A. Lincoln A Biography

Chapter 19
The Bottom Is Out of the Tub July 1861–January 1862

THE STRUGGLE OF TODAY, IS NOT ALTOGETHER FOR TODAY—IT IS FOR A VAST FUTURE ALSO.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Annual message to Congress, December 3, 1861

ARTICLE 2, SECTION 2 OF THE CONSTITUTION STATES, THE PRESIDENT shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several States, when called into the service of the United States,” but it does not identify the range or restrictions of the president’s military responsibilities. In the months after Bull Run, Lincoln began to take the role of commander in chief in new, dynamic, and controversial directions. Although he had held the title during the first four and a half months of his presidency, he only truly began to assume the position in the summer and fall of 1861.
Four of Lincoln’s fifteen predecessors—George Washington, Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, and Zachary Taylor—came to the presidential office with military experience, each having served as a commanding officer. Presidents James Madison and James Polk, neither of whom had military experience, presided over the nation’s two wars since the War of Independence—the War of 1812 and the Mexican War. Both Madison and Polk largely delegated to military leaders the military strategy and operations in each conflict. Lincoln, at the beginning of his presidency, followed this pattern, delegating this function to General in Chief Winfield Scott. After the disaster of Bull Run, he was ready to take up the yet-to-be-defined duties of commander in chief.
Lincoln came to the presidency keenly aware of his limited military experience. In the Black Hawk War in 1832, he had served for three months as a private and a captain. By contrast, Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America, had graduated from West Point, commanded a regiment that fought bravely at the battle of Buena Vista in the Mexican War, and served with distinction as secretary of war from 1853 to 1857 in the administration of Franklin Pierce.
Following his inauguration in March, Lincoln’s posture toward Scott and other senior military officers had been initially respectful and deferential. After carefully considering their opinions during the crisis leading up to Fort Sumter, Lincoln took his first steps as commander in chief in questioning some of the assumptions of his military leaders. Three months later, in the run-up to the battle at Bull Run, Lincoln challenged Scott’s Anaconda Plan, and advocated Irvin McDowell’s advance on Bull Run.
After the humiliating defeat, Lincoln turned his full attention to the military strategy that would carry out his national policy. Although he would, at times, vacillate between deference and decision with his new military leaders, as summer turned into fall he began to assume responsibilities that had never been wielded before by an American president. By early 1862, he would become a hands-on commander in chief.
“WARS, COMMOTIONS, AND REVOLUTIONS, we thought were for other and less favored lands, but for us an uninterrupted future of peaceful growth.” So spoke Lincoln’s Illinois friend Julian M. Sturtevant, president of Illinois College, in an address to the alumni of Yale College immediately after the defeat at Bull Run. Sturtevant offered a sober warning that Lincoln certainly heard. “These were the delusive daydreams of our national childhood … to be rudely dissolved by the stern, sad realities of experience.”
Immediately after Bull Run, Lincoln decided to change generals. At 2 a.m. on July 22, 1861, General Lorenzo Thomas sent a telegram to young General George B. McClellan, summoning him from western Virginia to Washington. “Circumstances make your presence here necessary.” McClellan would take the place of McDowell and serve directly under General Scott.
McClellan was only thirty-four years old when, the next morning at daylight, he rode on horseback sixty miles to Wheeling, Virginia, boarded a train to Pittsburgh, and from there traveled on to Washington. He arrived in the capital late on Friday afternoon, July 26, 1861, as a hero. His only victories up to this point had been in small battles in western Virginia, pushing out Confederate defenders in the state’s northwestern counties. But his conquests helped ignite efforts by Unionists in the area to repeal Virginia’s ordinance of secession and to form their own state of West Virginia. The Union was ready for a hero, and McClellan, with an erect, strong build and a handsome face with gray eyes and dark hair, looked and acted the part.


This photograph of General George B. McClellan captures the handsome features of the man called “Young Napoleon” who became the first military hero of the Civil War

The next morning, Lincoln welcomed McClellan to the White House to inspect his new general. Afterward Congress lionized McClellan and he was introduced all around. Lincoln invited him to attend a cabinet meeting in the afternoon. When McClellan told Winfield Scott, who was not invited, of the invitation, the old general became irritated at what he took to be a snub. He detained McClellan so that he missed the cabinet meeting. When McClellan later apologized to Lincoln, the president “seemed more amused than otherwise.” That same evening, McClellan wrote his wife, Ellen Marcy, “I find myself in a new & strange position here—Presdt, Cabinet, Genl Scott & all deferring to me—by some strange operation of magic I seem to have become the power of the land.” Three days later he wrote Ellen he was “quite overwhelmed by the congratulations I received & the respect with which I was treated.” Members of Congress “tell me that I am held responsible for the fate of the Nation.” McClellan was confident in his ability. “It is an immense task that I have on my hands, but I believe I can accomplish it.”
George Brinton McClellan was born to a family that traveled in the upper circles of Philadelphia society. A precocious student, George was educated in private schools before entering West Point at age fifteen, the youngest in his class. He graduated in 1846 second in a class of fifty-nine, but believed that it was only an injustice by faculty members that denied him finishing first.
On September 26, 1846, Second Lieutenant McClellan sailed from New York for Brazos Santiago, Texas, near the mouth of the Rio Grande. He began his service in the Mexican War in the Corps of Engineers, sometimes under the direction of Captain Robert E. Lee. McClellan advanced to first lieutenant, and his abilities and courage in battle marked him for future leadership.
After the Mexican War, McClellan returned to West Point to administrative and part-time teaching duties for three years. Discouraged by the slow rate of promotions in the peacetime army, he transferred to a position as captain in the newly formed First Cavalry in 1855. Here he undertook a number of assignments, including an entire year in Europe studying the tactics used in the Crimean War. He came back to the United States in April 1856, and set to work writing a report on his findings. Returning with a hundred books and manuals from Europe, fluent in French and German, and teaching himself Russian, McClellan focused in his report on the siege at Sebastopol and concluded with a highly informative manual for American cavalry. He completed his special assignments as a protégé of the activist secretary of war Jefferson Davis.
McClellan resigned his commission in the army on January 15, 1857, which surprised his army friends. He decided there was a bright future in business, and at age thirty he became the chief engineer of the Illinois Central Railroad at a beginning salary of $3,000, more than twice his army pay.
