A. Lincoln A Biography

Chapter 20
We Are Coming, Father Abraham January 1862–July 1862

I EXPECT TO MAINTAIN THIS CONTEST UNTIL SUCCESSFUL, OR TILL I DIE, OR AM CONQUERED, OR MY TERM EXPIRES OR CONGRESS OR THE COUNTRY FORSAKES ME.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN TO WILLIAM H. SEWARD
June 28, 1862

PRESIDENT LINCOLN S CHOICE FOR A NEW SECRETARY OF WAR TOOK everyone by surprise: Edwin M. Stanton, the combative lawyer who seven years earlier had scorned Lincoln at the “Reaper” trial in Cincinnati.
Lincoln does not tell us why or how he made this decision, but it may be possible to tease it out. To be sure, Stanton received several recommendations, notably from Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase, who had persuaded the outgoing secretary of war, Simon Cameron, to join him in doing so. True, Lincoln had already appointed Republican rivals Seward, Chase, Bates, and Cameron to the cabinet, but the choice of Stanton, a Democrat, struck political observers as even more startling. Actually, the fact that Stanton was a Democrat may have worked in his favor. By January 1862, Lincoln believed that having a Democratic Unionist in his cabinet could help him persuade other Democrats to support the war more enthusiastically. Lincoln’s decision to appoint Stanton would prove to be a turning point in the prosecution of the war.
Edwin Stanton was born in 1814 in Steubenville, Ohio, and attended Kenyon College, where he was a classmate of Judge David Davis, Lincoln’s legal colleague from Bloomington, Illinois. Admitted to the bar in 1836, Stanton moved to Pittsburgh in 1847, where he established an impressive reputation trying cases before the federal courts. The upwardly mobile Stanton settled in Washington in 1856 so that he could practice regularly before the Supreme Court. By the outbreak of the Civil War, Stanton earned fifty thousand dollars a year.
Outwardly successful and gifted with talent and energy, Stanton had a combative manner in pleading cases that may have been due in part to the losses he suffered as a young man, which friends say darkened his personality. His daughter Lucy died in 1841 at one and a half, and his lovely wife, Mary Lamson, died suddenly in 1844, after only seven years of marriage. For the next decade, Stanton buried his grief in his work, establishing a reputation for legal skill and an obstreperous spirit. In 1856, he married Ellen Hutchinson, sixteen years younger, opening a new chapter in his life.
As an antislavery Democrat living in Washington, Stanton had watched President Buchanan stumble as secessionist drums grew noisier in the South. On December 20, 1860, the same day that the U.S. flag was lowered in South Carolina, Stanton accepted an appointment as attorney general in Buchanan’s lame-duck cabinet, hoping he could make a difference in preserving the Union.
As a part of the president’s inner circle, Stanton concluded that Buchanan’s White House was adrift in its policy toward the South. At this critical moment of transition, Stanton reached out to Republicans behind President Buchanan’s back as a way to prevent the nation from sliding into collapse. Stanton met almost daily with soon-to-be secretary of state William Seward to keep him abreast of the Buchanan administration’s actions and inactions.
When Lincoln finally arrived in Washington in late February 1861, Stanton welcomed the new Republican administration, but he did not have much hope for the Lincoln he remembered from Cincinnati. He attended Lincoln’s inauguration on March 4, writing to a friend the same day, “The inauguration is over and whether for good or evil Abraham Lincoln is President of the United States.” Stanton would go on to watch the first year of the Lincoln administration with a critical eye.
When George McClellan came to Washington in the summer of 1861 as the savior-general, he and Edwin Stanton, both Democrats, were brought together by mutual friends. A fruitful relationship developed. A few days before being appointed secretary of war, Stanton met with McClellan and promised his support. McClellan, who was increasingly distancing himself from Lincoln, believed he now had an ally in the administration.


Lincoln appointed Edwin M. Stanton, the lawyer who had humiliated him in the famous “Reaper Case” in Cincinnati in 1855, to be his new secretary of war in January 1862.

Stanton made a good first impression on many people in his initial months on the job. The Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War met with him on his first day in office. Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio wrote, “The political horizon has brightened” since Stanton had assumed his new position. Attorney General Edward Bates wrote in his diary, “The new Secy of War is a man of mind and action. He is well recd. by all.” Joshua Speed, who traveled up from Kentucky to procure arms for his state, wrote Joseph Holt, the last secretary of war in the Buchanan administration, that Stanton “accomplished in a few days what heretofore would have taken as many weeks.” Speed believed Stanton would “infuse into the whole army an energy & activity which we have not seen heretofore.” George Templeton Strong, as treasurer of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, an agency of the government that coordinated relief efforts in army camps, traveled from New York to visit with War Department officials at the end of January. Upon meeting Stanton, Strong was impressed. He was sure Stanton was worth “a wagon load of Camerons.” But Strong, who knew his way around Washington, confided to his diary, “He is the most popular man in Washington now, but will it last?”
The president was also impressed by what he saw and heard in Stan-ton’s first weeks. When Lincoln wandered over to the telegraph office in the War Department in the evening, he saw that Stanton, in his private office on the second floor that overlooked the White House, worked many nights until 10 p.m. Lincoln knew that Stanton was strong-minded, and could at any moment unleash his fiery temper, but Lincoln was never defensive around people who knew more than he did and were proficient at getting the job done. Lincoln told Massachusetts congressman Henry L. Dawes that Stanton’s energy reminded him of an old Methodist preacher in the West who would become so energetic in the pulpit that a number of parishioners decided to put bricks in his pockets in order to hold him down. “We may be obliged to serve Stanton the same way,” Lincoln drawled, “but I guess we’ll just let him jump a while first.”
Stanton quickly assumed total control of his department. He was everywhere, and he seemed to know everything. He would brook no interference from “Premier” Seward, who outranked him, and treated almost everyone else, including Gideon Welles, secretary of the navy, as beneath him. Treasury Secretary Chase predicted in his diary that the new secretary of war “would be master of his Department, and yield to no one save the President.” The developing relationship between Lincoln and Stanton would become one of the most intriguing inner stories of the war.
