Lincoln (83 page)

At this point discontent in the Army of the Potomac bubbled over. Many of the officers, convinced of Burnside’s incompetence, were despondent almost to the point of mutiny. Anticipating another disaster, Generals John Newton and John Cochrane on December 30 made a quick trip to Washington to alert the President of the danger. Though Lincoln distrusted the reports of all these subordinates, because he was convinced their real purpose was to restore McClellan to command, he ordered a halt to Burnside’s advance: “I have good reason for saying you must not make a general movement of the army without letting me know.”

On New Year’s Day, before the public reception, Burnside came to the White House to explain and defend his plans. With an army of 120,000 men
immediately confronting the enemy in Virginia, he thought it imperative to begin an advance, whether below or above Fredericksburg, but since not one of his division commanders supported his plan he was willing to give it up, and with it the command of the Army of the Potomac and even his commission in the United States Army. In announcing that he would “most cheerfully give place to any other officer,” Burnside suggested that Lincoln ought to look not just at the ability of the commanding general but at the honesty and loyalty of both Secretary of War Stanton and General-in-Chief Halleck. He warned that they had not given the President the “positive and unswerving support in [his] public policy” or assumed “their full share of the responsibility for that policy.”

Lincoln was in a quandary. Not knowing what else to do, he asked Halleck’s opinion of Burnside’s planned operation. The general declined to give one, making it clear, as he had on a previous occasion, “that a General in command of an army in the field is the best judge of existing conditions.” Impatiently the President then directed Halleck to go to Burnside’s headquarters, examine the ground, talk with the officers, and, after forming his own opinion, tell Burnside either that he approved or disapproved of his planned advance. “If in such a difficulty as this you do not help, you fail me precisely in the point for which I sought your assistance,” he wrote sharply. “Your military skill is useless to me, if you will not do this.”

Halleck’s response was to offer his resignation as general-in-chief, on the ground that “a very important difference of opinion in regard to my relations toward generals commanding armies in the field” made it impossible to perform the duties of his office “satisfactorily at the same time to the President and to myself.”

Lincoln felt he had no alternative but to rescind his order, endorsing it “Withdrawn, because considered harsh by Gen. Halleck.” Heading an administration which he had barely saved from collapse, after the two principal members had offered their resignations and others had been prepared to follow, and facing the likelihood of a change of command in the almost mutinous Army of the Potomac, the President could not permit further evidence of dissension among his advisers. But it was not a decision that he made readily, and in the future he spoke of Halleck as little more than “a first-rate clerk.”

It was harder to know what to do with Burnside. Lincoln was always reluctant to dismiss a faithful subordinate, however unsuccessful; perhaps the President remembered that at times he himself had seemed to most people a failure. He genuinely liked Burnside’s modesty and loyalty. While recognizing the general’s limitations, he admired his fighting spirit, and he respected the “consummate skill and success with which [he] crossed and re-crossed the river, in face of the enemy.” He tended to distrust the generals critical of Burnside, suspecting they were McClellan partisans. Anyway, there was no obvious successor to Burnside, and Lincoln wrote him candidly: “I
do not yet see how I could profit by changing the command of the A[rmy of the] P[otomac].”

The general was given one more chance. With Halleck’s blessing he planned to cross the Rappahannock west of Fredericksburg, hoping to flank Lee’s army. Lincoln approved the advance but instructed the general, “Be cautious, and do not understand that the government, or country, is driving you.” On January 19 the Army of the Potomac lumbered out of camp on a mission that most of Burnside’s division commanders felt was doomed to failure. The weather reinforced their objections. As heavy rain turned to sleet, the army bogged down, and after three days Burnside called off what reporters scornfully called the “Mud March.”

Back in camp Burnside boiled over. Blaming the failure on the disloyalty of his subordinates, he drafted an order dismissing four of his major generals from the army and relieving four other generals from their commands. Taking the order to Washington, he told Lincoln he could not continue in command unless the order was approved. “I think you are right,” Lincoln said, but he reserved a decision until he could talk with Stanton and Halleck. The next morning, when Burnside returned to the White House, Lincoln told him he was to be replaced as commander of the Army of the Potomac.