Lincoln first met McClellan through his work for the Illinois Central Railroad. In 1857, the main line of the Illinois Central traversed 704 miles from Chicago to Cairo. By this time McClellan, who had grown up a Whig, had become a conservative Democrat who blamed the “ultras” in both Republican and Democratic parties for the growing sectional conflict. In Lincoln’s debates with Stephen Douglas in 1858, McClellan actively supported Douglas and invited the Little Giant to make use of his private Illinois Central car for his campaign against Lincoln. Some believe that the first encounters between these two quite different men, in what McClellan described as “out-of-the-way county-seats” in Illinois, sowed the seeds of future difficulties, but neither Lincoln nor McClellan ever offered such a suggestion.
AFTER MCCLELLAN ARRIVED in Washington in the summer of 1861, the public was keen to learn more about this new military hero. He proved more than willing to oblige. He visited Mathew Brady’s studio on Pennsylvania Avenue and struck a military pose with his right hand pressed into his coat in replication of Napoleon. As small cartes de visite, the photographs were sold across the North. Newspaper correspondent William Russell and others began calling him the “Young Napoleon.”
“Confidence Renewed” was the title of an August 1, 1861, New York Tribune editorial praising McClellan’s first days on duty. McClellan saw his immediate task as reestablishing order in the capital. He would sometimes spend twelve hours in the saddle, chewing tobacco, rounding up military stragglers, clearing the barrooms, and wanting to see and be seen by both his men and residents. The soldiers started calling him “Little Mac,” and offered a cheer when he approached, to which he would respond by raising and twirling his cap. When he stopped to talk to soldiers, he pledged no more retreats, asking them if they were ready to fight.
Lincoln was eager to fight, too, and asked McClellan to present a strategic plan to end the Souths insurrection. On August 2, 1861, “Little Mac” submitted his ambitious proposal to the president. He wanted “to move into the heart of the enemy’s country, and crush out this rebellion in its very heart.” Rather than Scott’s slow concentric squeezing of the enemy, McClellan proposed a quick strike by a huge army that would win the war in one climactic battle. “The force I have recommended is large—the expense is great.” Lincoln’s reaction to this plan is not known. McClellan’s plan was long on reach and short on realism, requiring more than double the number of men presently in the ranks.
AS COMMANDER IN CHIEF, Lincoln understood that he faced a steep learning curve. Yet his whole adult life had consisted of self-education, and he welcomed the challenge. Just as he had become a self-taught lawyer in rural Illinois, he now set out to teach himself military theory and strategy.
A day after Bull Run, Lincoln wrote out the lessons to be learned from defeat, following his lifelong habit of putting his thoughts to paper as a way of guiding himself through a difficult problem. He listed nine action steps, encompassing everything from “making the Blockade effective” in the East to instructing General John C. Frémont to “push forward his organization and operations in the West.” Four days later, Lincoln continued on the same page with two additional items, one for the eastern theater—the need to seize Manassas and Strasburg in Virginia—and one for the western theater—the proposal to move on both Memphis and eastern Tennessee.
By November John Hay wrote, “The President is himself a man of great aptitude for military studies.” By now Lincoln was so present at the War Department that “many of the orders issuing from the War Department are penned by the hand of the President.” In December, John Nicolay observed that Lincoln “gave himself, night and day, to the study of the military situation. He read a large number of strategical works. He pored over the reports from the various departments and districts of the field of war. He held long conferences with eminent generals and admirals, and astonished them by the extent of his special knowledge.” Increasingly, military books piled up on the long cabinet table in his office. One of the books he read was Elements of Military Art and Science by Henry W. Halleck, a general and military theorist.
“The poor President!” William Howard Russell, the world’s first war correspondent, became aware of Lincoln’s trips to the Library of Congress.
He is to be pitied … trying with all his might to understand strategy, naval warfare, big guns, the movement of troops, military maps, reconnaissances, occupations, interior and exterior lines, and all the technical details of the art of slaying. He runs from one house to another, armed with plans, papers, reports, recommendations, sometimes good humoured, never angry, occasionally dejected.
Russell, who continually undervalued Lincoln’s abilities, believed it was unwise for the president to immerse himself in the details of military theory and strategy. Time would tell who was correct.
Lincoln understood from the beginning that his role as commander in chief was in service to both his political vision and military realities. Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian soldier and educator, wrote in On War (Vom Kriege), “The political objective is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and means can never be considered in isolation from their purpose. Therefore, it is clear that war should never be thought of as something autonomous but always as an instrument of policy.” Although there is no evidence that Lincoln ever read von Clausewitz, he would nonetheless appropriate the German theorist’s thesis while pursuing his own political objectives.
Lincoln quickly learned that his own military leaders were often the greatest obstacles to military policy. The professional military leaders, almost all graduates of West Point, were trained for the battlefield. Used to operating within a chain of command that did not include political leaders, and certainly not the president, many did not take kindly to Lincoln’s growing involvement in what they saw as their field of expertise. As Lincoln would become more and more a hands-on commander in chief, tensions with some of his military leaders would grow.
Lincoln began to insist that he as president was the first and last authority in setting military policy. Critics railed that he was expanding the power of the presidency, some going so far as labeling him a “dictator.” Perhaps the greatest irony, some said, was that thirty years before, a young Lincoln had joined the bitter criticism against “King Andrew” Jackson—calling him a dictator. Now Lincoln had selected the old general’s portrait to hang in his office. But it needs to be remembered that Lincoln followed three weak and ineffectual presidents. The odor of Buchanan’s indecision in the year leading up to the Civil War still stuck in the nostrils of Washington politicians, even in Buchanan’s own Democratic Party.
THE PROCESS OF RAISING a large army quickly proved to be much more complicated than Lincoln could ever have imagined. Never before had an American general commanded an army larger than the fourteen thousand men Scott had led in the War with Mexico.
A persistent difficulty in 1861 was not securing the number of recruits—the army was quickly oversubscribed with volunteers—but rather putting in place a workable military organization. A number of problems immediately arose.
The Constitution spoke about the army and navy of the United States as well as the state militias. Military officers who owed their rank and service to a professional military system of recruitment and review led the army and navy. The militias, on the other hand, were state home guards who often owed their recruitment and review either to the political officers of the respective states or to the person who raised the regiment and served as its commanding officer. To complicate matters, a number of units were ethnic regiments, such as German regiments, which often recruited men from more than one state. The problem, as Lincoln came to understand it, was how to coordinate a national military comprising the regular army and navy plus both state militias and ethnic units into a cohesive fighting force.
From the vantage point of the professional military, as well as that of Secretary of War Simon Cameron, the various militias too often operated by their own rules under the jurisdiction of local officials. From the point of view of state political officials and the leaders of the militias, the professional army and the Department of War presented needless bureaucratic obstacles to men who simply wanted their opportunity to fight to preserve the Union. The problem was exacerbated when state officials or leaders of regiments went over the heads of Scott and Cameron and made their cases directly to the president. Lincoln was always ready to cut through the red tape to accommodate regiments of all kinds. His typical response was to write Cameron, as he did seven times between May 13 and 26, 1861, with essentially the same message: “If the Secretary of War can accept the Regiments named within, I shall be greatly gratified.”