In the first months of 1862, the president became visibly energized by Stanton’s presence. He walked over to the telegraph office at the War Department more frequently. Stanton, whose honeymoon in office was quickly over because of his bearish manner that terrified many around him, treated the president with respect, even deference. Welles sized up Stanton as a person who was “fond of power and its exercise,” but this quality never put Lincoln off. Lincoln had observed that Simon Cameron liked to exercise power, too, but often for his own self-aggrandizement. Lincoln saw in Stanton what many others did not. He came to admire his intellect and energy, despite what Gideon Welles called Stanton’s “imperious nature,” because Lincoln understood that Stanton offered enormous gifts in the service of the army and the Union.
“ALL QUIET ON THE POTOMAC” read the military news bulletins McClellan issued with monotonous predictability from his headquarters in the winter of 1861–62. Politicians in Washington, now that the Thirty-seventh Congress was in session, regularly derided McClellan and his announcement as nothing more than procrastination. All the while, Lincoln was waiting for General McClellan to lead his troops into battle.
On January 12, 1862, Illinois senator Orville Browning stopped by the White House. Browning sensed that Lincoln was caught up in his studies of military theory and wanted to talk at length about military strategy. He told Browning he believed the Union armies “should threaten all [the Confederate] positions at the same time with superior force, and if they weakened one to strengthen another seize and hold the one weakened.” Discouraged with his generals, Lincoln told Browning he “was thinking of taking the field himself.”
Finally, Lincoln could wait no longer. On January 27, 1862, he issued the President’s General Order Number One. He ordered army and navy forces to prepare to move by February 22 against “the insurgent forces.” This order, which Lincoln talked through with his new secretary of war, was a bold and curious document. Why February 22? Lincoln never said, but the president, with a penchant for precedents, probably chose it because it was George Washington’s birthday. Lincoln’s order was ridiculed by his detractors in Congress for its grand simplicity, but no one could miss its larger point—as commander in chief he was ordering McClellan to prepare to march in less than one month.
Four days later, Lincoln followed up his take-charge posture by issuing the President’s Special War Order Number One. This brief order demonstrated Lincoln’s ability to perform a political high-wire act. On the one hand, Lincoln stated that an “immediate object” should be the “seizing and occupying” of Manassas Junction. At the same time, he deferred “all details to be in the discretion of the general-in-chief.” He concluded this second order insisting, once again, that the expedition should move “before, or on, the 22nd of February next.”
This time, General McClellan rushed to the White House to object. He asked the president if he could present an alternative plan to Secretary of War Stanton. Lincoln accepted, probably believing that he might at last be able to coax from McClellan an actual battle plan in writing. On February 3, 1862, McClellan presented Stanton a detailed twenty-two-page report that included both his plan and his objections to the president’s.
McClellan’s plan called for transporting troops by water down the Potomac River and the Chesapeake Bay to little Urbana, Virginia, a tobacco port on the south side of the Rappahannock River. From this base he would advance the nearly sixty miles to Richmond. McClellan’s intention was to draw the Confederate forces under Joseph Johnston away from a defensive line around Manassas in a march to protect Richmond. McClellan wrote that his advance “affords the shortest possible land routes to Richmond, & strikes directly at the heart of the enemy’s power in the East.” With Richmond won, McClellan envisioned a large circle under Union command, from Ambrose Burnside in North Carolina to Don Carlos Buell in Tennessee to Henry Halleck on the Mississippi.
McClellan’s Urbana plan had its merits. He believed he could seize the advantage by fighting on the ground of his choosing while using the Union superiority in naval forces. McClellan concluded with a plea and a resolve. “I will stake my life, my reputation on the result—more than that, I will stake upon it the success of our cause.”
The plan did not persuade Lincoln. Even if McClellan began his advance in February, the president worried there would be long delays before marching on the Confederate forces. Lincoln also expressed concern that McClellan’s plan would leave Washington vulnerable to attack from what he now believed were very capable Southern military leaders.
Lincoln asked five tough questions of McClellan, including, “Does not your plan involve a greatly larger expenditure of time, and money than mine?” Lincoln also posed, “In case of disaster, would not a safe retreat be more difficult by your plan than by mine?” Although addressed to McClellan, Lincoln’s questions were as much to himself, as he worked in his typical logical way to discern the way forward. He told McClellan, “If you will give me satisfactory answers to the following questions, I shall gladly yield my plan to yours.”
Lincoln, as commander in chief, in the back-and-forth relationship with his top general, found himself honing the foundations of his evolving military strategy. First, he believed the Confederate armies, not Richmond or any other fixed place, should be his most important military target. Second, he increasingly recognized the risk of overstretched supply lines. And third, he wanted to avoid leaving Washington vulnerable to attack.
In the end, Lincoln signed off on McClellan’s plans despite his deep reservations. His respect for professional officers still outweighed Lincoln’s growing knowledge about military strategy.
WITH MCCLELLAN’S ARMY of the Potomac still confined to its winter bases in February, Lincoln received some good news from Kentucky. On January 19, 1862, Don Carlos Buell, responding to the president’s urgent call for action, dispatched General George H. Thomas, a Virginian loyal to the Union, on a risky mission in eastern Kentucky. Thomas, a large, imposing man who expected steeled discipline from his troops, led four thousand men over treacherous, trackless mountains in winter sleet to achieve a victory at Mill Springs, Kentucky.


This Currier and Ives print depicts the bombardment and capture of Fort Henry and the heroic work of federal gunboats under command of Commodore Andrew H. Foote.

Lincoln, with his eye turned toward the West, with which he was familiar, began monitoring the movements of General Ulysses S. Grant. On February 4, 1862, Grant attacked Fort Henry, a Confederate earthen fort eighty miles up the Tennessee River from the Union headquarters at Paducah, Kentucky, believing that the fort was the weak point in the Confederacy’s line. It was exactly the strategy Lincoln had commended to Browning three weeks earlier. Grant approached Fort Henry from two sides. Supported by Commodore Andrew H. Foote’s four ironclad and three wooden gunboats, Grant won a decisive victory on February 6, 1862, dealing the Confederates their first significant defeat of the war.
