Lincoln Part 31

V

At the same time, Mary Lincoln was achieving some successes of her own, and she became the most conspicuous female occupant of the Executive Mansion since Dolley Madison. Brought up with an active interest in public affairs, deeply involved in her husband's political career, she had no intention of fading quietly into the Washington background. She intended to become the First Lady of the land-a term that was coined to describe her.

She enjoyed her role as hostess, and she made a favorable impression on most visitors. The cynical William Howard Russell, the American correspondent of the Times of London, found much to criticize about her appearance and manner, but he praised her simple jewelry and her "very gorgeous and highly colored" dress and could not fail to observe that she fluttered her fan a great deal to display her rounded, well-proportioned shoulders. Noting that Mrs. Lincoln was "of the middle age and height, of a plumpness degenerating to the embonpoint natural to her years," with plain features and a homely appearance "stiffened, however, by the consciousness that her position requires her to be something more than plain Mrs. Lincoln, the wife of the Illinois lawyer," Russell judged that she was "desirous of making herself agreeable," and rather grudgingly added, "I own I was agreeably disappointed."

She made refurbishing the White House her main project as First Lady. She found it in bad shape. The furniture was broken down, the wallpaper peeling, the carpeting worn, and the draperies torn. The eleven bas.e.m.e.nt rooms were filthy and rat-infested. The whole place had the air of a rundown, unsuccessful third-rate hotel. Congress had appropriated $20,000 to be expended over the four years of her husband's term of office for rehabilitating the Executive Mansion, and she intended to put it to good use.

In the summer of 1861 she went to Philadelphia and New York to buy furnishings suitable for the mansion of the President of the United States and his First Lady. Merchants showed her the best and most expensive carpeting, material for upholstery and drapes, splendid furniture, and exquisite china. Mary was not entirely rational when it came to money and spending, and, having no head for figures, she bought everything: chairs, sofas and ha.s.socks, fabrics of damask, brocade, pink tarlatan, plush, and "French Satin DeLaine"; wallpaper imported from France; and a full set of Haviland china in "Solferino and gold," with the American coat of arms in the center of each plate. For the Red Room she ordered 117 yards of crimson Wilton carpet, and for the East Room an imported Brussels velvet carpet, pale green in color, ingeniously woven as a single piece, which, one admirer gushed, "in effect looked as if the ocean, in gleaming and transparent waves, were tossing roses at your feet."

On her return to Washington she personally oversaw the scrubbing, painting, and plastering of the White House, so that for the first time in years the entire mansion was sparklingly clean. When her new furniture arrived, the whole place took on an air of elegant opulence.

But by fall, when the bills began to come in, she discovered that she had greatly overspent the congressional allowance not just for the year but for Lincoln's full term. Desperately she tried to keep her husband from learning what she had done. In her panic she exploded in rage at anyone who dared cross her. Nicolay and Hay, who had to deal with her temperamental outbursts, began to refer to her as "the h.e.l.l-cat." She authorized a sale of secondhand White House furniture, but it brought in almost as little money as did the sale of manure from the White House stables at ten cents a wagonload. Then John Watt, the White House gardener, showed her easier ways of covering her deficit, by padding bills for household expenditures and presenting vouchers for nonexistent purchases. Discharging the White House steward, she secured that appointment for Mrs. Watt-and performed the duties and kept the salary herself.

None of this, however, could cover her enormous overrun of expenditures, and she had to ask Benjamin B. French, the commissioner of Public Buildings, who kept the White House accounts, to explain the situation to the President and to ask him to sponsor a supplemental congressional appropriation. Lincoln was furious. Never, he said, would he ask Congress for an appropriation "for flub dubs for that d.a.m.ned old house!" "It would stink in the land to have it said that an appropriation of $20,000 for furnishing the house had been overrun by the President when the poor freezing soldiers could not have blankets," he went on. The White House "was furnished well enough-better than any house they had ever lived in." Rather than ask Congress for more money he vowed he would pay for Mary's purchases out of his own pocket. Eventually, though, he was obliged to back down, and Congress quietly pa.s.sed two deficiency appropriations to cover rehabilitating the White House.