In his role as commander in chief, the president had to appoint generals subject to Senate confirmation. In an extremely politicized era, Lincoln acquiesced to the long traditional practice of appointing well-known politicians as “political generals.” He became amused and sometimes irritated by the process, but believed it was necessary in the beginning months of building up a huge army.
Lincoln allowed the custom to flourish for several reasons. First, governors and senators used their political influence as a form of military patronage. As a reward for political loyalty, or to accede to the wishes of political blocs of voters, influential leaders recommended men whose résumés consisted not of military experience but of political allegiance. Thus, Massachusetts governor John A. Andrew appointed Benjamin Butler, wealthy lawyer and powerful politician, to the overall command of the four Massachusetts regiments at the beginning of the war.
In May, Lincoln wrote to calm an irritated New York governor Edwin Morgan, a Republican governor he could not afford to upset. Morgan was angry that the “Union Defense Committee” of the city of New York was raising fourteen regiments “quite independent and irrespective of authority from the Executive of New York.” The governor complained that this action “cannot fail to result in confusion and serious disaster.” Lincoln’s answer was a masterpiece of diplomacy. He distinguished between a substantial wrong and a technical wrong in the question of jurisdiction. In his final sentence to Morgan, Lincoln summed up the attitude he had taken about raising an army. “The enthusiastic uprising of the people in our cause, is our great reliance; and we can not safely give it any check, even though it overflows, and runs in channels not laid down in any chart.”
Second, the appointment of a wide range of political generals helped foster the political allegiance of German, Irish, Polish, and other ethnic groups. On May 13, 1861, Lincoln wrote to Simon Cameron to recommend Carl Schurz, who had raised four German regiments in New York, for brigadier general. “I am for it, unless there be some valid reason against it.” A number of the ethnic political generals, like Schurz and Franz Sigel, became outstanding recruiters, expanding their ranks to great effect. Sigel was extremely popular with German recruits who proudly shouted, “I fights mit Sigel!”
Lincoln also appointed political generals for his own larger national policy. To lead the Union as a president elected by less than half of the electorate, he understood his need to court and include the opposition Democratic Party. An important way to do so was to appoint Democrats as political generals. In the first years of the Civil War, Lincoln accepted the appointments of Butler, John A. Logan, John A. McCler-nand, and Daniel E. Sickles: all Democrats. These and other Democratic leaders represented constituencies in sections or states, such as southern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, where the war was not popular.
As commander in chief, Lincoln quickly understood that a mass mobilization of troops was almost totally dependent on the efforts of state and local politicians. He knew he was riding a teeter-totter between professional and political soldiers and he needed to give equal weight to both sides to keep the army in balance. As the war moved forward, he believed the qualifications of soldiers would be quickly judged and won by their conduct on the battlefield.
LINCOLN SOON BECAME a frequent caller at George McClellan’s headquarters, in a capacious home at Jackson Square on Pennsylvania Avenue at Nineteenth Street, two blocks from the War Department. McClellan set up the first floor for staff offices and a telegraph office and used the second floor for his living quarters. He convened staff meetings in the morning and rode to the various troop encampments in the afternoon. On two occasions, he made surveillances from Professor Thaddeus Lowe’s hydrogen balloon.
Lincoln came calling to seek military news and talk strategy, while usually finding time to tell a few humorous stories. McClellan came to resent these visits as bothersome and the president as an annoyance. Like so many others, McClellan underestimated the man behind the droll stories: Lincoln, in fact, used these visits to size up his young general.
Less than two weeks into his new command, McClellan became convinced that his army would soon be under siege. On August 8, 1861, McClellan wrote a pessimistic memorandum, officially to General in Chief Scott, but he had aide Thomas M. Key deliver a copy on the same day to the president—without Scott’s knowledge. McClellan portrayed a dire military landscape that, without ever saying so directly, cast aspersions on Scott’s leadership. Citing “information from spies, letters and telegrams”—never identified—he wrote that the Confederacy was sending massive reinforcements because “the enemy intend attacking our positions on the other side of the river as well as to cross the Potomac North of us.” How large was this force? “I am induced to believe that the enemy has at least one hundred thousand men in front of us.” (Their actual numbers were closer to forty thousand.) After inflating the enemy’s strength, Little Mac deflated the capacity of the army he had inherited: “I feel confident that our present army in this vicinity is entirely insufficient for the emergency; and it is deficient in all the arms of service—Infantry—Artillery and cavalry.” A pattern of alarm and exaggeration was being set in motion. McClellan would defend himself by saying he was holding fast to his “one safe rule of war”—always be ready for the worst.
McClellan’s memo infuriated Scott. The aged general, feeling the brunt of the tactics of America’s Young Napoleon, wrote Secretary of War Cameron on August 9, 1861, and asked him to put him on the list for retirement. However, Scott wanted to hang on long enough to be sure that the young upstart McClellan would not be his successor. He hoped to anoint General Henry Halleck, the writer and editor of books on military theory that Lincoln had begun to read, to take his place.
Lincoln, ever the mediator, immediately sprang into action. First he walked over to McClellan’s headquarters to both confront and counsel his young general. After reproving McClellan for the content and tone of the letter to his superior, Lincoln asked him to retract the letter by the end of the day. In McClellan’s new letter he wrote, “I yield to your request, and withdraw the letter referred to.” Later, Lincoln walked over to Scott’s headquarters, showed him McClellan’s second letter, and asked the general to withdraw his resignation. Scott thanked Lincoln for his “patriotic purpose of healing differences,” but declined to withdraw his resignation. He told the president that he could not overlook or forgive his “ambitious junior” for his disrespect and for going around him directly to the president “without resort to or consultation with me, the nominal General-in-Chief of the Army.”
“The Presdt is an idiot,” wrote McClellan to his wife, Ellen, on the evening of August 16, 1861. If McClellan had publicly agreed to a truce, in his private letters to his wife he saw demons and adversaries everywhere—“wretched politicians” he called them. “Seward is the meanest of them all.” “Welles is weaker than the most garrulous old woman.” As for Lincoln, “The Presdt is nothing more than a well meaning baboon.”
