Lincoln's Gamble Read online

  As for Lincoln, he scarcely had time to indulge his grief. Even as Willie’s body lay in the Green Room and plans were being formed for the boy’s funeral, the president had to tend to eight-year-old Tad’s own battle with the same illness, moving his work into his son’s room to be closer to the boy, listening for his voice calling for him in the night, and then emerging, his tall frame wrapped in a gown, his bony feet gripped by slippers, to manage the boy’s needs. Tad would eventually recover, but the entire episode—two children stricken (one dead, one deathly ill) and the war going on—was, he said, his life’s “greatest trial.”

  A torrential rain arrived the day of Willie’s funeral, winds ripping through the capital, destroying trees and pelting the mourners as their caravan moved through Washington to a vault at the top of a hill. Here Willie’s body was placed—temporarily, it was presumed, until it could accompany his parents back to Illinois, and eventually it did, though only when the body of the murdered Abe Lincoln made the journey to Springfield in 1865. So, now, in July 1862, moving to the rhythm of another funeral dirge, this one to observe the burial of yet another innocent victim of the war’s pestilence, even as the federal army retreated from defeat after defeat, the casualty toll approaching 150,000 on each side, 300,000 overall, how could Lincoln not feel a deep and painful association with his own recent loss?

  The president’s two professional companions on this passage formed a stark contrast. Gideon Welles was a Connecticut Yankee, a big, tall, white-whiskered figure sporting a comically ill-fitting brown wig that shook out of place when he spoke. Lincoln affectionately called him Father Neptune. A onetime Jacksonian Democrat who read for the law but pursued a career as a journalist, Welles had broken with the Democrats in the 1850s over slavery, joining the emerging Republican Party and starting a new newspaper, the Hartford Evening Press, which promoted Republican ideas. A member of the Connecticut legislature, he was the Republican candidate for governor in 1856, though he received only 10 percent of the vote.

  Four years later, when Welles met Lincoln, the future president was fresh from the commanding success of his Cooper Union speech in New York City, where he had introduced himself to the Eastern political establishment and carefully laid out the argument for the federal government’s regulation of slavery in the Western territories. While visiting Hartford, Lincoln sought out Welles with the hope of securing his support at the upcoming Republican nominating convention in Chicago. The two sat outside Brown and Gross’s Bookstore at the corner of Main and Asylum Streets, drawing attention from bystanders who had recently become aware of Lincoln’s growing reputation, pushed forward first by the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 and then by the Cooper Union speech. Lincoln’s lanky form, two-thirds legs, shrank when he sat so that he faced his host more or less eye to eye. Yet even with Lincoln in this pose, Welles found him “every way large, brain included.” The following day in his paper, Welles gave readers a nuanced picture of the man whose rapid fame had invited both curiosity and caricature. “He is not Apollo,” Welles offered, “but he is not Caliban.” Lincoln “was made where the material for strong men is plenty” with a “huge, tall frame . . . loosely thrown together.” Still, “his countenance shows intellect, generosity, good nature.”

  Going into his meeting with Lincoln, Welles had favored Salmon P. Chase, the Ohio governor, for the Republican nomination. Like Welles, Chase was a strong and outspoken opponent of slavery and was conservative on government spending and the protection of states’ rights, two subjects that the Connecticut reformer, as a former Democrat, found attractive. But on this visit to Hartford, Lincoln deeply impressed Welles. To Welles, Lincoln was an accomplished speaker, “earnest, strong, honest, simple in style, and clear as crystal in his logic.”

  Welles switched his support to Lincoln at the Chicago convention, and Lincoln, as president-elect, rewarded him with the post of navy secretary. This political appointment was aimed at getting a New Englander into the cabinet, and Welles had little familiarity with naval affairs. Lincoln once joked that he himself at least knew the difference between a stern and a bow, more, he ventured, than Welles knew. Still, Welles performed capably at his post, earning Lincoln’s respect, and he kept him in wise counsel.

  Welles’s disdain for slavery led him to a pronounced dislike for the South in general. An inveterate diarist—certainly the most valuable among the Lincoln administration insiders—he was dismissive of what he came to see as the “diseased imagination” of the Southern landowners, little Ivanhoes inspired by reading too many Walter Scott novels, thinking themselves “cavaliers, imbued with chivalry, a superior class, not born to labor but to command,” who held the North in contempt as weak, religious, moral, dull. Years later, at the close of the war, he acknowledged its inevitability. “[Southerners] came ultimately to believe themselves a better race,” he penned in an 1865 entry. “. . . Only a war could wipe out this arrogance and folly.”

  Seward was Welles’s superior in every measurement but size. A short, thin reed of a man sporting a painful-looking beak for a nose (Henry Adams found him reminiscent of a “wise macaw”), he was dashing and brilliant, known for throwing off restraint in favor of the bold statement of principle or at least appearing to do so, his political face blending so well with his private face that it was hard, Adams wondered, to tell “how much was nature and how much was mask.”