VI

Support for the President, which appeared so overwhelming immediately after Bull Run, rapidly eroded. For many Democrats the defeat brought realization that the nation faced a long and costly war. Those who were styled "War Democrats" rallied behind the President. A larger group of Democrats reluctantly accepted the war as long as it was fought to preserve "the const.i.tution as it is and the Union as it was," but they were nervous lest a prolonged conflict prove "the Trojan horse of tyranny." A few, like James A. Bayard of Delaware and Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio, willingly acknowledged that they were Peace Democrats. Bayard took as his motto "Anything is better than a fruitless, hopeless, unnatural civil war."

These divisions deeply troubled Lincoln. He recognized what he called "the plain facts" of his situation. The Republicans, as he said, "came into power, very largely in a minority of the popular vote." His administration could not possibly put down the rebellion without a.s.sistance from the Democrats. It was, he observed, "mere nonsense to suppose a minority could put down a majority in rebellion." Consequently he carefully cultivated War Democrats in Congress like Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, the only Southern senator who refused to follow his state when it seceded, and Reverdy Johnson of Maryland, who sustained the President's use of war powers and refuted the arguments of Chief Justice Taney. He rewarded Joseph Holt, the staunch Kentucky Unionist who had been Secretary of War under Buchanan, by naming him judge advocate general. In making military appointments he tried to select commanders on the basis of military expertise rather than on what he called "political affinity," and a sizable number of the generals he selected were Democrats: George B. McClellan, Benjamin F. Butler, W. S. Rosecrans, John A. McClernand, and many others. In policy, too, he tried to build a broad base of support by presenting the issue before the country as one of Union versus Disunion.

In attempting to build a consensus, the President ran the risk of dividing his own party. Many Republicans felt that he was neglecting the moral and political arguments against slavery that had been the foundation of their party's ideology. Two days after the defeat at Bull Run, Senator Zachariah Chandler of Michigan and Senator Sumner, accompanied by Vice President Hamlin, came to the White House and urged the President to make the war a contest between Freedom and Slavery. Sumner argued that emanc.i.p.ation was a military necessity, and Chandler asked Lincoln to free the slaves in order to create such chaos in the South that the Confederacy would collapse. The President listened politely but said such measures were too far in advance of public opinion.

Among disgruntled Republicans the feeling spread that Lincoln, though well meaning, was slow and incompetent. In his diary Count Adam Gurowski, the eccentric Polish n.o.bleman who worked as a translator for the State Department, accurately captured the mood of Republicans in Congress: "Mr. Lincoln in some way has a slender historical resemblance to Louis XVI-similar goodness, honesty, good intentions; but the size of events seems to be too much for him." According to Gurowski, Senator Wade was so "disgusted with the slowness and inanity of the administration" that he remarked, "I do not wonder that people desert to Jeff. Davis, as he shows brains; I may desert myself." To express that dissatisfaction and to give some direction to the Union war effort, the Congress just before adjournment pa.s.sed the Confiscation Act, which provided that a master would lose ownership of any slave employed to a.s.sist the Confederate armies. Lincoln signed the measure reluctantly, and it had little effect except as an expression of opinion.

In late August the diffuse feeling of unhappiness with the Lincoln administration found a focus. General John C. Fremont, named commander of the Department of the West, with headquarters in St. Louis, took drastic steps to defeat a Confederate invasion in southwestern Missouri and end widespread guerrilla warfare elsewhere. Proclaiming martial law in the entire state of Missouri, Fremont announced that civilians bearing arms would be tried by court-martial and shot if convicted and that slaves of persons who aided the rebellion would be emanc.i.p.ated.

Fremont's proclamation, issued without consultation with Washington, clearly ran counter to the policy Lincoln had announced in his inaugural address of not interfering with slavery and against the recently adopted Crittenden resolution pledging that restoration of the Union was the only aim of the war. It also violated the provisions of the Confiscation Act, which established judicial proceedings to seize slaves used to help the rebel army. Lincoln saw at once that Fremont's order must be modified. He directed the general to withdraw his threat to shoot captured civilians bearing arms. "Should you shoot a man, according to the proclamation, the Confederates would very certainly shoot our best man in their hands in retaliation," he admonished Fremont; "and so, man for man, indefinitely." The President viewed Fremont's order to liberate slaves of traitorous owners as even more dangerous. Such action, he reminded the general, "will alarm our Southern Union friends, and turn them against us-perhaps ruin our rather fair prospect for Kentucky." He asked Fremont to modify his proclamation.