The President had difficulty in choosing a successor. Despite considerable public pressure, he gave no thought to restoring McClellan to command. He could have brought in either Rosecrans or Grant, though neither had yet been notably successful, but to impose a Western commander would have been insulting to the Army of the Potomac. Of Burnside’s subordinates, E. V. Sumner was too old, Franklin and Smith were thought to be McClellan partisans, and others had yet to prove they could command a huge army.

Rather uncertainly Lincoln turned to Joseph Hooker. The general had some decided negatives. He was known to be a hard drinker. He had been outspoken almost to the point of insubordination in his criticisms of Burnside’s incompetence, and he let it be known that he viewed the President and the government at Washington as “imbecile and ‘played out.’” “Nothing would go right,” he told a newspaper reporter, “until we had a dictator, and the sooner the better.” But the handsome, florid-faced general had performed valiantly in nearly all the major engagements of the Peninsula campaign and at Antietam, where he had been wounded, and his aggressive spirit earned him the sobriquet “Fighting Joe.” Lincoln decided to take a chance on him.

Calling Hooker to the White House, he gave the general a carefully composed private letter, which commended his bravery, his military skill, and his confidence in himself. At the same time, he told Hooker, “there are some things in regard to which, I am not quite satisfied with you.” He lamented Hooker’s efforts to undermine confidence in Burnside and mentioned his “recently saying that both the Army and the Government needed a Dictator.” “Of course,” he continued, “it was not
for
this, but in spite of it, that I have
given you the command.” “Only those generals who gain successes, can set up dictators,” he reminded the new commander. “What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship.” Promising the full support of the government, he warned, “Beware of rashness.”

The appointment of Hooker, which was generally well received in the North, relieved some of the immediate pressure on the President. Everybody understood that the new commander would require some time to reorganize the Army of the Potomac and to raise the spirits of the demoralized soldiers. The President could, for the moment, turn his attention to other problems.

Foreign relations did not occupy a great deal of Lincoln’s time. For the most part, he was content to allow the Secretary of State to manage diplomatic affairs—just as he permitted the other cabinet members to conduct the business of their departments with minimal interference. He trusted Seward, and he respected the Secretary’s knowledge of diplomatic protocol.

With most nations the relations of the United States were entirely amicable, and there were few occasions that called for special exertions by either the Secretary of State or the President. No doubt Lincoln derived some amusement from his correspondence with the King of Siam, who, as a token of his goodwill and friendship for the American people in their present struggle, sent gifts of a photograph of himself, a sword and a scabbard, and a pair of elephant tusks, and offered to supply to the government a stock of breeding elephants. “Our political jurisdiction,” the President replied, in words probably drafted by Seward, “does not reach a latitude so low as to favor the multiplication of the elephant, and steam on land, as well as on water, has been our best and most efficient agent of transportation in internal commerce.”

From time to time, the eccentric or unauthorized behavior of American diplomats caused minor ripples, as when Theodore Canisius, once Lincoln’s partner in the
Illinois Staats-Anzeiger
and now American consul to Vienna, initiated, quite on his own, negotiations to offer a command in the Union armies to the great Italian general Garibaldi. Somewhat more serious was the game of musical chairs played with the American ministry to St. Petersburg. The post went first to Cassius M. Clay, the Kentucky abolitionist, as a reward for his strong support for Lincoln in the Chicago nominating convention of 1860. Despite several street brawls, in which Clay demonstrated to startled Russian challengers the merits of the bowie knife, the minister grew bored and sought a more active life in the Union army. Lincoln replaced him with Simon Cameron, thinking St. Petersburg an excellent place to remove his first Secretary of War from the hands of his congressional investigators, hot on the scent of fraud and scandal. Cameron lasted only long
enough to present his credentials to the Czar and then asked for a furlough so that he could come back to Pennsylvania and run for the Senate. Meanwhile Clay proved noisy, importunate, and time-consuming with his constant advice to the President on how to conduct all aspects of the war, and Lincoln decided the Union cause would benefit by sending him back to Russia. The Czar was graciously understanding, for his government throughout the war was staunchly pro-Union, and it repeatedly discouraged all suggestions of European intervention in the American conflict.