  As a senator from New York, and former governor of the Empire State, Seward had been the favorite over either Chase or Lincoln for the 1860 Republican presidential nomination. Seward had planned for it. In his mind, and in the mind of many others, it would serve as the much-anticipated cap to a career that had been animated by his forthright and eloquent opposition to slavery. In a justly famous speech delivered on the Senate floor in 1850, Seward had argued that a “Higher Law” was superior to the slavery-tolerating Constitution, a “law of nature and of nations” that had been “bestowed upon them by the Creator of the universe,” and he implored his Senate colleagues to be most faithful to this law, even when it conflicted with the nation’s founding document. “We cannot . . . be either true Christians or real freemen,” he concluded, “if we impose on another a chain that we defy all human power to fasten on ourselves.”

  Such claims naturally put Seward at odds with Southern leaders, who rightly felt the New Yorker’s finger wagging at them, and they traded verbal jabs with him throughout the decade, the worst exchange, perhaps, coming after the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision of 1857, when Seward charged that President James Buchanan and Chief Justice Roger Taney had conspired in that infamous ruling, which declared that Congress had no power to legislate a ban on slavery in US territories (invalidating the Missouri Compromise of 1820) and African-Americans (slave or free) had no rights under the Constitution of the United States. Seward’s charge of collusion, which compared Buchanan and the justices to England’s Charles I and his courtiers, “[subverting] the statutes of English liberty,” prompted Buchanan to declare that Seward was not welcome at the White House, and years later Chief Justice Taney acknowledged that if Seward had been elected president in 1860, Taney would have refused to administer him the oath of office.

  Undaunted, Seward continued to let his mouth outpace his discretion. A few months after the Scott decision, he declared that the growing sectional conflict over slavery put the country on the path of “an irrepressible conflict” where the choice would be “either entirely a slaveholding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation.” It almost seemed as though Seward were saying to the South, “Bring it on,” an explicit rejection of the accommodationist approach of those who argued that the clash of wills between North and South was but “accidental, unnecessary,” the work of fanatic fringes on each side that would surely prove “ephemeral.” In fact, Seward’s tone misrepresented his views. Like Lincoln, he favored a gradual, legislative end to slavery, but he was a confrontational speaker, and rare for a Northern politician in this time, he dared to challenge the South, mistakenly
thinking that disunion was not a serious possibility, that the threat of secession was nothing more than a bluff.

  As the 1860 convention neared, Seward had tried to broaden his appeal by sounding more moderate, assuring delegates that he felt the South was “sovereign on the subject of slavery” within its own borders. But the past continued to haunt him. Adopting his colorful phrase as their own, members of the New York delegation supporting him branded themselves “the Irrepressibles,” making it even harder for the New York senator to escape his lively rhetoric, and this while the rest of the gathered delegates in Chicago—an amalgamation of Free-Soilers, Know-Nothings, Nativists, and former Democrats who made up the nascent Republican Party—saw a clash with the South as something they wanted very much to avoid, not encourage by nominating the man Southerners most resented.

  Despite their common views on ending slavery, Welles and Seward were antagonists, and their animosity predated their service in the Lincoln administration. For his part, Welles found Seward unattractively ambitious, an opportunist whose employment of Thurlow Weed, a cigar-chomping political boss, to manage his political career struck the New Englander as crass. Seward, in turn, resented Welles for his support of Lincoln at the nominating convention, where the future navy secretary helped lead not only Connecticut but all New England away from supporting Seward. Once Lincoln was elected, Seward opposed the appointment of Welles to the cabinet, preferring that Lincoln select only former Whigs, not ex-Democrats such as Welles.

  The tension between Welles and Seward had a more recent history, too. In 1861, in what became the opening scene of the Civil War, federal troops stranded at Fort Sumter in hostile South Carolina had been in desperate need of provisions. Welles ordered the USS Powhatan to be readied from its pier in Brooklyn for service in supplying the South Carolina fort. At the same time, however, Seward was scheming for the same ship to help protect Fort Pickens at Santa Rosa Island, Florida. While Welles was navy secretary, Seward assured the president that “Uncle Gideon” would not mind Seward’s meddling. Yet Welles did of course mind, and when he heard of it, the whole plan had to be scuttled. The episode only confirmed Welles’s feelings toward Seward, whom he thereafter referred to as “the trickster.” Even after Seward died in 1872, Welles could not contain his wrath over this experience and others, publishing a small book in which he vented his rage. In Lincoln and Seward, Welles accused the onetime Lincoln rival of entering “upon his duties [as secretary of state] with the impression . . . that he was to be the de facto president.”

  Welles’s opinion of Seward was shared by others in the Lincoln cabinet, particularly Chase. Seward was pictured as an arrogant, self-aggrandizing figure who could be charming, yes, but whose flair for the dramatic often offended more people than it pleased. Seward even dared to show his haughtiness to Lincoln, criticizing the president to his face with the air of one convinced that he could have done a better job. Yet Seward’s brilliance was undeniable and his input critical. After Lincoln’s nomination, he became a loyal supporter of the Republican candidate and declared himself a Unionist first—joining in Lincoln’s view that preservation of the Union was the first and only important goal. Working side by side with Lincoln on the writing of the president’s first inaugural address, Seward, in a reversal of roles, softened Lincoln’s text, making it less combative toward the South, removing the president’s threat to reclaim federal property seized by the secessionists, and moderating the tone Lincoln had assumed toward the Supreme Court over the Dred Scott decision.