Some of the Confederates defending Fort Henry retreated to Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River, which became Grant’s next objective. General Don Carlos Buell warned that Grant was about to take on a much larger force and should retire after his initial victory. In addition, Buell could send no reinforcements. No matter. Grant, unlike so many other commanders that Lincoln had come to know, never hollered for reinforcements. Instead, he marched his men twelve miles overland and prepared to attack. On February 14, 1862, Foote’s gunboats arrived on the Cumberland and began lobbing “iron valentines” at Fort Donelson. Within a short time, however, the Confederate heavy artillery punished Foote’s boats, gaining the upper hand. When word came by telegram to the War Department that Foote’s boats were absorbing a vicious battering, many were quick to say, “I told you so.” Stanton confessed his worry.
Lincoln and the military leaders in Washington knew little about Grant. Refusing to be beaten, Grant pushed on in bitter weather, finally taking Fort Donelson on February 17, 1862, with this famous remark: “No terms except complete and unconditional surrender can be accepted.” The Confederates accepted. Grant marched away with thirteen thousand prisoners, giving the Union a second strategic victory in the western theater in less than two weeks.
When Stanton read the “unconditional surrender” dispatch, the secretary of war led three cheers for General Grant. A clerk in Stanton’s office recalled that the cheers “shook the old walls, broke the spider’s webs, and set the rats scampering.” All around Washington, church bells rang and cannons fired.
Grant became an instant hero. Throughout his native Midwest, people started to call him “Unconditional Surrender” Grant. Newspaper stories of Grant at Fort Donelson, chomping on a cigar, prompted grateful citizens to send him hundreds of boxes of cigars. Grant, who began the war smoking his meerschaum pipe, switched full-time to ci gars.
Grateful for these victories, Lincoln promptly promoted Grant to major general, second in command only to Halleck in the entire American West.
DURING THE WINTER OF 1862, as Abraham Lincoln worried over his military leadership, his sons Willie and Tad played a game of counting sunny days while stuck inside the White House. Willie had recently received a pony, and despite Washington’s cold, wet, and mushy weather, insisted on riding his new horse. Either from exposure or from one of the frequent infections caused by unsanitary Washington conditions, Willie became sick with what was called “bilious fever,” a catchall term that could cover a multitude of illnesses. By the end of January, Willie’s condition improved and worsened with frustrating irregularity. His mother frequently stayed up with him all night.


Willie Lincoln, the third Lincoln son, was a happy, studious, religious boy who enthralled both children and adults.

On February 5, 1862, while Grant was engaged in the battle at Fort Henry, the Lincolns hosted an evening reception at the White House that would turn into a nightmare. Continuing to face unfavorable comparisons to Buchanan’s stylish niece Harriet Lane, the original First Lady, Mary had planned this party as a model of fine elegance. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper congratulated her for initiating “a social innovation.” Heretofore, social events at the White House had either been “state dinners” for the few or a “reception” for the uncontrolled many. Mary Lincoln’s event was for a select five hundred guests. The Lincolns’ oldest son, Robert, was home from Harvard and stood proudly beside his parents receiving guests in the East Room. Throughout the evening, the marine band “discoursed sweet music,” including the new “Mary Lincoln Polka.” Mary wore a new dress, jewels, and a headdress of black and white crape myrtle.
Sadly, Abraham and Mary could not enjoy the evening. During the day, Willie’s condition had suddenly worsened. Tad also became ill. First mother, then father left the party, ascending the central staircase to care for Willie, who was burning up with fever.
The party’s crowning moment occurred at 11:30 p.m. when servants unveiled beautiful tables of food and pastries prepared by Milliards, an upscale New York caterer. Models of a Union warship and Fort Pickens were depicted in confectioners’ art. Dinner lasted until 3 a.m. Leslie’s Illustrated pronounced the party “a complete success,” but guests never knew the anxiety upstairs.
A week later, on Abraham Lincoln’s fifty-third birthday, newspapers reported that Willie was recovering and out of danger. But his condition quickly became worse again. Willie asked to see his close friend, Horatio Nelson “Bud” Taft, Jr., who had “been to see him or to enquire about him almost every day,” and could always cheer him up.
Mary now stayed beside him day and night.
On Thursday, February 20, 1862, at 5 p.m., Willie Lincoln died. Mary crumpled in a seizure of sobbing. Lizzie Keckley, her African-American seamstress, whose compassion for Mary had become a healing balm in these difficult months, gently led her away.
Only three days after celebrating Grant’s second victory in the West, Lincoln was overcome by grief. He spoke softly. “My poor boy. He was too good for this earth … but then we loved him so.” He walked down the hall to his secretary’s office, and “choking with emotion,” said, “Well, Nicolay, my boy is gone—actually gone!” Lincoln, “bursting into tears, turned, and went into his own office.”
Attorney General Bates wrote in his diary that evening, “A fine boy of 11 years, too much idolized by his parents.” The dark cloud of mourning that descended on the White House in February 1862 would never really lift for Mary Lincoln.
The service for Willie Lincoln was held in the East Room on February 24, 1862, at 2 p.m. Phineas Gurley, minister of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, conducted the service. Gurley brought a message of consolation and hope. He began by identifying with the grief of the parents over the death of a young child. He then spoke words of comfort. “It is well for us, and very comforting on such an occasion as this, to get a clear and scriptural view of the providence of God.”
Gurley was a preacher who anticipated questions in his sermons. In this funeral oration, he addressed the delicate balance between free will and determinism. He told the grieving Abraham and Mary seated before him that sometimes providence appeared as “a mysterious dealing.” Gurley’s final counsel was to “acknowledge His hand, and hear His voice, and inquire after His will.”
Gurley offered Lincoln pastoral care at one of the darkest moments in his life. In less than a year, Lincoln had experienced the death of the charming young Elmer Ellsworth, his close Illinois friend Edward Baker, and now his son.
When the pallbearers carried the casket from the White House, they were followed by a group of children, members of Willie’s Sunday school class. Departing the White House, Lincoln rode in a carriage drawn by two black horses, accompanied by his oldest son, Robert, and his Illinois friends Senators Browning and Trumbull, in a procession to the Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown.