Over the next months, Lincoln would spend far more time with McClellan than any of his generals. It was as if he saw potential greatness in this young man and hoped he could nurture his abilities. Lincoln encouraged him and tried to reason with him. McClellan, for his part, was never able to take advantage of the leadership and insight that the president was only too willing to offer. After a tea at the White House, he told Ellen, “I found ‘the original gorilla,’ about as intelligent as ever. What a specimen to be at the head of our affairs now!”
On September 27, 1861, the simmering dispute between McClellan and Scott boiled over when Scott complained he was the last to know of McClellan’s plans, and yet civilians in the administration always seemed to know. Finally, Lincoln had had enough. He wanted Scott respected for his long service to the country, but recognized that McClellan represented the future. On October 18, Lincoln accepted the old general’s resignation, effective October 31. On the morning of November 1, Lincoln appointed McClellan general in chief of the army, the nation’s top military post. That evening, Lincoln walked to McClellan’s home to promise his full support. “Draw on me for all the sense I have, and all the information,” he told his new general. “In addition to your present command, the supreme command of the army will entail a vast labor upon you.”
“I can do it all,” McClellan replied.
THROUGHOUT THE SUMMER OF 1861, Lincoln became increasingly concerned that the border states of Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri would join with the eleven states of the Confederacy. With their agricultural, industrial, and military resources, the fifteen states would become a much more potent adversary.
Lincoln was convinced he didn’t need to worry about Delaware, with its less than two thousand slaves. Actually, the tiny state was really two Delawares, a northern, Republican, antislavery Delaware, and a southern, Democratic, pro-slavery Delaware. Seventy-five percent of Delaware’s slaves lived in the Nanticoke River basin in the far southwestern corner of the state. Despite this division, most residents of this small state believed it would be suicide not to stay within the Union. Besides, Delawareans were proud of their heritage as the first state to enter the Union. When Georgia first approached the state to secede, the Delaware legislature answered back, “As Delaware was the first state to adopt, so will she be the last to abandon the Federal Constitution.”
Maryland, which was smaller in population than the states of Kentucky and Missouri, posed large strategic problems because of its location. It not only surrounded the capital on three sides, but on and over its land passed key railroad and telegraph communications to the North and West. Union sentiment abounded among the small farmers of western Maryland while the eastern shore and southern Maryland supported slavery and often secession. Baltimore was a tinderbox where both sides vied for power.
The phrase “an iron hand in a velvet glove” was probably coined by Napoleon, but it became Lincoln’s method of dealing with Maryland. He had seen the problems firsthand earlier that spring when the troops of the Sixth Massachusetts Militia were attacked as they traveled through Baltimore. From this episode, Lincoln had learned that he needed to work hard to cultivate and support Unionist sentiment in the border states. He could sometimes do this best by not overreacting to secessionist threats, which only played into the hands of Confederate sympathizers. He had gone to the limits of his iron hand with his suspension of habeas corpus, but he believed this strong action was necessary to keep open communications to and from the capital. Backward glances at Lincoln’s controversial suspension of habeas corpus have often overshadowed what many of Lincoln’s contemporaries saw as the president’s quite limited actions in Maryland. While members of his own Republican Party demanded that Maryland be made to pay for its secessionist sympathizers and Baltimore “plug uglies,” Lincoln believed that to err on the side of conciliation was the best path forward in the vol a tile state. When Postmaster General Montgomery Blair reported to Lincoln that “our office holders have been quietly installed in Baltimore,” Hay reported that the president responded “that if quiet was kept in Baltimore a little longer Maryland might be considered the first of the redeemed.”
Lincoln’s hopes were to be realized in the fall elections. Helped by Union soldiers who traveled home to vote and by the presence of Union troops on guard in the state, Augustus W. Bradford, an earnest Unionist, was elected governor, ensuring that Maryland would remain within the Union ranks.
“I HOPE TO HAVE GOD ON MY SIDE, but I must have Kentucky.” Lincoln was reported to have offered this observation early in the Civil War. If Maryland was the capital’s contentious neighbor, Kentucky was the keystone in the bridge of four border states that spanned from East to West.
All Kentuckians knew that the state had given birth to two sons who were now presidents. Jefferson Davis was born in 1808 in Christian County a year before Lincoln. As a boy, Lincoln moved with his family to the free state of Indiana; Davis moved to the slave state of Mississippi. In the election of 1860, of the four border states, Lincoln did the worst in his home state, receiving only 1,364 votes in Kentucky. Despite the election result, Lincoln believed that as a native son he knew this border state better than the other three.
Lincoln understood that connections of family, commerce, and slavery moved Kentucky on the currents of the Ohio and the Mississippi rivers toward the South. But Lincoln also believed that the long Whig tradition exemplified by Henry Clay, the political hero of his youth, would continue to hold the state within the Union. On June 14, 1861, as a monument to Clay was dedicated in the Lexington cemetery, spectators placed a flagstaff in the extended right hand of the statue and “the Stars and Stripes were unfurled amid hearty cheers.”
Kentucky was strategically valuable as a safeguard between the Old Northwest states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and the Confederate state of Tennessee. Furthermore, whoever controlled Kentucky’s natural boundaries of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, as well as the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers within the state, would immediately secure huge military advantages. Through the years, Lincoln had stayed in touch with Kentucky by subscribing to Lexington’s polar opposite newspapers, the now Unionist Observer and the secessionist-leaning Statesman. Lincoln also hoped to rely on his old friend Joshua Speed, his influential brother, James Speed, seventy-four-year-old senator John Crittenden, and Presbyterian minister and politician Robert J. Breckin-ridge for information and counsel.
Kentucky’s Democratic governor, Beriah Magoffin, wanted secession. He had replied angrily to Lincoln’s call for troops, but was outvoted and outmaneuvered, and was out of office by August. While the state House of Representatives proclaimed a policy of “neutrality,” each side, Unionists and pro-Confederates, hoped to tip the balance in their direction.
Lincoln was careful not to awaken any more hostility against the Union. The president spoke with Kentucky senator Garrett Davis, a strong opponent of secession, and told him that “he contemplated no military operations that would make it necessary to move any troops over her territories.” Aware of the chorus of Republican senators and newspaper editors calling for forceful action, Lincoln believed that respect for Kentucky’s public stance of neutrality in the short term was the best strategy for winning his native state to the Union side in the long term. He did this by his public commands not to recruit volunteers or to move troops against Kentucky unless attacked.
Behind Lincoln’s public posture, however, he appointed Major General Robert Anderson, the hero of Fort Sumter and a native Kentuckian, to the command of the new Department of Kentucky, its headquarters located in Cincinnati, just across the Ohio River. Lincoln also agreed to permit William Nelson, a former navy officer, to smuggle five thousand rifles into the state. A delighted Joshua Speed wrote Lincoln on May 27, 1861, “We have beaten them at their own game.” What Speed meant was that Governor Magoffin had secretly borrowed money to procure guns from New Orleans, but what arrived were out-of-date flintlocks. By contrast, Speed told Lincoln, “The distribution of the small number received has had a most salutary influence. … Giving strength and confidence to our friends.”
