Lincoln (69 page)

During this period of great excitement Lincoln had a confrontation with McClellan. After complaining about the Harpers Ferry fiasco, he expressed fears that if McClellan moved his army down the Potomac to attack Richmond from the east he would leave Washington exposed. “It had been represented to him,” he said, that McClellan’s move “was conceived with the traitorous intent of... giving over to the enemy the capital and the government, thus left defenceless.” The President did not identify his source, but he had been talking with the fiercely anti-McClellan members of the Committee on the Conduct of the War. Furious, McClellan sprang up and told Lincoln he would permit no man to call him a traitor. Much agitated, Lincoln backed down from his accusation and, according to McClellan, “said that he merely repeated what others had said, and that he did not believe a word of it.”

At the end of the conversation McClellan agreed to consult the division commanders of the Army of the Potomac on his plan. Eight of them, all younger generals who owed their promotion to McClellan, favored it, but the four senior men opposed. They then trooped over to the White House, where the President and the Secretary of War questioned them closely. Both Lincoln and Stanton were clearly troubled about the safety of the national capital, but in the end the President accepted the decision of the majority and authorized McClellan to go ahead. “We can do nothing else than accept their plan and discard all others,” he told Stanton afterward. “We can’t reject it and adopt another without assuming all the responsibility in the case of the failure of the one we adopt.”

The President, still unconvinced, made his dissatisfaction plain by ordering the reorganization of the twelve divisions of the Army of the Potomac into four corps. This action, which for some time the Committee on the Conduct of the War had been urging, was a sensible one. The Army of the Potomac was now so vast that no one commander could give sufficient attention to each of the twelve separate divisions. McClellan himself had favored such a reorganization—though he wanted to wait until after a battle and appoint as corps commanders generals who had distinguished themselves in the field. Lincoln overruled him and named as corps leaders Generals
E. V. Sumner, Irvin McDowell, Samuel P. Heintzelman, and Erasmus D. Keyes—the first three of whom had opposed McClellan’s plan of campaign.

Further evidence of the President’s doubts about his commanding general’s strategy appeared in a general war order forbidding the Army of the Potomac to change its base of operations until McClellan and the four corps commanders declared Washington entirely secure.

Three days later the President clipped McClellan’s wings even closer in a broad reorganization of the army command. After Stanton made a full report to the cabinet blaming McClellan for the “great ignorance, negligence and lack of order and subordination—and reckless extravagance” evident in the management of the Army of the Potomac, Lincoln and his advisers agreed it was too much to expect any man to be both general-in-chief of all the armies and commander of the huge Army of the Potomac when it was about to take to the field. The President relieved McClellan from his duties as general-in-chief. Henceforth he was simply to be commander of the Department of the Potomac. Lincoln’s order consolidated the several armies in the Mississippi Valley under the command of General Halleck, who claimed most of the credit for Forts Henry and Donelson. In order to pacify the abolitionists and the disgruntled German element in Missouri, Frémont was given command of the new Mountain Department, where it was assumed he would try to liberate the Unionists of eastern Tennessee. Perhaps the most significant change was that all three department commanders were to “report severally and directly to the Secretary of War,” who now took full charge of bringing order and efficiency to army administration.

Most people welcomed the reorganization. McClellan himself, though disgruntled that he had to learn of the reshuffling of commanders from the newspapers, accepted his demotion in good spirits and wrote Lincoln: “I shall work just as cheerfully as ever before, and ... no consideration of self will in any manner interfere with the discharge of my public duties.”

Now at last the way was cleared for McClellan to begin his campaign, but one final episode further weakened the President’s confidence in his commander. Hearing that the Confederates were pulling back from Manassas, the general led the entire Army of the Potomac, 112,000 strong, to see what was happening. The Confederates were indeed gone, and it was clear that they had numbered less than 50,000—about half of what McClellan had estimated. The Southern fortifications that had looked so formidable turned out to be mostly logs painted to resemble cannon. The whole country gave a giant horselaugh.