Much more sensitive were relations with Great Britain and France, the two powers with major interests at stake in the American conflict. In neither was the government particularly favorable to the Union cause, and in both the upper levels of society looked with scorn combined with fear at the democracy of the North and fancied a kinship to the slaveholding oligarchy of the South. The Union blockade, which cut off the export of Southern cotton, produced real suffering in the textile-manufacturing regions of both Britain and France. Shipbuilders in France and especially in Britain saw the possibility of huge profits in outfitting vessels for the Confederate navy. With so much at stake, the two great powers had early moved to issue proclamations of neutrality, which recognized the Confederacy as a belligerent (though not as an independent nation); these had doubtless been proper, even necessary, under international law, but the actions had struck the Lincoln government as precipitate. British willingness to go to the brink of war over the
Trent
affair had offered further evidence that the American Civil War could be easily transformed into an international conflict. And the decision of the Emperor Napoleon III to send French troops to Mexico, in order to bolster the shaky regime of his puppet-king Maximilian, was a direct challenge to the Monroe Doctrine and to the Union government.

Holding firmly to his axiom “One war at a time,” Lincoln allowed Seward to manage the day-to-day relations with the two great powers but when there was a crisis used his personal authority to preserve peace. For instance, early in 1863 when Union blockaders captured the
Peterhoff
, a British-owned merchant ship carrying goods to Matamoros, Mexico, just across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas, the British protested this violation of international law, while Secretary Welles defended the navy, claiming the
Peterhoff was
carrying contraband intended for the Confederacy. The mails aboard the
Peterhoff
posed a specially touchy issue, because they might prove the vessel was really a blockade-runner. The British, whose position was strongly backed by Seward, insisted that under international law mails were inviolate, while Welles, whose views were endorsed by Sumner, of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, argued that only the courts could decide whether they had been lawfully seized. This controversy, which was in reality a minor affair though it had the potential for becoming an explosive issue, occupied much of the time of the Secretary of State and the Secretary of the Navy until the middle of May, and Lincoln gave respectful hearing to
both sides. In the end, the President sided with Seward and released the mails, reminding his cabinet members that “we were in no condition to plunge into a foreign war on a subject of so little importance in comparison with the terrible consequences which must follow our act.”

Lincoln demonstrated the same caution in dealing with the larger issues of international relations. It was perhaps well that neither he nor Seward realized how close Great Britain and France came to intervening in the American conflict in the summer and fall of 1862, when a long succession of Confederate victories seemed to prove W. E. Gladstone’s assertion that Jefferson Davis had made a nation of the Confederacy. Economic hardship, disruption in the patterns of trade, and unwillingness to see a debilitating conflict further protracted moved Napoleon to suggest joint intervention to the British government, and both Lord Palmerston, the Prime Minister, and Earl Russell, the Foreign Secretary, looked favorably on the French plan. Only after an angry debate in the British cabinet, in which defenders of the Union were strengthened by the news of McClellan’s success at Antietam and of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, was intervention rejected.

Washington knew of these ominous developments only through rumor, and Lincoln was not, of course, obliged to take any official notice of them. But in early 1863 he could not ignore another scheme for foreign intervention in the war. Horace Greeley, the unpredictable editor of the
New York Tribune,
concluding that the war was hopeless, announced in his influential editorials that the North was ready to restore “the Union as it was.” That was tantamount to saying that the Emancipation Proclamation, which the editor had so vigorously urged on the President, should be dropped and that mediation by England, France, or even Switzerland, if offered “in a conciliatory spirit,” would be welcomed. Greeley had come under the influence of an unstable mining speculator, William Cornell (“Colorado”) Jewett, just back from France with a mediation proposal from Napoleon III, and, flushed with enthusiasm, the editor dashed off to Washington to enlist the French minister, Henri Mercier, in his cause. He found the President noncommittal, and Charles Sumner, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, said that the Union armies needed another chance for victory. But Greeley was not discouraged, and he told his fellow editor, Henry J. Raymond, of the
New York Times,
that he intended to bring the war to a close by mediation. When Raymond asked what the President had to say about his scheme, he replied: “You’ll see ... that I’ll drive Lincoln into it.”