Lincoln’s stealth and patience paid off as Confederate military leaders grew impatient. Alarmed at what they believed were imminent Union military moves into the state, Confederate forces under impulsive general Gideon Pillow violated Kentucky’s neutrality by seizing Columbus in the western tip of the state on September 4, 1861. Pillow and his superior, General Leonidas Polk, a former Episcopal bishop, believed that from this base they could control river traffic on the Mississippi. That decision triggered a countermove by Union forces under the command of a little-known brigadier general from Illinois named Ulysses S. Grant. On September 6, Grant occupied Paducah, Kentucky, giving the Union control of the mouth of the Tennessee River, which flowed into the Ohio. From that point forward, though still officially neutral, Kentucky was on the side of the Union.
OF ALL THE BORDER STATES, Lincoln was least familiar with Missouri. It would become his greatest challenge. Missouri’s threat to the Union was geographic. If in Confederate control, it could bar river traffic on the middle length of the “Father of Waters,” the Mississippi. Missouri had been the staging ground for the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1806 and for the Pony Express in 1860, which would carry Lincoln’s inaugural address to California in March 1861. Under the stars and bars, Missouri could become the staging ground for incursions into southern Illinois, Kentucky, and Tennessee, as well as cut off communications with the West.
As in Kentucky, the outbreak of the Civil War found a Southern sympathizer occupying the governor’s office. Claiborne Jackson, a conservative Douglas Democrat, called for a special convention to vote on secession, but the delegates voted resolutely to stay within the Union.
The secessionists coveted the St. Louis Arsenal with its sixty thousand stand of arms and other military supplies. When Governor Jackson directed the mobilization of several hundred soldiers in the state militia, Union Captain Nathaniel Lyon, a fiery antislavery Republican from New England, confronted the militia on May 10, 1861. Fighting spilled into the streets of St. Louis, resulting in twenty-eight deaths and seventy-five injuries. The next two months witnessed continued skirmishing, not simply between Union and Confederate troops, but within the Union ranks, between military leaders General William S. Harney, commander of the Department of the West, and Lyon, as well as between political leaders Congressman Frank Blair, Jr., and Attorney General Edward Bates.
Lincoln, still relying on the advice of the Blair family, decided to make a fresh start in Missouri by appointing General John C. Frémont to head the Department of the West. Frémont, now forty-eight, handsome, with graying hair and piercing eyes, was the first Republican candidate for president in 1856. He met with Lincoln at the White House before heading west and reported that Lincoln told him, “I have given you carte blanche; you must use your own judgment and do the best you can.” Frémont arrived at his headquarters in St. Louis on July 25, 1861, just after the Union was defeated at Bull Run.
General Frémont did not get off to a good start. He rented an opulent mansion on Chouteau Avenue for six thousand dollars a year. He made himself largely inaccessible, surrounding himself with Hungarian and Italian guards in showy uniforms at the gates, while citizens and soldiers sought, often in vain, to see him. While Frémont remained in St. Louis, the impetuous Lyon picked a fight at Wilson’s Creek, ten miles south of Springfield, Missouri, and a long 215 miles from his supplies in St. Louis, against a Confederate force that outnumbered him two to one. Lyon was killed in battle, the first Union general to die in the Civil War. Frémont’s initial supporters, the Blairs, and Hamilton R. Gamble, a Lincoln loyalist who led the provisional state government as governor, wondered aloud why the aloof Frémont did not reinforce Lyon.
Confederate forces, encouraged by their victory at Wilson’s Creek, continued to wreak havoc across the Missouri countryside. Desperate, Frémont declared martial law, pushing aside Governor Gamble. Acting solely on his own authority, he issued a proclamation on August 30, 1861, that freed the slaves belonging to all rebels in the state. Frémont, by his action, was expanding the purpose of the war to include the liberation of slaves. Frémont, in far-off Missouri, suddenly had Lincoln’s undivided attention.
Alarmed, the president wrote Frémont at once. “I think there is great danger that the closing paragraph, in relation to the confiscation of property, and the liberating slaves of traitorous owners, will alarm our Southern Union friends, and turn them against us—perhaps ruin our rather fair prospect for Kentucky.” Lincoln asked, not ordered, Frémont to “modify” the paragraph. Lincoln saw that the measure about slaves could quickly undo everything that he had been attempting to accomplish in Kentucky and Maryland. He told Frémont that no commander, no matter how high his rank, could set national policy in the guise of military action. Lincoln reserved to himself this right. Though Lincoln was obviously upset, his conclusion was remarkably evenhanded in dealing with the senior military officer. “This letter is written in a spirit of caution and not of censure.”


These newspaper headlines broadcast the news of John C. Frémont’s proclamation of August 30, 1861, which freed the slaves of enemies of the Union in Missouri.

Frémont decided to send his reply in the person of his wife. On September 8, 1861, Jessie Benton Frémont boarded a train in St. Louis ready to defend her husband’s reputation as well as his point of view on slavery. After two days and two nights sitting up in hot, squeaking cars, she arrived at the Willard Hotel in Washington. Immediately upon her arrival, without an opportunity to bathe or rest, she sent a message to the president requesting a meeting. To her surprise, a reply came back immediately: “Now, at once. A. Lincoln.” It was after 9 p.m.
She was in a state of high tension as she was ushered into the Red Room. In a short while, Lincoln entered and, leaving the door ajar, remained standing without offering her a seat. Lincoln’s every indication was that he was not there for a long conversation. She handed him her husband’s letter, explaining that she wanted to be sure it reached him. He took the letter and stood under the chandelier to read it. Finally, looking up, Lincoln told her, “It was a war for a great national idea, the Union,” and that “General Frémont should not have dragged the Negro into it—that he never would if he had consulted with Frank Blair. I sent Frank there to advise him.” With that, Mrs. Frémont launched into her own defense of her husband’s actions, implying that her husband was superior to the president in wisdom, and arguing that this war could not be won by force of arms. Annoyed and offended at her words and demeanor, Lincoln exclaimed, “You are quite a female politician.” Lincoln would say later that Mrs. Frémont “taxed me so violently with many things that I had to exercise all the awkward tact I have to avoid quarrelling with her.”