The Confederate withdrawal from the Manassas area forced McClellan to change his plan for transporting the Army of the Potomac down the Potomac and up the Rappahannock River to Urbanna, where it could make a quick dash of about fifty miles on Richmond. In their new position the Southern forces would be between him and the Confederate capital. Quickly revising his strategy, the general decided to go farther south to the peninsula between the York and James rivers, where Fort Monroe, guarding the entrance
to the Chesapeake Bay, was still in Union hands. By April 1 part of the Army of the Potomac was on the peninsula. Lincoln continued to watch with anxiety and doubt. Months later he told Browning that he had always thought McClellan’s strategy was a mistake and “that his opinion always had been that the great fight should have been at Manasses
[sic].”

Republicans who wanted Lincoln to remove McClellan also criticized the President for not attacking slavery, the cause of the war. In Congress these condemnations were usually indirect, as when Thaddeus Stevens, the powerful Pennsylvania Republican, without mentioning Lincoln by name, lamented that in this war there had been “no declaration of the great objects of Government, no glorious sound of universal liberty.” But in private letters critics bluntly referred to the President’s “imbecility” and to his folly in attempting to preserve slavery while engaged in a war against the slave power of the South. “A more ridiculous farce was never played,” wrote one of Trumbull’s correspondents. Francis W. Bird, one of the original organizers of the Republican party in Massachusetts, felt that Lincoln had “gone to the rescue of slavery, which had almost committed suicide.” “The key of the slave’s chain is now kept in the White House,” he scolded. Some of Lincoln’s close political friends were equally direct. “Our nation is on the brink of ruin,” Joseph Medill lamented. “Mr. Lincoln, for God’s sake and your Country’s sake rise to the realization ... that this is a Slave-holders rebellion.” An Illinois man, enraged by Lincoln’s course, predicted “that if a speedy change ... did not soon occur,... some Brutus would arise and love his country more than he did the President.”

Lincoln’s views on slavery were not, in fact, so far from those of his critics. He made no attempt to disguise his antislavery feeling; as he told a group of border-state representatives, he “thought it was wrong and should continue to think so.” He agreed that slavery was “somehow” the cause of the war, and he did not think it could long survive the present conflict. In areas where he felt he was constitutionally able to act, he took small but significant steps to dissociate himself from the proslavery stance of his predecessors. He willingly signed a law prohibiting slavery in all the national territories—even though the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision had declared such exclusion unconstitutional. He welcomed a new treaty with Great Britain for the more effective suppression of the Atlantic slave trade. At the urging of Charles Sumner, he refused to commute the death penalty for Nathaniel Gordon, the first American slave trader convicted and hanged for participating in the nefarious traffic.

But he was reluctant to adopt more sweeping policies. He was ready to use “all indispensable means” to preserve the Union, but he warned against hastily adopting “radical and extreme measures, which may reach the loyal as the disloyal.” “In considering the policy to be adopted for suppressing
the insurrection,” he told Congress in December 1861, “I have been anxious and careful that the inevitable conflict for this purpose shall not degenerate into a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle.” Remembering his inaugural vow not to interfere with slavery in the states where it already existed and adhering to his theory that the seceded states were still part of the Union, he was not yet ready to strike at slavery in the Confederacy—especially since nothing he could do or say would have any practical effect there.

The constant barrage of criticism to which Lincoln was subjected had the wholesome result of forcing him to think through more systematically his position on slavery and emancipation. Up to this time he had not been called on to do much more than express his dislike for the peculiar institution, his hope that in time it would die out, and his vague wish that Negroes should be colonized elsewhere. As Stephen A. Douglas repeatedly pointed out in their 1858 debates, he never explained how he expected to bring slavery into a course of ultimate extinction. Now he was obliged to come up with a positive policy. There was all the more urgency for him to act because Congress was pushing ahead with consideration of Trumbull’s second confiscation bill, which would, in effect, emancipate the slaves of all rebels.