Though Lincoln said he was writing "in a spirit of caution and not of censure," Fremont took his letter as an undeserved rebuke. He, after all, was on the scene; he had to deal with the vindictiveness of Confederate sympathizers in Missouri; he had to defend the state when Washington conspicuously neglected to provide the men, the equipment, and even the food he needed to sustain his army. Very angry, he permitted his redoubtable wife, Jessie, the daughter of the celebrated Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton, to go to Washington and present his case in person to the President.

Mrs. Fremont arrived on September 10 and immediately asked the President to set a time for an interview. He replied tersely, "Now, at once." Though it was nine o'clock in the evening and she was tired and dusty from traveling all day, she went immediately to the White House. She did not find Lincoln hospitable. He received her in the Red Room, standing, and he did not offer her a seat. When she presented a letter from her husband explaining his position, Lincoln, as she remembered it, "smiled with an expression that was not agreeable" and read it without comment. Attempting to make Fremont's views clearer, she went on to talk about the need to strike a blow against slavery that would enlist British sentiment on the Union side. The President cut her off with "You are quite a female politician." Then, in a voice that she found both hard and "repelling," he told her, "It was a war for a great national idea, the Union, and... General Fremont should not have dragged the Negro into it."

The next day the President, taking note of Fremont's unwillingness to modify his proclamation on his own, "very cheerfully" ordered him to change it so as "to conform to, and not to transcend," the provisions of the Confiscation Act. Some of Lincoln's advisers feared that Fremont would disobey the President's order and "set up on his own." But Lincoln would not permit civilian authority to be overruled by the military, and he would not allow sensitive questions concerning slavery and emanc.i.p.ation to be decided by anyone but the President himself.

That was not the end of the Fremont problem. The general, who had made his reputation as a pathmarker of the Western trails to California, was never able to find his way across the Missouri political terrain. He quarreled with everybody. He scorned the duly elected, if ineffectual, governor of Missouri, Hamilton R. Gamble, who promptly went to Washington with complaints about military incompetence in St. Louis. He quarreled with his subordinates. He made the serious mistake of quarreling with the Blair family, which had originally sponsored his appointment as commander of the Department of the West, and eventually he even ordered the arrest of Frank Blair. "He is losing the confidence of men near him, whose support any man in his position must have to be successful," Lincoln observed. "His cardinal mistake is that he isolates himself, and allows n.o.body to see him; and by which he does not know what is going on in the very matter he is dealing with."

To ineptness, charges of fraud and corruption in the Department of the West were added, though n.o.body accused Fremont of using his command for personal gain. The Blairs exerted incessant pressure on the President to remove the general, but Lincoln was always reluctant to dismiss subordinates, however incompetent, and told Montgomery Blair that it was not "quite fair to squander Fremont until he has another chance." The very negative report that Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas submitted in October decided the issue. Fremont was relieved from command on November 2.

The Fremont imbroglio caused an immense turmoil throughout the Union. In the border slave states, just as Lincoln predicted, Fremont's proclamation dealt a heavy blow to Unionist sentiment. "That foolish proclamation," Joshua Speed promptly warned the President from Kentucky, "will crush out any vestage [sic] of a union party in the state." "I am now fully satisfied," he wrote a few days later, "that we could stand several defeats like that at Bulls run [sic], better than we can this... foolish act of a military popinjay." Robert Anderson, now in command of the Department of Kentucky, warned that if the proclamation "is not immediately disavowed, and annulled, Kentucky will be lost to the Union." Fremont's decree came at the worst possible time, when the legislature was about to abandon the policy of neutrality for Kentucky. The legislature would not budge until the proclamation was modified, and there was danger that Union volunteers in Kentucky would desert to the Confederacy. By overruling the most offensive parts of Fremont's edict, Lincoln saved the state for the Union. As one Kentucky Unionist wrote, "The President handled that matter with an honesty of purpose, and a good sense that I have never seen surpa.s.sed."

In the North the reaction was exactly the opposite. Fremont's order aroused a public that was already tired of war and demanded decisive steps to end it. All the major newspapers approved it-not merely the staunchly Republican journals like the New York Tribune, the New York Times, and the Chicago Tribune, but also independent conservative papers like Washington's National Intelligencer and the Democratic Boston Post and Chicago Times. Even a cautious conservative like Browning wrote the President: "Fremont's proclamation was necessary and will do good. It has the full approval of all loyal citizens of the West and the North West."