Frémont, who had earned his initial fame as the Pathmarker of the physical geography of the West, seemed unable to find his way in the admittedly complicated political geography of Missouri. He stubbornly tried to hang on to his command by finally taking the field. But in a short one hundred days, Lincoln terminated Frémont’s appointment as commander of the Department of the West.
Governor John Andrew of Massachusetts voiced the sentiments of many in the North when he declared that Frémont’s proclamation offered “an impetus of the grandest character to the whole cause.” New England poet and essayist James Russell Lowell asked, “How many times are we to save Kentucky and lose our self-respect?”
Frederick Douglass turned his editorial guns on Lincoln for not supporting Frémont’s proclamation. “Slavery is the bulwark of rebellion—the common bond that binds all slaveholding rebel hearts together. Cut that bond, and the rebellion falls asunder. If the Government does this, it will succeed, and if it does not, it will not deserve success.”
Lincoln was not surprised by the comments of Andrew and Douglass, but he was astonished at how all of the New York newspaper generals, as well as politicians in his own Republican Party, rallied to Frémont’s proclamation. The proclamation raised Frémont to the stat ure of an antislavery hero in the eyes of many Republicans, putting Lincoln in an awkward position. Many Republicans were appalled when they learned that he had rescinded Frémont’s order. Lincoln’s correspondence with his friends demonstrated how divisive Frémont and his proclamation were.
Joshua Speed spoke for many in the border states when he wrote to Lincoln from Kentucky on September 3, 1861, “I have been so distressed since reading … that foolish proclamation of Frémont that I have been unable to eat or sleep.” Speed voiced his concern that “it will crush out every vestage of a union party in the state—I perhaps & a few others will be left alone.”
Illinois senator Orville Browning, usually a conservative on matters of slavery, wrote from his home in Quincy on September 22, “Frémont’s proclamation was necessary, and will do good. It has the full approval of all loyal citizens of the west and North West. It was rumored here that the cabinet had disapproved it, but I trust this is not so. Such a step would disappoint and dishearten all loyal men who are fighting for the life of the Government.”
Browning’s letter caught Lincoln off guard. Had he so misjudged the attitudes of conservative Republicans? Lincoln replied, “Coming from you, I confess it astonishes me.” Because of his long friendship with Browning, Lincoln took the time in his response to say, in private, what he never quite said in public. “Genl. Frémont’s proclamation, as to the confiscation of property, and the liberation of slaves, is purely political, and not within the range of military law, or necessity.” Lincoln then got to what for him was the nub of the matter. “You speak of it as being the only means of saving the government. On the contrary it is itself the surrender of the government. Can it be pretended that it is any longer the government of the U.S.—any government of Constitution and laws—wherein a General, or a President, may make permanent rules of property by proclamation?”
Lincoln’s letter to Browning is one of the best indications of his thinking in the fall of 1861. Even as his own power as president and commander in chief was increasing, he articulated his belief that no general, or president, could put himself above or outside the laws embodied in the Constitution in an attempt to deal with the vexing issue of slavery. Bound by the Constitution, he could not envision such a sweeping liberation of slaves at this time.
By the end of 1861, Lincoln had played his first hands in a contest with four border states as the prizes. He stood pat on Delaware. He undertook a high-stakes strategy with Maryland and, by alternating both pressure and passivity, allowed state politics to emerge into a modified Unionist posture. After initially underestimating the complexity of conflicting loyalties in Kentucky, his hands-off posture succeeded not simply because of the wisdom of his policies but because of the misguided hands-on policies of the Confederacy. Missouri, farthest from Washington and closest to Kansas and the frontier, became the most difficult hand for Lincoln to play. His tendency to stay with the leadership he had appointed made it difficult for him to change. But change he did when he nullified Frémont’s declaration of emancipation. Lincoln’s action cost him dearly in the short run, but he had come to believe that military strategy must grow out of the policies directed by the commander in chief alone.
ON A BALMY SUNDAY AFTERNOON in October 1861, Lincoln welcomed his old friend Edward Dickinson Baker to the White House. As Lincoln leaned against a tree on the lawn, just as he used to do long ago in New Salem, the two old friends talked of their days together as lawyers and politicians in Illinois. Baker had introduced Lincoln at his inauguration, but other than that they had seen little of each other in recent years. He had moved to San Francisco in 1852, ran unsuccessfully for the Senate, and then moved to Oregon in 1859, where he won election to the Senate in 1860. When the war broke out, Baker organized a California regiment. Lincoln offered to appoint him a brigadier general, but he turned it down, saying he would serve as a colonel, which would allow him to retain his Senate seat. As Baker rose to leave, he lifted ten-year-old Willie in his arms. Mary Lincoln gave him a bouquet of autumn flowers as a measure of their affection for him.
All summer, Baker—courageous but impetuous—had had a premonition that he would die in combat. In August, he had prepared a will and put his affairs in order. Before midnight on October 20, 1861, he was ordered to prepare his men for battle. Brigadier General Charles P. Stone, operating under orders from General McClellan, led 2,000 Union troops against 1,600 Confederates in a badly synchronized effort to cross the Potomac and capture Leesburg, Virginia. The Confederates, under the command of General Nathan “Shanks” Evans, counterattacked and forced the Union forces over the bluff and into the Potomac River. Ball’s Bluff, although a small battle, was a disaster with large implications. The Union forces suffered a total of 1,070 casualties, including more than 700 captured, compared to only 149 casualties for the Confederates.
As Lincoln was monitoring the progress of the battle in the War Department, a telegram came through announcing the death of Colonel Baker. In scaling Ball’s Bluff on the Virginia shore, he and his men were surrounded by Confederate forces and Baker was killed. Lincoln emerged from the telegraph office “with bowed head, and tears rolling down his furrowed cheeks, his face pale and wan.”
Of all the tributes to Baker in the Senate, in Washington, and in San Francisco where he was buried, the most touching may have been the one by Willie Lincoln. In what he called his “first attempt at poetry,” Willie wrote a poem that he sent to the editor of the National Republican.
There was no patriot like Baker,
So noble and so true;
He fell as a soldier on the field,
His face to the sky of blue.
BY NOVEMBER 1861, as the leaves began to vanish from the trees in Washington, the aura around McClellan, the summer sunshine soldier, was starting to darken. He was acclaimed in July as the rescuer of the nation, but by the fall critics from all sides—newspaper generals, politicians, and ordinary citizens—were questioning the Young Napoleon’s capacity to lead and fight. Lincoln wanted to support McClellan, but he, too, was growing impatient for the army to move south before winter. On a crisp Wednesday evening, November 13, 1861, Lincoln, accompanied by Secretary of State Seward and Hay, called on McClellan at his home. When they arrived, Ellen McClellan told the president that the general was attending a wedding but would return soon. After about an hour, the general returned. Informed the president was waiting to see him, he “went up stairs, passing the door of the room where the President and Secretary of State were seated.” After waiting yet another half hour, the president asked the servant to inform the general, again, that they were waiting to speak with him. Presently the servant returned to announce that “the General had gone to bed.” On the walk home, Hay spoke with Lincoln about what had just taken place, “but he seemed not to have noted it specially, saying, it was better at this time not to be making points of etiquette & personal dignity.”