Life for Tad was now profoundly different without his older brother Willie, who had been his constant companion. He also lost their close friends Bud and Holly Taft. At the time of the funeral, Mary Lincoln wrote to Mary Taft, “Please keep the boys home the day of the funeral; it makes me feel worse to see them.” Because the Taft boys reminded her of Willie, they were never again invited to the White House, leaving Tad even more alone.
Mary simply could not deal with the death of a second son. Eddie Lincoln had died at three and a half in 1850. Although extreme public mourning was a custom of the day, the death of Willie left Mary inconsolable. She never again entered the room where he died. She sought to remove from the White House everything and everyone that could remind her of Willie. Her husband felt the loss of his son deeply, too, but as president he knew he had to resume his leadership of a deeply wounded nation. As Lincoln increasingly found himself comfortable with cabinet members William Seward, Edwin Stanton, Gideon Welles, and a few other trusted colleagues, he was less available for the often-painful task of helping Mary cope with her grief.
In the wake of Willie’s death, Lincoln forged a new relationship with Tad. He became the boy’s chief companion. Tad and Willie had often slept together, but now Tad wanted to sleep with his father. The young Tad would be present at official meetings, sometimes sitting in Lincoln’s lap or even perching on his shoulder, to the consternation of some of the president’s guests. The hardworking president kept late hours at his desk, and often near midnight, when he had finished his last correspondence or signed his last order, Lincoln would pick up his small son from under the desk or in front of the fireplace and carry him off to bed.


Abraham Lincoln forged a new, special relationship with Tad, the fourth Lincoln son.

ON MANY EVENINGS, Lincoln would amble across the street to Secretary of State Seward’s redbrick three-story mansion on Lafayette Square just north and east of the White House. Living with Seward in Washington was his son, Frederick, and daughter-in-law Anna, who frequently served as hostess because Seward’s wife, Frances, preferred to stay in their home in Auburn, New York.
After working with him for almost a year, Lincoln had grown to appreciate the company of the intellectual and witty Seward, a conversationalist with a thousand stories. To the other members of Lincoln’s cabinet, and many in Washington, Lincoln and Seward were an odd couple. As the two men lounged in Seward’s library, the secretary of state would take pleasure in his Havana cigars, while Lincoln did not smoke; Seward enjoyed vintage wines and brandy, while Lincoln did not drink; Seward was known for his colorful language, whereas Lincoln almost never swore. One day, Lincoln and Seward were on their way to review troops near Arlington. Traveling in an ambulance drawn by four mules over rutted roads, the driver, losing control of his team, began to swear. As the roads became even rougher, the swearing increased. At last Lincoln spoke up. “Driver, my friend, are you an Episcopalian?”
“No, Mr. President, I ain’t much of anything; but if I go to church at all, I go to the Methodist Church.”
“Oh, excuse me,” Lincoln replied, “I thought you must be an Episcopalian for you swear just like Secretary Seward, and he’s a churchwarden.”
Lincoln enjoyed Seward because they could talk openly about many subjects besides the war. With portraits of George Washington, Andrew Jackson, and Daniel Webster arrayed on the walls of Seward’s residence, their conversations turned regularly to the merits of American leaders. Lincoln had idolized Washington as a youth and still revered the nation’s first president. He had joined in the Whig excoriation of Jackson as a young man, but with the hindsight of age, and the different chair in which he now sat, Lincoln had come to appreciate Old Hickory. In a conversation about Jackson, the two men discussed how to manage the delicate balance of presidential power. Lincoln had long admired Webster for his eloquent enunciation of American political ideals; he often used Webster’s speeches as models for his own. In the course of another conversation, Seward argued that the reputations of neither Clay nor Webster would live “a tithe as long” as that of John Quincy Adams. Lincoln disagreed. He stated that he thought Webster “would be read forever.”
Mary became resentful of the time her husband spent with Seward. She still held a grudge against him for the Republican nomination fight in 1860. Even after Seward joined her husband’s administration, Mary derided him as that “hypocrite,” and a “dirty abolition sneak.” After almost a year in the White House, Mary saw her role as confidant and counselor being eclipsed by Seward at the very time she needed her husband more than ever.
LINCOLN’S IMPATIENCE WITH General McClellan increased as February turned into March. The Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War had been complaining about McClellan’s lack of response to the Confederate control of the Potomac both above and below Washington. At last McClellan decided to break this grip by sending a Union detachment to the upper Potomac to reopen the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad link to the West. In order to cross the Potomac to rebuild a strategic bridge at Harpers Ferry, McClellan had arranged to bring canal boats up the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, which paralleled the Potomac River. These boats would serve as platforms for the timbers to build the bridge. Just as they were about to travel from the canal into the river, sailors discovered the boats were six inches too wide to pass through the lock.
When McClellan, who had a reputation as an excellent planner, sent this bad news to Stanton, the secretary of war hurried over to tell Lincoln at the White House. After locking the door, Stanton read to Lincoln two dispatches from McClellan. Exasperated, Lincoln inquired, “What does this mean?” Stanton replied, “It means it is a damned fizzle. It means he does not intend to do anything.”
Lincoln, “dejected,” sent for Randolph Marcy, McClellan’s chief of staff and father-in-law. As Lincoln paced the floor of his office, he may well have thought back to his days on the Eighth Judicial Circuit when he delighted in examining new farm machinery. Always a stickler for quality, Lincoln would lie down under a new machine to “sight” it, to see if it was straight or warped. With Nicolay present, he now asked Marcy, “Why in the——nation, Gen. Marcy, couldn’t the Gen. have known whether a boat would go through that lock before spending a million dollars getting them there? I am no engineer, but it seems to me that if I wished to know whether a boat would go through a hole or a lock, common sense would teach me to go and measure it.” Lincoln concluded his remarks by summing up his feelings about more than canal boats. “Everything seems to fail. The general impression is daily gaining ground that the General does not intend to do anything. By a failure like this we lose all the prestige we gained by the capture of Fort Donelson. I am grievously disappointed—almost in despair.”