  Seward even contributed to one of the most powerful statements Lincoln ever made: the closing paragraph of his first inaugural address, which the president had initially penned as a challenge to the rebels: “With you,” he wrote, in the tone of a bark, “and not with me, is the solemn question of ‘Shall it be peace, or a sword?’ ” Seward suggested replacing it with an outstretched hand: “We must not be aliens or enemies but fellow countrymen and brethren.” He also proposed a commanding image of optimism and reconciliation: “mystic chords . . . proceeding from so many battle fields and patriot graves,” which Seward, writing for Lincoln, imagined “will yet again harmonize in their ancient music when breathed upon by the guardian angel of the nation.” Lincoln, the better poet, improved on this image to make it into one of history’s most commanding lines of political oratory—looking forward to the moment when “the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” But it was Seward who pushed Lincoln toward it.

  So the carriage ride to James Stanton’s funeral on that thirteenth day of July 1862 was not exactly a meeting of friends, more accurately the convening of three men of character thrown together by both ambition and circumstance, each of them deeply connected to, and responsible for, the nation’s great test: Welles in charge of the naval campaign, Seward as chief diplomat, and Lincoln at the center of it all. The war, to put it mildly, was not going well.

  The Union Army had met with considerable success in the winter and spring of 1862, securing control of Missouri and western Tennessee, capturing New Orleans, and defeating the Confederates at the massive battle of Shiloh. But the Confederates had since regrouped and humiliated the North in the Virginia peninsula, rendering General George B. McClellan’s strategy there a failure. The former engineering instructor at West Point, himself a West Pointer, had risen to fame off an early battle success in the western region of Virginia. Out of this the Pennsylvania native had earned the nickname Young Napoléon, but the moniker fit him more favorably as a comparison of inflated egos than as a comparison of tactical brilliance. As an officer, McClellan was good at one thing: organizing and training troops. But there it all stopped. Like a skilled stage actor who freezes in the opening-night lights, McClellan could rehearse but not perform. Worse, he blamed his failures on others, repeatedly overestimating the strength of his enemy and stalling for more time, then pleading for more troops, receiving them, and pleading for even more time. He elicited an impressive loyalty from his soldiers, who revered him as a “soldier’s general,” probably because his passivity helped keep them out of danger, which may be a virtue for an officer but only if not taken to the extreme. Frustrated by his general, in March Lincoln relieved McClellan from his position as general in chief of the Union Army, still leaving him to lead the Army of the Potomac, the primary Union fighting unit in the Eastern Theater of the war. Now the failure of that army’s Peninsula Campaign, aimed at capturing the Confederate capital, Richmond, had cast a dark shadow over the North’s prospects. Bungled by McClellan, it was probably the last chance for the Union to make it a short war.

  McClellan’s failures were failures of courage. He could not abide risk. But they were also, to some degree, failures of intention, and with him, the two fit comfortably. Like many of the West Point officers serving the Union, McClellan was a Democrat. He did not share the Republican Party’s antipathy toward the South, nor did he see the eradication of slavery as a worthy war goal. Slavery should end, he believed, but only gradually, not forcibly, and with respect rendered to both master and slave. After the war, he pronounced “a prejudice for my own race,” adding that he couldn’t imagine learning “to like the odor of either Billy goats or niggers,” but such racist pronouncements were not in his mind inconsistent with a repugnance for slavery.

  McClellan was particularly uncomfortable with bringing a war against his own people. Throughout his life, he had found himself inclined toward Southern culture and Southern thinking, preferring it to Northern ways, even as he held firm in his belief that the South’s decision to secede was wrong. He believed in the integrity of the American nation. Thus, while he fought for the Union Army, he fought primarily for the cause of union, wanting to see the country restored to its prewar geography and seeing the clash between North and South as essentially a pique bro
ught on by “ultras,” with both sides equally to blame. Naturally such a confusion of sympathies led him to a stuttering war plan. He wanted to successfully prosecute the battle against the South, but he wanted to limit the risk, too, both for his own soldiers and, ironically, for the “enemy” as well. It was a rebellion, and he intended that it remain a rebellion, not a full-scale war. To radicals and abolitionists, even to some in Lincoln’s cabinet, such as Stanton, the McClellan stutter was something just short of treason.

  In early July, only days before the funeral of Stanton’s baby, a peeved Lincoln had boarded the steamship Ariel out of Fort Monroe and journeyed to visit McClellan at his Harrison’s Landing, Virginia, headquarters along the James River. The purpose of the visit was to spur the morale of the troops involved in the disappointing Peninsula effort. On that, the trip was a success, the soldiers cheering the presidential visit in competition with the sounds of cannons fired in a show of enthusiasm. But Lincoln was also there to confront McClellan on his lack of success. The president had been pained by the army’s failures, and it was taking a toll on him. He was losing sleep and had lost interest in eating. “I cannot take my vittles regular,” Lincoln had said, when pressed on his increasingly gaunt appearance. “I kind of just browse around.”