About halfway across Stanton became dizzy and Dahlgren, who was somewhat giddy himself, had to help the Secretary. But Lincoln, despite the grinding cares of his office, was in fine physical shape and never lost his balance.

His political equilibrium was not so steady. By the end of May 1862 his administration could point to few successes. In neither the East nor in the West had Union armies succeeded in crus.h.i.+ng the Confederate forces. Only in faraway Louisiana, where David G. Farragut ran the fortifications on the lower Mississippi River and seized New Orleans, had there been a clear Union success. The Treasury was almost depleted. After exhausting the possibilities of borrowing, Secretary Chase had reluctantly been obliged to ask Congress to issue legal-tender paper money (usually called greenbacks). Like Chase, Lincoln doubted the const.i.tutionality of the measure, but he had no choice but to approve it. In foreign affairs, European powers had nearly exhausted their patience and, as cotton shortages caused ma.s.sive unemployment and suffering in the textile mills, were coming close to recognizing the Confederacy. In Congress the President had almost no defenders, and a few Jacobin members of his own party criticized almost every action he took. The prospects for Lincoln's presidency were not good. Edward Dicey, the perceptive American correspondent of the British journals the Spectator and Macmillan's Magazine, offered what he felt would be the verdict of history: "When the President leaves the White House, he will be no more regretted, though more respected, than Mr. Buchanan."

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

An Instrument in G.o.d's Hands

Whenever Lincoln's plans were frustrated, he reverted to the fatalism that had characterized his outlook since he was a youth. A delegation of Quakers known as Progressive Friends who visited him on June 20,1862, urging a proclamation to emanc.i.p.ate the slaves, found him in such a mood. At first he bandied words with them. Since he, as President, could not require obedience to the Const.i.tution in the Southern states, could he be more effective in enforcing an emanc.i.p.ation proclamation? "If a decree of emanc.i.p.ation could abolish Slavery," he argued, "John Brown would have done the work effectually." Then, turning serious, he acknowledged to his visitors that he was "deeply sensible of his need of Divine a.s.sistance" in the troubles he and the country faced. He had sometimes thought that "perhaps he might be an instrument in G.o.d's hands of accomplis.h.i.+ng a great work and he certainly was not unwilling to be," he told the memorialists. But he warned them: "Perhaps ... G.o.d's way of accomplis.h.i.+ng the end [of slavery] ... may be different from theirs."

I

By the summer of 1862, Lincoln felt especially in need of divine help. Everything, it seemed, was going wrong, and his hope for bringing a speedy end to the war was dashed. In the West the Union drive to open the Mississippi River valley stalled after the capture of Corinth, Mississippi, and the key city of Vicksburg remained in Confederate hands. In Tennessee, Buell ignored the President's orders to advance into the mountainous regions, and so failed to liberate the desperate Unionists of Appalachia. Federal amphibious operations along the coasts and on the waterways, which had resulted in the seizure of New Orleans, the sea islands of South Carolina, and Cape Hatteras, seemed barren of results-except for endless bickering among factions of liberated Louisiana Unionists who demanded the President's attention. And-most important of all-the news from McClellan and the Army of the Potomac was discouraging.

The lack of military success blocked Lincoln's plan to unite all the moderate elements in the country in a just, harmonious restoration of the Union. If there were any loyal elements in the Confederacy, they gave no evidence of hearing his promises speedily to restore their states to their place in the Union. In the North the growing body of antislavery opinion chafed at the President's slowness to act against slavery and complained that he was under the control of the proslavery border states. At the same time, his plan for gradual, compensated emanc.i.p.ation in the border slave states went nowhere; representatives of those states could not see why as loyal supporters of the Union they should bear the burden of emanc.i.p.ation, while the peculiar inst.i.tution was left intact in the Confederacy. Though Congress gave token support, in the amount of half a million dollars, for the President's scheme to colonize the freed African-Americans outside the United States, n.o.body, other than Lincoln himself, had much faith in this project.