Lincoln met with members of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War on the evening of March 3, 1862. Senators Benjamin Wade of Ohio and Zachariah Chandler of Michigan informed Lincoln that reports were circulating that McClellan was secretly in sympathy, if not in league, with the Confederates. This was not news to the president, who held one of these letters accusing McClellan of treason in his vest pocket. McClellan had made no secret of his dislike for abolitionists and radical Republicans who wished to destroy slavery. The meeting quickly degenerated into a heated exchange between the committee and the president about removing McClellan. Lincoln asked Senator Wade if McClellan were to be removed, who would replace him? “Well, anybody!” Wade cried out. “Wade,” Lincoln replied, “anybody will do for you, but I must have somebody.”
The committee actually had two candidates in mind. They were divided in their opinion between Irvin McDowell and John C. Fré-mont. Lincoln believed that both of these generals had lost standing with the public by their respective failures at Bull Run and in Missouri. He did agree, however, when the committee recommended that the army modify its command structure to encompass four corps, each with three divisions. Although the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War was made up of a bunch of military amateurs, Lincoln knew that the professional army in early 1862, far larger than any previous army in America, had become too large to be commanded by one person. The meeting ended inconclusively. Lincoln was not about to be told what to do by a congressional committee, but, in truth, he, too, was also thinking about changing generals.
At half past seven on the morning of March 7, 1862, Lincoln met with McClellan at the White House. After speaking to him about the fiasco with the boats in the canal, he reiterated his concerns about the Urbana plan, which McClellan had yet to implement. The real purpose of Lincoln’s summons was to tell McClellan, more than two weeks after his February 22 deadline, that it was time to start his march to Richmond. He also spoke to McClellan about what he called “an ugly matter.” The president told McClellan that some members of Congress believed that the lengthened march of the Urbana plan was actually a strategy of “giving over to the enemy the capital and the government, thus left defenseless.” McClellan, who had been seated, rose and demanded that the president retract such charges. Lincoln, “much agitated,” disclaimed that these were not his ideas and said “he did not believe a word of it.”
To set Lincoln’s mind at ease, McClellan said he had convened a meeting with his generals to review the options between his Urbana plan and Lincoln’s plan to march on Manassas. McClellan, a politician as well as a general, already knew what the result of the discussion would be. His generals voted in favor of his plan 8 to 4, with most of the eight being junior officers appointed by McClellan himself.
Subsequently, the generals reconvened at the White House at the president’s request. Lincoln listened to the account of their meeting and their decision. He told the assembled military group that since he was not a military man he would respect the opinion of the majority. He advised Secretary of War Stanton, “We can do nothing else but accept their plan.”
Out of respect for the military, Lincoln once again went against his better judgment. But not completely. Without consulting McClellan, on the next day he issued two orders. First, Lincoln commanded that the army be reorganized into four corps with twelve divisions. He appointed four senior generals to lead the new corps. Second, he approved the Urbana plan on the condition that McClellan agree to place “in, and about Washington,” a force that would leave the capital “entirely secure.” McClellan was furious with the first order. He did not disagree with the concept, but he wanted to handpick his own men.
The next day, March 9, 1862, after all of the debates about Richmond or Manassas, news came that Confederate general Joseph Johnston had evacuated his lines around Manassas and had taken up new defensive positions behind the Rappahannock River. By shifting his line farther to the south, he was now near the position at Urbana where McClellan had intended to begin his advance to Richmond.
In a show of bravado, McClellan immediately dispatched some of his troops south to Manassas, accompanied by a collection of newspaper reporters. Everyone was astounded by what they found. The configuration of the Confederate defenses had space for at most fifty thousand men, only half of the one hundred thousand troops McClellan had long insisted would face him. They also found that some of the enemy artillery were nothing more than painted black logs—“Quaker guns.” These simple black logs had effectively deceived McClellan’s intelligence service for months. The findings made McClellan look foolish. Never again, so Lincoln and Stanton agreed, would they accept his estimates of the strength of the opposition.
George McClellan finally began to march his army on March 17, 1862. By the beginning of April, a remarkable sight was taking shape at the upper end of the Virginia peninsula. Near the towns of Hampton and Old Point Comfort, baggage wagons, artillery, and shelter tents arrived daily. On Chesapeake Bay, a massive armada of 405 side-wheel steamers, propeller-driven steamers, brigs, and barges was assembling. The ships ferried thousands of supply wagons and hundreds of ambulances. The armies and navies who fought on this same peninsula eighty years before at the battle for Yorktown in the Revolutionary War would have been amazed at the preparation for a military operation far larger than anything ever seen on the American continent. General George B. McClellan was slowly bringing into formation one hundred thousand soldiers for the long-awaited attack on Richmond.
McClellan came to the White House on March 31, 1862, to bid good-bye to the president, but really to seek his approval after so much acrimony between them. The next day, McClellan informed the War Department that he was complying with the president’s injunction to ensure that Washington was protected by leaving behind 19,000 troops, augmented by 7,800 at Harpers Ferry and Irvin McDowell’s 30,000 troops in the nearby Shenandoah Valley. Lincoln was aghast. He believed the force was too few and too raw and most of them too distant from the capital. On April 3, Lincoln told Stanton he wanted McDowell’s corps, slated to join the march to Richmond, to stay behind to protect Washington.
McClellan’s plan to lay siege to Richmond was patterned after the siege of Sevastopol in the final battle of the Crimean War in 1855. Just as England and France brought to bear their industrial might on the Rus sian fortress, he would bring the industrial might of the Union army, including naval power and heavy artillery, to defeat the Confederates in the fortified city.
McClellan’s forces advanced with little opposition until they approached Yorktown. Along the march he had encountered an elaborate network of trenches, which convinced him he was facing a large enemy force. The visible maneuvers of Confederate major general John B. Magruder’s troops near Yorktown further alarmed McClellan. The Young Napoleon, believing he was outnumbered, decided to dig in and bring up his enormous guns for an assault.
Lincoln, now visiting the War Department telegraph office at all hours of the day and night, attempted to encourage McClellan to move forward. He wired on April 6, 1862, “You now have over one hundred thousand troops. … I think you better break the enemy’s line from the York-town to the Warwick River at once.” The president, gaining in military knowledge, told McClellan, “They will probably use time as advantageously as you can.”
McClellan was piqued. He fired off a telegram to Lincoln with the usual litany of complaints—he was outnumbered and the president and Stanton had failed to supply him with enough troops. McClellan later wrote his wife, “I was much tempted to reply that he had better come and do it himself.”