From Iowa came a report that failure to sustain Fremont was causing "extreme dissatisfaction" and would end volunteering in the Northwest. "It would have been difficult to have devised a plan to more effectually dispirit the People of this section than your order," a Wisconsin voter wrote the President. "My own indignation is too deep for words," raged Horace White of the Chicago Tribune. "Our President has broken his own neck if he has not destroyed his country." Benjamin Wade sneered that Lincoln's conduct was all that could be expected "of one, born of 'poor white trash' and educated in a slave State." Ironically Wade added, "I shall expect to find in his annual message, a recommendation to Congress, to give each rebel, who shall serve during the war, a hundred and sixty acres of land." Even Herndon, Lincoln's own law partner, thought the President had behaved shamefully. "Does he suppose he can crush-squelch out this huge rebellion by pop guns filled with rose water," he gibed. "He ought to hang somebody and get up a name for will or decision-for character. Let him hang some Child or woman, if he has not Courage to hang a man."

Sorely beset, Lincoln laid out his reasons for overruling Fremont's proclamation in a long, careful letter to Browning. If the general's order had been allowed to stand, he explained, Kentucky would probably have seceded. "I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game," he went on. "Kentucky gone, we can not hold Missouri, nor, as I think Maryland. These all against us, and the job on our hands is too large for us. We would as well consent to separation at once, including the surrender of this capitol." He also offered an even more cogent reason, which he knew would appeal to men like Browning who loved the Const.i.tution and respected the rule of law. "Genl. Fremont's proclamation, as to confiscation of property, and the liberation of slaves, is purely political," he wrote, "and not within the range of military law, or necessity." It was, in fact, simply dictatorship, because it a.s.sumed "that the general may do anything he pleases." Far from saving the government, such reckless action meant the surrender of the government. "Can it be pretended that it is any longer the government of the U.S.-any government of Const.i.tution and laws-wherein a General, or a President, may make permanent rules of property by proclamation?"

VII

As indisputable evidence of Fremont's military incompetence and fiscal extravagance surfaced, support for the general waned, and criticism of the slow pace of the war effort focused on General McClellan, who only in July had been hailed as the defender of Washington and the savior of his country. At first everybody admired the thirty-four-year-old general. Handsome, with blue eyes and reddish brown hair, he gave an impression of strength and vigor. "He has brains," Browning thought, "looks as if he ought to have courage, and I think, is altogether more than an ordinary man." Everybody else thought so, too. "By some strange operation of magic," the young general wrote his wife, "I seem to have become the power of the land." When he visited the Senate, the members vied to shake his hand. "They give me my way in everything, full swing and unbounded confidence."

There was only admiration for the way McClellan reorganized the forces around Washington. A skilled engineer, he developed a ring of fortifications to protect the city from surprise attacks. Replacing the useless ninety-day soldiers who had formed McDowell's force (most of their terms were about to expire) with three-year volunteers, he began rigorously training his men and kept a close eye on them as they performed close-order drills, did target practice, and engaged in practice maneuvers. Dashing about on a magnificent horse, he seemed omnipresent, and no detail of his soldiers' life was too small to escape his notice. The men under his command-after August 15 called "the Army of the Potomac"-loved him as they loved no other commander throughout the war.

Along with his other talents, McClellan had an excellent sense of public relations, and he made a practice of inviting the President, the Secretary of War, other members of the cabinet, and senators to be present when he staged a review of the troops. The contrast between the general and his commander-in-chief as they rode down the lines struck some observers as ludicrous. McClellan was superb in full-dress uniform, while Lincoln, wearing his customary stovepipe hat, looked, according to one observer, "like a scare-crow on horseback." Though amused, the soldiers were in good spirits and they gave resounding cheers to a President who had not received much applause in recent months.

But by fall McClellan's honeymoon ended. Critics began to complain that he was not taking advantage of the fine weather to launch an offensive against the Confederates, still lodged at Mana.s.sas. Horace Greeley again demanded that the army march onward to Richmond. Senator Chandler, originally one of McClellan's strongest backers, lost faith in the general; he lamented that "Fremont[']s operations were bad enough in all conscience, but as compared with McLellan[']s they were splendid," and he blamed the general's failure on a "timid vacil[l]ating and inefficient" administration. Wade was even more intemperate, simultaneously denouncing "Old Abe" and General McClellan. He raged that the general was stripping the West of men and putting them in the Army of the Potomac so "that Mr Lincoln and his Cabinet may breathe freely and eat their dinners in peace, and that Mrs Lincoln may without interruption, pursue her French and dancing."