Doubting both the constitutionality and the wisdom of proclaiming general emancipation, Lincoln felt obliged to deal with some immediate problems arising from slavery. One of these was what to do with the thousands of slaves who fled from their masters to seek freedom behind the lines of the Union armies. Since the Fugitive Slave Act was still in force, some Union commanders in the West, like Halleck, allowed slave masters to search their army camps and reclaim these fugitives. Unwilling to return the runaways, General Benjamin F. Butler, a Massachusetts antislavery man, called them contraband of war, on the ground that they were, or could be, used by their masters to help build Confederate fortifications, and refused to send them back to slavery. His decision was immensely popular in the North, and for the rest of the war slaves were often referred to as “contrabands.” Lincoln made no official comment on Butler’s action, or on the decision of other commanders to exclude slave hunters from their camps, but he told Browning as early as July 1861 “that the government neither should, nor would send back to bondage such as came to our armies.”

What to do with these fugitives was a puzzle. They should not be returned to their masters; they could not live in idleness near Union army camps; and they must not be turned loose on the negrophobic border states. The Northern states did not want them. In his search for a solution, Lincoln turned back, as he so often did in a crisis, to the ideas of Henry Clay, and he proposed in his annual message to colonize these runaway slaves “at some place, or places, in a climate congenial to them.”

The idea was not a new one for Lincoln. He had endorsed colonization as early as 1852 in his eulogy on Clay and subsequently made speeches before meetings of the Illinois Colonization Society. During the debates with
Douglas he more than once mentioned colonization, though he admitted it was an impractical solution of the race problem. More recently the Blair family, who for years had made colonization something of a hobby, had revived his interest in the subject. Frank Blair, as a representative from Missouri, had long favored emigration of the “sable race, bred in the pestilence of Africa,” to Central America. With the outbreak of the war his father, Francis Preston Blair, Sr., alerted Lincoln that the time had come when “the deportation or extermination of the African race from among us” was inevitable. Montgomery Blair joined his father and brother in recommending colonization of freedmen as “absolutely indispensable to prevent unspeakable horrors,” because blacks and whites could never live together in peace.

By the 1860s most colonizationists, who had earlier favored sending freedmen to Africa, endorsed setting up a colony of blacks under the protection of the United States somewhere in Central America or the Caribbean. Haiti, the Danish West Indies, Dutch Guiana, and British Honduras were among the sites considered possible, but a tract of land in New Granada (later Panama) on the Chiriqui Lagoon was the favorite of many. Here Ambrose W. Thompson, a Philadelphian who had made a fortune in shipbuilding, had acquired a claim to several hundred thousand acres of land located at what was likely to be the terminus of a projected railroad across the isthmus. The lagoon was supposed to be deep enough to serve as an American naval base; the land was especially suited for growing cotton; and it allegedly contained rich stores of coal, which Thompson promised to sell to the navy at half the usual price. It would, the Blairs urged, be the ideal location for a colony of American freedmen.

Lincoln thought the idea was worth looking into. He appointed Ninian W. Edwards, his wife’s brother-in-law, to review the prospectus and other legal documents submitted by the Chiriqui Improvement Company and learned that the claims of Thompson and the other entrepreneurs were fully verified. Because the project would involve the navy, he asked Secretary Welles’s opinion, but that resolute New Englander, opposed to colonization in principle, refused to have anything to do with the scheme. Because money would be needed for the project, the President also asked for Chase’s advice. Responding more tactfully than Welles, the Secretary of the Treasury responded that he was generally “much impressed by the prospects” but that he was too busy to give it his close attention. Lincoln then turned the project over to Secretary of the Interior Smith, who he knew was in favor of colonization, and gave it his conditional blessing.

What began as a project for resettling runaway slaves escalated into a more ambitious plan for abolishing slavery in some, or perhaps all, of the border states, where it was a source of constant embarrassment to the Union government. Almost daily there was friction between local authorities sworn to uphold the state laws concerning slavery and military commanders reluctant to return fugitives to their masters. In addition, Lincoln knew that so
long as these heavily populated and strategically located states maintained slavery there was a possibility that they might join the Confederacy. He was also aware the continued existence of slavery in the border states complicated foreign policy; so long as Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri remained slave states, European powers could not view the American conflict as one between freedom and slavery. Emancipation could thus strengthen the Union cause abroad, relieve friction between civil and military authorities in the upper South, and weaken the Confederacy.