Only McClellan's campaign on the Peninsula could break the stalemate, but Lincoln failed to reinforce the Army of the Potomac just as it came within sight of Richmond. He had promised to send McDowell's corps overland to a.s.sist McClellan's army, but when it was about to start, he diverted it to the Shenandoah Valley, where Thomas J. ("Stonewall") Jackson had begun a brilliant campaign designed to relieve the pressure on Richmond. Out-marching, outmaneuvering, and outfighting the Union forces in the valley commanded by Fremont, N. P. Banks, and James s.h.i.+elds (Lincoln's old Illinois rival), Jackson moved north toward Harpers Ferry, and there were reports that Union soldiers were "running and flinging away their arms, routed and demoralized," in "another Bull Run." Some feared that Jackson might cross the Potomac and threaten Was.h.i.+ngton itself. Even Lincoln at one point believed the Confederates were planning to take the national capital, and he wrote McClellan: "I think the time is near when you must either attack Richmond or give up the job and come to the defence of Was.h.i.+ngton."

That was, however, an uncharacteristic note. Most of the time Lincoln saw Jackson's campaign as an opportunity to cut off a Confederate army from its base and force it to surrender. He antic.i.p.ated that Jackson, after pursuing Banks almost to Harpers Ferry, would have to turn south, and he hoped to trap him on the way back. It was for this reason, much more than for a fear for Was.h.i.+ngton's safety, that he rushed McDowell's force to the Shenandoah Valley, where it was supposed to cooperate with Fremont's army. Lacking a general-in-chief or a chief of staff, he and Stanton took over the day-by-day-and sometimes the hour-by-hour-management of the Union armies that were trying to trap Jackson. The President gave specific, even minutely detailed, orders to McDowell, to Banks, to Rufus Saxton the commander at Harpers Ferry, to Fremont.

But his plan failed. Jackson's men retreated faster than McDowell's men could come up. Catching the Confederates was "a question of legs," Lincoln saw, and he urged McDowell, "Put in all the speed you can." Fremont was of no help because he advanced by a route different from the one Lincoln had ordered him to take and spent eight days covering seventy miles-while Jackson's men marched fifty miles in two days. Lincoln's strategy was too ambitious. To trap the Confederates in the Valley would have required the close coordination of three separate armies approaching from different directions-Fremont from the west, Banks from the north, and McDowell from the east-and the timing needed to be perfect to catch the elusive Jackson. Lincoln did not have the experience or the technical knowledge to issue orders that were precise, unambiguous, and authoritative. It was deflating to realize, after his heady experience at Norfolk, that he was a political, not a military, leader.

Jackson's exploits in the Shenandoah served their intended purpose of distracting Lincoln's attention from the major fighting on the Peninsula. Slowly and methodically McClellan advanced toward Richmond at the rate of about two miles a day, constantly complaining that he was facing overwhelming odds, that he was handicapped by heavy rains and impa.s.sable roads, and, most of all, that he needed reinforcements. On May 31 the Confederate army, commanded by Joseph E. Johnston, launched an attack on the Army of the Potomac, while it was divided by the Chickahominy River. All Lincoln could do from Was.h.i.+ngton was to send encouragement to McClellan: "Stand well on your guard-hold all your ground, or yield any only, inch by inch and in good order." Though welcome, the advice was not needed, and the army fought fiercely in this battle of Seven Pines (or Fair Oaks) and on the second day forced the Confederates back on the defenses of Richmond. In the struggle Johnston was wounded, and Robert E. Lee became the new commander of the Southern army.

With 5,000 casualties, McClellan cried out for more men, and Lincoln did his best to supply his needs. He ordered McCall's division of McDowell's corps to go at once to the Peninsula, gave McClellan control over the forces at Fort Monroe (up to this point commanded by General Wool, who was replaced), and ordered Burnside to make available any troops from his North Carolina expedition that could be useful. But plans to send on the rest of McDowell's corps failed. s.h.i.+elds's division, as the President explained to McClellan, "got so terribly out of shape" chasing Jackson in the Valley that it was "out at elbows, and out at toes" and was not able to move.