Lincoln, not about to be put off by McClellan, raised his own ongoing concern. “After you left, I ascertained that less than twenty thousand unorganized men, without a single field battery, were all that you designed to be left for the defense of Washington, and Manassas Junction.” McClellan believed his march to Richmond was the best prevention of an attack on Washington. Lincoln’s worry was that, while McClellan was leading his large Union army slowly up the Virginia peninsula to capture a well-defended Richmond, the Confederates could, with a relatively small army, march quickly to capture a thinly defended Washington.
Lincoln and Stanton were so furious with McClellan’s dithering that they offered the command of the Army of the Potomac to Ethan Allen Hitchcock, grandson of Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen. Hitchcock, a curious character with a philosophical mind (he read Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in German) had become Stanton’s adviser in February. Now the president and the secretary of war asked him to assume command of the Army of the Potomac. He said he was too old, nearly sixty-four, and turned them down.
By early May, McClellan finally said he was ready to attack York-town with his heavy guns. Vastly overemphasizing the size of the enemy before him, which probably was only eleven thousand when he first approached Yorktown, his dawdling had allowed the Confederates to concentrate their defense. Lincoln wrote to McClellan, “Your call for Parrott guns from Washington alarms me, chiefly because it argues indefinite procrastination. Is anything to be done?”
McClellan now received a surprise. As he prepared to attack with his guns, to be followed by an infantry assault, Confederate general Joseph Johnston, under the cover of darkness on the night of May 3, 1862, executed a strategic retreat with his troops to help defend Richmond. Just like at Manassas, the overly cautious McClellan found no one to fight. The South laughed that he had been tricked again. The North was not laughing.
On May 6, 1862, Lincoln, with Stanton and Treasury Secretary Chase at his side, decided to travel to Fortress Monroe to discover for himself exactly what General McClellan was or was not doing.
Two months before, a Confederate ironclad ship, the CSS Virginia, had steamed down the Elizabeth River into Hampton Roads to attack the wooden-sided Union ships set up there. The Virginia had rammed and sunk the twenty-four-gun USS Cumberland and then fired on the fifty-gun frigate USS Congress. The next day, the Union ironclad USS Monitor arrived on the scene. The two slow-moving ships could not damage each other. The dramatic encounter proved in two days the superiority of iron over wood. When Lincoln arrived, the Virginia was still lurking inside the Norfolk harbor. When Lincoln discovered the general had still done nothing to remove the Virginia, he threw his hat to the ground.
The next day, Lincoln took charge of a plan to capture Norfolk. Soldiers and sailors watched in amazement as Lincoln commandeered a boat to select the best landing site to launch his attack. He ordered gunboats to attack the Confederate shore batteries at Sewall’s Point.
On May 9, 1862, the Confederates abandoned Norfolk, blowing up the Virginia so that it could not be captured. A soldier aboard one of the navy transports watched Lincoln directing reinforcements to the front. “Abe was rushing about, hollering to someone on the wharf—dressed in a black suit with a very seedy crepe on his hat, and hanging over the railing, he looked like some hoosier just starting for home from California, with store clothes and a biled shirt on.” An officer aboard the Monitor wrote, “It is extremely fortunate that the President came down as he did—he seems to have infused new life into everything.” The president’s action began “stirring up dry bones.” Salmon Chase wrote to his daughter, “So 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 whole coast is now virtually ours.”
While at Fortress Monroe, Lincoln met Union general Ambrose Burnside, who had come up from North Carolina. On May 11, 1862, Lincoln invited Burnside to sail back with him on the USS Baltimore. Once in Washington, Burnside found himself responding to a whole battery of questions from the president. When the general returned to the Willard Hotel, he offered his initial assessment of the president to members of his staff. “If there is an honest man on the face of the earth, Lincoln is one.”
Also on May 11, 1862, Lincoln removed McClellan as general in chief, relieving him of his overall command. Lincoln’s rationale was that Little Mac could not do it all. He placed Henry Halleck in charge of the armies in the West, and John C. Frémont in charge of a new Mountain Division, consisting of western Virginia and eastern Tennessee. McClellan retained his command of the Army of the Potomac. Inside the War Department, there was debate about whether Lincoln had gracefully let McClellan down, or challenged him that if he succeeded in taking Richmond his command would be restored.
Even so, Lincoln’s orders further strengthened his own role as commander in chief. Henceforth, Halleck, Frémont, and McClellan would be equals reporting through Stanton to the president. Lincoln had come to trust Stanton and could work with him in ways he never could with Cameron. The hospitable Lincoln and his demanding secretary of war became a formidable team.
BY THE MIDDLE OF MAY, under the command of the freshly demoted George McClellan, the Army of the Potomac’s 105,000 men could see the church spires of Richmond as they approached the city’s gates. Sixty thousand Confederate troops defended Richmond, yet McClellan called for reinforcements, complaining he was fighting twice that number. For a while there was a standoff, but on May 31, 1862, Joseph Johnston unleashed an attack on McClellan south of the Chickahominy River. The ensuing battle of Seven Pines, or Fair Oaks, devolved into chaotic skirmishes in confusing terrain. Johnston was severely wounded and replaced by Robert E. Lee. Two days of blooding fighting resulted in a tactical draw.
McClellan was delighted when Lee, Jefferson Davis’s military adviser, replaced the veteran Johnston. McClellan wrote Lincoln, “I prefer Lee to Johnston—the former is too cautious & weak under grave responsibility—personally brave & energetic to a fault, he yet is wanting in moral firmness when pressed by heavy responsibility & is likely to be timid and irresolute in action.” Lincoln likely wondered whether McClellan had misjudged an opponent once again.
The answer came soon. General Robert E. Lee, whom Lincoln had asked to assume command of the entire Union army at the beginning of the war, was now in charge of the Confederate forces defending Richmond. He quickly proved to be a formidable commander. He directed General Stonewall Jackson into the Shenandoah Valley. Jackson was a risk taker who could move his often-outnumbered troops to take advantage of an opponent’s weakness.