Three days later, on November 16, 1861, Lincoln watched McClellan present sixty-five thousand men on parade before thirty thousand spectators. Criticism was mounting. With so many men in uniform, why could they not move from the parade ground to the battleground?
In December, during one of Senator Orville Browning’s regular visits to the White House, Lincoln asked the Illinois senator if he would come along with him on another evening visit to McClellan. Lincoln valued Browning’s opinion and wanted his judgment on the general. This was Browning’s first meeting with McClellan. He wrote later that night in his diary, “I was favourably impressed—like his plain, direct straight forward way of talking and acting. He has brains—looks as if he ought to have courage, and I think, is altogether more than an ordinary man.” McClellan once again made a good first impression, and Lincoln took no action.
THE TOPIC OF SLAVERY would not go away, even if Lincoln told Frémont to stop talking about it. Lincoln himself was continually thinking about it and by the end of 1861 began to test ideas and tease out the issue in his varied communications.
Lincoln believed that Delaware, with its less than two thousand slaves, might prove to be the best test case for compensated emancipation. In November, Lincoln presented his idea to Congressman George P. Fisher. They discussed how much compensation to provide for each slave. In the end, they proposed a bill that called for a payment of $400 per slave, or a total of $719,200 to Delaware. The bill called for adult slaves over thirty-five to be freed immediately. In the draft, Lincoln wrote that all remaining slaves would be freed by 1893, but then struck that date and changed it to 1872. The bill would cover 587 slave owners in Delaware. Lincoln told Fisher it was the “cheapest and most human way of ending this war and saving slaves.”
When Fisher introduced the bill in the Delaware legislature, the debate quickly turned not on the fate of slaves but on the political loyalties of representatives. Some of the bill’s detractors were nonslavehold-ers who characterized its proponents as “Black Republicans.” In the end, the bill was never voted on in the legislature.
Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts was determined to keep talking with Lincoln about slavery. Sumner believed the only course for the government was to proclaim a policy of emancipation. He had grown concerned about Lincoln’s slowness to act. Yet, Sumner believed Lincoln was “a deeply convinced and faithful anti-slavery man.” He was sure that before too long Lincoln would be forced to act.
Sumner, the chairman of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, also believed that keeping peace abroad was directly related to freeing the slaves at home. He struggled to get Lincoln to understand that an emancipation edict would cut off any chance for the recognition of the Confederacy by foreign nations. Though Lincoln seemed to be making no movement toward emancipation, Sumner worked hard to win his trust. He refused to attack Lincoln as many of his radical Republican friends were beginning to do.
When Congress reassembled in December, Sumner resumed his conversations with the president. After one particularly long discussion, Lincoln said to Sumner, “Well, Mr. Sumner, the only difference be tween you and me on this subject is a difference of a month or six weeks in time.”
“Mr. President,” Sumner responded, “if that is the only difference between us, I will not say another word to you about it till the longest time your name has passed by.” Sumner kept his promise to Lincoln in the White House, while in the Senate he kept building support for emancipation.
THE CONVENING OF the Thirty-seventh Congress only one month after the retirement of General Scott quickly became a forum for debate about the progress of the Union war effort. There was restlessness in the air. Lincoln was under obligation to give an annual message to Congress when it assembled on December 2, 1861. He had addressed Congress in special session on July 4, but that was a targeted message asking for support at the beginning of the war. The annual message, by tradition, had become a cobbling together of reports by cabinet secretaries, long on detail and short on eloquence. Lincoln adhered to this tradition in this, his first annual message, but he also offered his perspective on what was important at the close of 1861.
At the center of his address was his report on the border states. “Noble little Delaware led off right from the first. Maryland was made to seem against the Union.” After recounting the story of the assault on soldiers, bridges, and railroads, he rejoiced in the fact that at a regular election, the people of Maryland “have sustained the Union.” He was most pleased to declare, “Kentucky, too, for some time in doubt, is now decidedly, and, I think, unchangeably ranged on the side of the Union.” Finally, “Missouri is comparatively quiet; and I believe cannot be overrun by the insurrectionists.”
Lincoln was not sure yet how best to use the traditional format, in which his words would be read by someone else. He did not include any of the striking words that marked his formal addresses and many of his letters. But at the end of the speech, as he looked to the future, one could almost hear his voice. He recalled that, from the first census in 1790 to the last in 1860, the nation was “eight times as great as it was at the beginning.” He then predicted that there would be some “among us” who, “if the Union be preserved,” would live to see a nation of 250 million people. “The struggle of today, is not altogether for today—it is for a vast future also. With a reliance on Providence, all the more firm and earnest, let us proceed in the great task which events have devolved upon us.”
The fresh memory of the October defeat at Ball’s Bluff, as well as Lincoln’s decision to relieve General Frémont of his command, produced determination among returning Congressmen to exercise more congressional oversight over the war. Radical Republicans led the way, establishing a Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. Republicans controlled the committee 5 to 2.
Under the leadership of Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio, the committee called General McClellan as their first witness for a meeting scheduled on December 23, 1861. McClellan, in bed with typhoid fever, could not attend. In light of his absence, other witnesses began to paint an unfavorable portrait of Little Mac’s inaction.
Lincoln took an initial benign posture to the committee’s oversight. He gave the members easy access to himself and the War Department. He chose not to become defensive in response to their inquiries even when it became obvious the committee was pushing him for a more aggressive prosecution of the war. He may have become rankled as the committee started evaluating his generals—especially the Democratic ones—not on their performance in the field but on their political allegiances. But Lincoln came to the conclusion that the efforts of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, even when noisy or overblown, could be used to support his own positions as commander in chief.
BY THE END OF 1861, Secretary of War Simon Cameron was proving to be the most problematic member of Lincoln’s cabinet. Cameron had a dignified bearing: tall, with a high, broad forehead, abundant gray hair, and intense gray eyes. People sometimes initially regarded him as aloof but changed their minds as he proved himself a person of ability. He had succeeded in business and accumulated a fortune before entering politics and, so his critics said, turned politics into his business, where he made even more money. A man of energy and affability, he had worked with large groups of people in both of his careers, which suggested he could succeed at his admittedly large task of equipping the War Department to be the engine of a new kind of war.