With an army of 130,000 men McClellan prepared to advance on Richmond as soon as the rains ended and the roads permitted the pa.s.sage of artillery. On June 18, when Lincoln gently asked when he planned to attack so that he "could better dispose of things," the general responded, "After tomorrow we shall fight the rebel Army as soon as Providence will permit." In private, he resented what he considered prodding by the President, and he believed the report of Allan Pinkerton, his chief intelligence gatherer, that "Honest A has again fallen into the hands of my enemies and is no longer a cordial friend of mine!" To newspaper reporters at army headquarters he spoke of the overwhelming superiority of the Confederate army and complained publicly of the way he had been treated by the administration. General Fitz-John Porter, one of McClellan's favorite aides, helped spread the view that the administration was ignoring all calls to strengthen the Army of the Potomac. He urged the editor of the New York World to raise the question: "Does the President (controlled by an incompetent Secy) design to cause defeat here for the purpose of prolonging the war?"

On June 25, before McClellan could launch his proposed a.s.sault on Richmond, the Confederates ripped into his army. He had completely misjudged the character of the new Confederate commander, considering Lee "too cautious and weak under grave responsibility-personally brave and energetic ... yet... wanting in moral firmness when pressed by heavy responsibility and ... likely to be timid and irresolute in action." In a series of hard-fought engagements known as the Seven Days' battles (June 25-July 1), the Confederates forced the Army of the Potomac to retreat back across the Chickahominy and down the Peninsula to take refuge under the protection of federal gunboats on the James River.

While the Army of the Potomac was engaged in desperate fighting on the Peninsula, Lincoln slipped out of Was.h.i.+ngton and went to West Point, where General Scott was spending the summer. Old and infirm, the general was still thought to have a good head for military matters, and he was perhaps the only commander on whom Lincoln could rely for disinterested advice. The immediate problem the two men discussed was whether McDowell's corps, now stationed at Fredericksburg to protect the capital, should join McClellan's army on the Peninsula. No notes were made of his conversations with Scott, but afterward the general prepared a memorandum for the President that implicitly criticized his recent attempt to coordinate the forces in the Valley against Jackson and recommended that McDowell's corps be sent by water to reinforce McClellan. The old general reminded the President: "The defeat of the rebels, at Richmond, or their forced retreat, thence,... would be a virtual end of the rebellion."

Learning of the surprise visit, a small crowd greeted the President at Jersey City on his return the next day and trapped him into making a few remarks. His trip "did not have the importance which has been attached to it," Lincoln a.s.sured them. Indeed, so far as McClellan's campaign on the Peninsula was concerned, it had no consequences at all. Nothing that Scott told him changed his mind, and he returned to Was.h.i.+ngton with more doubts than ever about the value of military expertise. He did not send McDowell's corps to join McClellan. Instead, on the day he got back from West Point, he ordered the consolidation of all the federal forces in northern Virginia, including Fremont's and Banks's forces as well as McDowell's, into the new Army of Virginia, and he appointed John Pope to command it. In a huff, Fremont declined to serve under Pope, whom he outranked, and went on inactive duty.

Behind Lincoln's decision was his growing belief that McClellan, for all his undoubted gifts as an organizer, would never fight a decisive battle to take Richmond. With painful anxiety he continued to read the telegraphic dispatches from McClellan's headquarters, with their repeated excuses for not advancing and their constant complaints. The weather, wrote the general, was impossible; rains made mud bogs of the roads and repeatedly washed out all his bridges. Wryly Lincoln observed that the weather did little to restrict the movement of the Confederates, and he judged that McClellan believed, contrary to the Scriptures, that the rain fell more upon the just than the unjust. Still accepting the information supplied by the detective Allan Pinkerton, the general repeatedly lamented his great inferiority in numbers, claiming that he was facing 200,000 men in the Confederate armies; but Lincoln and Stanton had more realistic estimates of enemy strength, compiled by Generals Wool and Meigs, showing the Confederates much inferior to Union forces. Over and over, McClellan asked for-indeed, demanded-reinforcements, and Lincoln patiently explained that all the forces at his disposal were already committed. But occasionally McClellan's demands became too importunate, and the President's temper snapped. He rejected the general's demand for 50,000 additional troops as "simply absurd."