Lincoln, sensing the danger of Jackson, implored McClellan to instruct his senior generals to trap the wily Jackson in the valley. At the same time, he sent out his own orders to the division commanders from the telegraph office. But while the Union forces slowly came into position in a pincer move, Jackson’s men stayed steps ahead by marching hard to escape the potential trap. Jackson won small battles at Front Royal, Winchester, Cross Keys, and Port Republic, frustrating the Union forces. He then joined Lee in the defense of Richmond.
In June, Lee led a counteroffensive, the Seven Days Battles, in which McClellan was forced to retreat from his position four miles east of Richmond. If McClellan thought he knew Lee, the Virginia general clearly remembered McClellan from Mexico. Convinced that McClellan would be tied to his guns, Lee risked leaving only twenty-five thousand troops to defend Richmond, and prepared to attack McClellan north of the Chickahominy. Not successful the first day, he attacked again and again. In a series of six battles in seven days, McClellan’s peninsular campaign came to an end. By July 4, 1862, one year after Lincoln’s special message to Congress, it had become clear to the president and the nation that McClellan’s grand opportunity had been lost. Richmond had survived, and Lee and Jackson and their armies were on the rise.
Lincoln determined to find out firsthand what went wrong. He arrived by steamer at Fort Harrison, at the eastern tip of the Virginia peninsula, on July 8, 1862. McClellan came on board the steamer Ariel at Harrison’s Landing and handed Lincoln a long letter, resuming a conversation he had started with the president before the Seven Days Battles. Admitting that he was going beyond his duties as an army commander but believing that the war had reached a crucial stage, McClellan wrote, “The Government must determine upon a civil and military policy, covering the whole ground of our national trouble.”
McClellan’s letter was partly a response to whispers in Washington debating the need for a second Confiscation Act. The first, signed by Lincoln on August 6, 1861, permitted the seizure of any property, including slaves, being used by Confederates to support their insurrection. Lincoln, after negotiating with Congress, had signed it because it did not explicitly free all the slaves. The rumored second act would go further. “It should not be a war looking to the subjugation of the [Southern] people,” McClellan lectured. “Neither confiscation of property … or the forcible abolition of slavery should be contemplated.”
Lincoln, who had not met with McClellan in three months, received the letter, thanked him, and said nothing. The next day, discouraged, McClellan wrote his wife, Ellen, of the visit to “His Excellency.” He said he doubted Lincoln “profited” from the call. The president “really seems quite incapable of rising to the height of the merits of the question & the magnitude of the crisis,” he wrote.
But Lincoln did understand the enormity of the crisis. Whereas he might have agreed with McClellan six months earlier, he had changed his point of view. Three weeks later, Lincoln wrote as much in a letter to Cuthbert Bullitt, a Southern Unionist in New Orleans. He asked a series of rhetorical questions. “What would you do in my position? Would you drop the war where it is? Or, would you prosecute it in the future, with elder-stalk squirts, charged with rose water?” Lincoln strongly implied his answer in asking, “Would you deal lighter blows than heavier ones?” Three days later, in the same spirit, Lincoln wrote August Belmont, a prominent Northern Democrat. “This government cannot much longer play a game in which it stakes all, and its enemies stake nothing.” Lincoln had reached a crucial decision in July 1862, about the nature of the war and new means to win the peace.
IN EARLY JUNE, Abraham and Mary Lincoln made an unannounced trip from the White House to a residence known as the Soldiers’ Home. Located on shaded hills three miles north of the White House along the road to Silver Spring, Maryland, the Soldiers’ Home was only a half-hour carriage ride from the White House. The seclusion of its three hundred acres was a welcome relief from the frenetic pace, humidity, and stench that constantly enveloped the Executive Mansion in Washington. Abraham and Mary would stay until early November, and would return the following two summers, living there a total of thirteen months, or more than one-quarter of Lincoln’s presidency.
What came to be called the Soldiers’ Home was built in 1842 by Washington banker George W. Riggs. In 1851, it became an asylum for disabled veterans of previous wars who could not provide for themselves. James Buchanan became the first president to stay at the Soldiers’ Home. He probably suggested it to the Lincolns as a retreat. Both Mary and Abraham visited the Soldiers’ Home separately in the days immediately following the inauguration on March 4, 1861, but the events leading up to Bull Run postponed a move in 1861 to the summer of 1862. In their summers there, the Lincolns may have stayed in more than one of the cottages, including the Riggs family home, a country house with a large porch built in the English Gothic Revival style whose popularity had begun in England in the 1830s.


In 1862, the Soldiers’ Home became a summer retreat for the Lincoln family. Here Lincoln found space and time for mental refreshment as well as for entertaining close friends.

After Willie’s death, Mary especially enjoyed getting away from busy Washington. Benjamin B. French, commissioner of public buildings, visited the White House on Monday, June 16, 1862, just as Mary was getting ready to depart for the Soldiers’ Home. French wrote in his diary, “She seemed to be in excellent spirits, and delighted at getting out of the city.” One reason she surely was delighted was that the retreat provided more of an opportunity to be alone with her husband and Tad. Robert joined them from Harvard at the end of June. Mary and Abraham read to each other, and, whenever she could, she encouraged him to accompany her on late-afternoon carriage rides. In July, in a letter to a friend, she wrote, “We are truly delighted, with this retreat, the drives & walks around here are delightful, & each day, brings its visitors. Then, too, our boy Robert, is with us.”
As a daily commuter, Lincoln rose early in the summer months and was on his way into Washington well before 8 a.m. One of the soldiers who was responsible for escorting the president, Captain David Derickson, reported that he would arrive at the cottage many days about 6:30 a.m. to find Lincoln “reading the Bible or some work on the art of war.” Although he would accomplish presidential work at the Soldiers’ Home, Lincoln also welcomed private time for reading and reflection in this retreat setting. While on duty at the White House, Lincoln regaled visitors with stories and humor, but when off duty at the Soldiers’ Home he much preferred, guests recalled, to read from Shakespeare and several of his other favorite poets. In the company of his secretary John Hay, a graduate of Brown College who had a literary flair, Lincoln would read for hours from Macbeth or Hamlet or Richard II. In Springfield, Hay had heard Lincoln read the outburst of despair in the third act of Richard II; he heard it again at the White House, and now at the Soldiers’ Home.