Simon Cameron, former senator from Pennsylvania, served as secretary of war in the first year of the Civil War

Lincoln quickly recognized that the secretary of war had been handed the most difficult task of all. He inherited a woefully small department that was expected to support a huge and growing army. In April 1861, the War Department consisted of eight bureaus staffed by about ninety employees and used out-of-date systems of record keeping. Cameron, recognizing his own shortcomings as an administrator, welcomed Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase’s assistance. With Lincoln’s blessing, it was Chase who drafted the order on May 3 enlarging the army that was sent out under Lincoln’s name.
As the army grew exponentially, Cameron became a tense, perplexed executive who lost command of his own department. Disdaining the use of a clerk or secretary, Cameron seemed to run his growing department with records he kept in his head or his pockets.
Lincoln’s leadership style was to offer his colleagues both support and the benefit of the doubt. But by the summer of 1861, Lincoln was hearing grumblings about Cameron and his department from many quarters. He understood that Cameron had many critics for his past actions, but Lincoln was interested only in the present. The president wanted to weigh, not count, the criticism.
Lincoln took his time when it came to people. By the end of 1861, he decided not to simply fire Cameron, but to find another position for him that would save his dignity. Lincoln wrote a brief letter to Cameron on January 11, 1862, informing him that he was nominating him to be minister to Russia. The letter did not include any recognition of Cameron’s service as secretary of war. Cameron, expressing his feelings to Chase, his closest cabinet colleague, said he “was quite offended, supposing the letter intended as a dismissal, and therefore discourteous.” When Cameron expressed his feelings to Lincoln, he wrote a second letter, which shifted the initiative “to gratify your wish” and to express “my personal regard for you, and my confidence in your ability, patriotism, and fidelity to public trust.”
Did Lincoln take too long to remove Cameron? The critics had been nipping at Cameron’s heels since the summer. Lincoln’s loyalty was a strong character trait that sometimes overrode his judgment. The president refused to discuss his criticisms of Cameron’s shortcomings, and now he gave the secretary of war a second letter that could be released to the public. Cameron went to Russia, retaining a deep appreciation for Lincoln.
FOR LINCOLN, the last day of 1861, the coda to a dispiriting fall, symbolized all that was going wrong. The year ended with the central actors he was attempting to direct either unwilling or incapable of receiving direction. George McClellan, his main commander in the East, was temporarily offstage with typhoid fever. On December 31, Lincoln wired his two key commanders in the West, Henry W. Halleck and Don Carlos Buell, encouraging them to act in a “simultaneous movement” to support Unionists in Kentucky and eastern Tennessee. Halleck’s reply was not encouraging. “I have never received a word from General Buell.” Halleck said he was “not ready to cooperate” with Buell and that “too much haste will ruin everything.”
On New Year’s Eve, Lincoln received a visit from the entire Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. The committee, not including members who were familiar with military matters, was eager to strike a blow that would win the war in one grand battle. They looked down their political noses at West Point–trained professional soldiers. At the outset of the meeting, Ohio senator Benjamin Wade aggressively attacked General McClellan. Lincoln was placed in a difficult position. He wanted to be receptive to influential members of Congress, but he was determined to defend McClellan. As Lincoln tried to be a mediator, Wade raged, “Mr. President, you are murdering your country by inches in consequence of the inactivity of the military and the want of a distinct policy in regard to slavery.” Wade had succinctly named the two problems confronting Lincoln at the beginning of 1862.
Attorney General Edward Bates, who had grown quite fond of the president, confided to his diary, “For some months past (and lately more pressingly) I have urged upon the President to have some military organization about his own person.” Bates believed that if Lincoln had more and better assistants, and was better organized himself, he would be in a better position to command. “I insisted that being ‘Commander in chief by law, he must command—especially in a war as this. The Nation requires it, and History will hold him responsible.” Bates went on to complain of McClellan that he “is very reticent. Nobody knows his plans.” Finally, after an unusually long entry, Bates concluded, “The Prest. is an excellent man, and in the main wise; but he lacks will and purpose, and, I greatly fear he, has not the power to command.”
THE NEW YEAR did not bring any better news. On January 6, 1862, General Halleck wrote the president explaining that because of the state of affairs in Missouri he could not comply with Lincoln’s request to cooperate with Buell by ordering a force to Columbus, Kentucky. Four days later, Lincoln passed along the letter to Cameron, writing on it, “It is exceedingly discouraging. As everything else, nothing can be done.”
On Friday morning, January 10, 1862, knowing that a recovering McClellan was carrying on business from his bed, Lincoln decided to call on the general. The mild weather of the abnormally lengthy fall of 1861 had given way to 1862’s snows. The temperatures were not very cold, though, so Lincoln walked through a gloomy fog to McClellan’s home. When he arrived he was told that the general could not see him.


Montgomery Meigs, a civil engineer, served as quartermaster general of the Union army. He earned Lincoln’s respect for his management of the logistical necessities of equipping a huge new volunteer army

A troubled Lincoln then walked to the office of Montgomery C. Meigs, quartermaster general of the army, in the brick Winder Building, which housed the headquarters of the army and navy. Lincoln pulled up a chair before the open fire.
In 1860, Meigs had been a Douglas Democrat, not a Lincoln man. Standing an inch and a half over six feet, Meigs went to Lincoln’s inauguration on March 4, 1861, to hear what this new president stood for. He was surprised. As Meigs wrote to his brother, John, that evening, “I feared until last night that some weak shilly shally policy would prevail that we had a chief with no character a buffoon.” Meigs told his brother he believed he spoke for many, for he now recognized that Lincoln’s inaugural address “put into every patriotic heart new strength and hope.”
Lincoln came to Meigs’s office that day, as he had on a number of previous days, because he had found new strength and hope in this career West Point professional who had almost single-handedly put in place, after the disastrous summer of 1861, an extensive system of communications, purchases, and transportation to provision an army growing to a million and a half men. Lincoln was both growing in wisdom and suffering some of his most virulent criticism. In the midst of dealing with McClellan and Cameron, he appreciated the opportunity to unburden himself with a military man who talked less and acted more. Lincoln mournfully asked the trusted Meigs a question he had been asking himself for some time. “General, what shall I do? The people are impatient; Chase has no money and tells he can raise no more; the General of the Army has typhoid fever.” Lincoln was despondent. “The bottom is out of the tub. What shall we do?”


Francis Carpenter’s famous painting, First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln, grew out of his work in the White House in 1864, where he studied and sketched Lincoln for nearly seven months.