Abetted by Senator Trumbull, Wade and Chandler began worrying Lincoln into forcing McClellan to fight. Wade went so far as to say that he preferred an unsuccessful battle to further delay, because "a defeat could be easily repaired, by the swarming recruits." These critics were so persistent and vehement in their campaign against McClellan that John Hay labeled them "Jacobins," after the most extreme radicals of the French Revolution, and the name stuck. Lincoln told the general not to fight until he was ready, but he felt obliged to warn him that Wade voiced a widely held feeling of impatience, which he said was a reality that had to be taken into account. McClellan listened, but evidently he did not hear.

On October 21, McClellan's critics were infuriated when, after long inaction, an element of his army ventured across the Potomac at Ball's Bluff (or Leesburg), ran into fierce Confederate opposition, and was thrown back with heavy losses. Colonel Edward D. Baker, Lincoln's longtime friend and a senator from Oregon, was killed. The Lincolns were devastated by the news and received no White House visitors the next day. In Congress grief over the fallen senator exploded into wrath at McClellan for having allowed such an ill-planned, poorly supported expedition. Lawmakers began to harbor a growing suspicion that not merely Baker's superior officer, Charles P. Stone, but McClellan himself might be disloyal to the Union.

McClellan defended himself by telling his congressional critics that he was hamstrung by the aged and nearly senile General Scott. They then descended on the White House to nag Lincoln into removing General Scott, and on November 1, with a heavy heart, the President accepted Scott's offer to retire, which had often been tendered. In a statement praising Scott's long and brilliant career, Lincoln expressed the country's grat.i.tude for "his faithful devotion to the Const.i.tution, the Union, and the Flag, when a.s.sailed by parricidal rebellion."

That left McClellan in charge, and Lincoln designated him to command the whole army of the United States. He was now in charge not merely of the Army of the Potomac but of Don Carlos Buell's Army of the Ohio, which was preparing for a push into Tennessee, and of Henry W. Halleck's Army of the Missouri, which was to move down the Mississippi River. In giving these increased responsibilities to McClellan, Lincoln said: "Draw on me for all the sense I have, and all the information. In addition to your present command, the supreme command of the Army will entail a vast labor upon you." Quietly McClellan responded, "I can do it all."

But the general still failed to launch a campaign, and his relations with both the President and the Congress rapidly deteriorated. After his first few weeks in Washington he concluded that "the Presdt is an idiot," but he rarely expressed his opinion until after he was placed in command of all the armies. Now he began consorting with Democratic politicians, and he wrote freely to his wife that Lincoln was "nothing more than a well meaning baboon," while Seward was "a meddling, officious, incompetent little puppy," Welles was a "garrulous old woman," Bates "an old fool," and Cameron a rascal. He grew weary of the President's constant visits to his headquarters to read the latest military dispatches and discuss projected campaigns. General Samuel P. Heintzelman was present on one such occasion when Lincoln pored over the map of Virginia making strategic suggestions which McClellan obviously thought absurd but which he pretended to listen to deferentially. After the President left, McClellan turned to his subordinate and laughed: "Isn't he a rare bird?"

Even more taxing were Lincoln's late-night visits to McClellan's house to discuss strategy, and the general decided to put an end to them. On the evening of November 13, when Lincoln and Seward, accompanied by John Hay, called on McClellan, he was out, and they decided to stay until he returned. After about an hour he came in and, paying no attention to the porter who told him the President was waiting, went straight upstairs. After another half hour the guests sent up a message that they were still waiting, only to receive the cool message that the general had gone to bed. Hay thought the President should feel greatly offended, but Lincoln said "it was better at this time not to be making points of etiquette and personal dignity." He paid no more visits to McClellan's house.

Though Lincoln said that he was willing to hold McClellan's horse if he would win a victory, he was growing disenchanted with his general-in-chief. In his December message to Congress, after expressing a hope that the country would support McClellan's exertions, he added a backhanded compliment: "It has been said that one bad general is better than two good ones; and the saying is true, if taken to mean ... that an army is better directed by a single mind, though inferior, than by two superior ones, at variance."

Congressmen could afford to be less guarded in their language. Senator Chandler bluntly told Lincoln that if McClellan allowed his huge army to go into winter quarters without fighting a battle he "was in favor of sending for Jeff Davis at once."

VIII