For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison ’d by their wives: some sleeping kill’d;
All murder’d:
Lincoln seemed drawn to those plays of Shakespeare that spoke of an England split apart by civil war and of men driven by overwhelming ambition. The president’s young assistant reported that Lincoln “read Shakespeare more than all other writers together.”
AT THE END OF JUNE 1862, at a time of great Northern discouragement, Lincoln asked his secretary of state to sound out confidentially the state governors about the need to call up more troops. Worried that such a call might produce a panic across the North, Lincoln nonetheless told Seward of his resolve. “I expect to maintain this contest until successful, or till I die, or am conquered, or my term expires or Congress or the country forsakes me.” On July 1, a few days before the nation celebrated its eighty-sixth birthday, Lincoln issued a call for another three hundred thousand three-year volunteers.
Quaker abolitionist James Sloan Gibbons, a businessman who was one of the lead supporters of the National Anti-Slavery Standard, wrote a poem that was published anonymously in the New York Evening Post on July 16, 1862. The poem struck a chord with the public. No less than eight composers quickly set it to music. By the early fall the poem was being sung by choruses at Union rallies and by the public in town squares. The song expressed the Union’s heart in music.
We are coming, Father Abraham, 300,000 more,
From Mississippi’s winding stream and from New England’s shore.
We leave our plows and workshops, our wives and children dear,
With hearts too full for utterance, with but a silent tear.
We dare not look behind us but steadfastly before.
We are coming, Father Abraham, 300,000 more!
CHORUS: We are coming, we are coming our Union to restore, We are coming, Father Abraham, 300,000 more!
The poem elicited such a popular response because it voiced what everyone was saying. The last stanza begins, “You have called us and we’re coming.” The growing esteem of the Union soldiers and sailors for their commander in chief was spreading to citizens around the country.
Through the years, people had affixed nicknames to Lincoln in admiration. The earliest moniker, “Honest Abe,” stuck because it captured the essential character of Lincoln in his midtwenties. Lincoln had endured the constant harangue that he was the “Black Republican” in his debates with Stephen Douglas, and again in the presidential campaign of 1860. This latest name, “Father Abraham,” was a signpost that by the middle of 1862, appreciation for Lincoln had moved beyond an admiration reserved for an American president to an unusual affection bestowed upon a loving father figure by his grateful citizens.
IN THE SUMMER quiet at the Soldiers’ Home, Lincoln brooded about slavery. Though personally he had long been opposed to slavery, as president he felt that in his oath he was constrained by the Constitution not to interfere with it where it already existed. He understood that taking this principled position had put him at odds with many leaders of his own party.
Lincoln’s viewpoint on slavery was not so different from those of his critics, whose passion against slavery he admired. As he had told Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner at the end of 1861, timing was everything. Since signing the original Confiscation Act, he had tried to shift the burden of responsibility from the federal government to the states in a plan of compensated emancipation. He had high hopes for his trial plan in Delaware, but it was not going anywhere. Turning back to the ideas of his mentor, Henry Clay, he had advanced the idea of colonization as a solution to the problem of strife between whites and blacks. Colonization was a plan to settle African-Americans outside the United States. He floated this idea in his December 1861 annual message to Congress, with little response.
In early March 1862, Lincoln sent to Congress a bill providing for a federal-state emancipation plan similar to his Delaware plan. In order to soothe fears of white Northerners, he again coupled emancipation with colonization. Whereas in his annual message he had assured Congress that he would not resort to any “radical” or “revolutionary” measures, this time he warned them that if compensated emancipation did not work, he would be free to use means “such as seem indispensable, or may obviously promise great efficiency towards ending the struggle.” This message created an uproar, but Sumner and Greeley praised it. Henry J. Raymond, editor of the New York Times, wrote Lincoln to complain that the plan would cost too much. The president replied that the cost of fighting the war for seven to eight days would pay entirely the price of emancipating the slaves in the four border states. On March 10, he met with border state representatives at the White House who, to his discouragement, almost to a person opposed his plan.
On April 16, 1862, Lincoln signed into law a bill abolishing slavery in Washington, D.C. The bill compensated owners and made plans to send slaves, if they so wished, to either Haiti or Liberia. On June 9, he signed a bill outlawing slavery in all the federal territories. This bill effectively reversed the ruling in the Dred Scott decision of 1857.
On July 12, 1862, two days after Lincoln returned from seeing McClellan at Harrison’s Landing, Congress passed a second confiscation bill. This bill dealt with a problem that plagued field commanders occupying Southern territory. As troops advanced, slaves sought refuge in Union camps, and federal commanders were confused over their obligations to the refugees. Some freed the slaves, others sent them back to their masters for lack of means to care for them. The Confiscation Act of 1862 declared that all slaves taking refuge behind Union lines were captives of war who were to be set free.
On the same day, Lincoln met, once again, with representatives of the border states. He told them that they must forget their retreat into earlier, quieter times, and face up to “the unprecedentedly stern facts of our case.” If they rejected his plan for compensated emancipation, the war would kill off slavery “by mere friction and abrasion,” and they would not get a dollar for their slaves. Did not they see that his plan was the best option for them?
They did not. The plan would cost too much. It would only further fan the flames of rebellion.
Lincoln returned to the Soldiers’ Home to continue work on a document he had been readying in recent days, perhaps weeks. He had tried his best to move people toward compensated emancipation with colonization. Now he was prepared for a much bolder move.
ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON, July 13, 1862, Lincoln invited Seward and Welles to ride with him to the funeral of Secretary of War Stanton’s infant child, James, not quite nine months old. Both his guests were startled when Lincoln informed them that he was thinking of emancipating the slaves. Welles wrote in his diary, “He dwelt earnestly on the gravity, importance, and delicacy of the movement, and said he had given it much thought.” Lincoln had come to the conclusion “that we must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued.”
Lincoln, as usual, would say nothing more to anyone for more than a week as he continued to mull over his decision. He would later reflect, “Things had gone from bad to worse, until I felt that we had reached the end of our rope on the plan of operations we had been pursuing; that we had about played our last card, and must change our tactics, or lose the game!” Lincoln now decided to convene his cabinet to make his first public disclosure of his momentous decision.