McClellan bitterly protested "that the Gov[ernmen]t has not sustained this Army," and both he and General Randolph B. Marcy, his chief of staff, spoke ominously about the possibility of capitulation. "If I save this Army now," McClellan concluded a message to Stanton on June 28, "I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you or any other persons in Was.h.i.+ngton-you have done your best to sacrifice this army." These final sentences were so mutinous that the supervisor of the telegraph deleted them from the copies shown to the President and the Secretary of War, and they were not published until months later.

II

During this anxious period Lincoln worried incessantly. Stanton reported that he was "very tired." He had lost weight because he felt under too much pressure to eat meals at normal hours. "Well, I cannot take my vittles regular," he explained to Dr. Henry W. Bellows of the Sanitary Commission. "I kind o' just browze round." Mary Lincoln reported that her husband was getting very little sleep at night. He looked so "weary, care-worn and troubled" that Browning feared his health was suffering. When he told the President of his anxiety, Lincoln held him by the hand, "pressed it, and said in a very tender and touching tone-'Browning I must die sometime.'"

But in public the President tried to present an air of calm. "Maintain your ground if you can," he instructed McClellan, "but save the Army at all events, even if you fall back to Fortress-Monroe. We still have strength enough in the country, and will bring it out." New troops were needed, but Lincoln felt that "a general panic and stampede" would follow a ma.s.sive call for more men. Consequently he deputized Seward to go to meet with several Union governors in New York and urge them to supply more troops. "I expect to maintain this contest until successful," he pledged, "or till I die, or am conquered, or my term expires, or Congress or the country forsakes me." On reflection, Seward concluded that such a bleak message would be unsettling to the country and that it would be better to induce the governors to pet.i.tion the President to enlist more men. Probably n.o.body was taken in by the ruse, but the governors' memorial gave Lincoln the occasion to call up 300,000 additional men "so as to bring this unnecessary and injurious civil war to a speedy and satisfactory conclusion."

By this time Lincoln had decided that the kind of warfare McClellan believed in would never defeat the Confederacy. He had arrived at this conclusion slowly, but for some time his dissatisfaction had been growing. Back in June, for example, he had overruled the general after a doctor protested that because of McClellan's orders Union soldiers were not allowed to use the White House estate owned by Mrs. Robert E. Lee, the healthiest and best hospital location on the Peninsula. The physician asked the President, "Are our brave soldiers to die off like rotten sheep there because General McClellan chooses to protect the grounds of a rebel?" "McClellan has made this promise," Lincoln told the doctor, "but I think it is wrong.... He does not want to break the promise he has made, and (with emphasis) I will break it for him."

McClellan, who had never understood or fully trusted Lincoln, was aware of the President's dissatisfaction. It was easy to deduce Lincoln's growing impatience from his dispatches to the general. Many of them, though couched in friendly, reasonable language, were perhaps written less with the hope of influencing McClellan than with an eye to establis.h.i.+ng a record to show that the President had done everything possible to a.s.sist an insatiably demanding commander.

At any rate, in early July Lincoln decided to visit McClellan's headquarters at Harrison's Landing and to inspect the Army of the Potomac himself. The evening he arrived, he reviewed the troops, and thousands of muskets flashed in the moonlight as the President rode along the lines. "Long and hearty was the applause and welcome which greeted him," one lieutenant recorded in his diary. "His presence after the late disaster... seemed to infuse new ardor into the dispirited army." The dispirited commander of that army did not share their enthusiasm. McClellan claimed that the soldiers did not welcome the President and that he "had to order the men to cheer and they did it very feebly." Lincoln, the general wrote his wife, is "'an old stick'-and of pretty poor timber at that."

Shortly after Lincoln reached the army, McClellan handed him a confidential letter in which he outlined his "general views concerning the existing state of the rebellion," admitting that his ideas did "not strictly relate to the situation of this Army or strictly come within the scope of my official duties." His theme was that the war against the Confederates "should be conducted upon the highest principles known to Christian Civilization." That meant there must be no confiscation of rebel property, which was part of the stringent measure then being debated in Congress, and, especially, no "forcible abolition of slavery." To carry out this "const.i.tutional and conservative" policy, the President needed to name a commander-in-chief of the army. "I do not ask that place for myself," McClellan concluded modestly. "I am willing to serve you in such position as you may a.s.sign me and I will do so as faithfully as ever subordinate served superior."