Rise to Greatness by David Von Drehle Read Free Book Online Page B

lines southward, out of the border states, and thus would bind Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri more tightly to the Union.
    The question was not what to do, but how to make it happen. At the embarrassing cabinet meeting on New Year’s Eve, Bates had urged Lincoln to take charge of the army himself, rather than defer to military men who were just as inexperienced in large-scale warfare as their commander in chief was. “We have no general who has any experience in the handling of large armies—not one who has ever commanded 10,000 under fire,” Bates observed. He suggested that the president appoint a personal staff of professional soldiers, “two or three or four,” who could translate his thinking into crisp military orders. Anyone who refused to fall in line should be cashiered. “By law, [you] must command,” Bates summed up, speaking as one lawyer to another. “The Nation requires it, and History will hold [you] accountable.”
    As a matter of constitutional theory, Bates was on solid ground. The president was commander in chief. But Bates’s prescription ignored important political realities, and therefore his advice was of limited value to a man who ate, slept, and breathed political realities. For Lincoln, the military battlefield was inseparable from the political battlefield; he drilled this idea into his aides until they could channel the president’s philosophy. “Every war is begun, dominated, and ended by political considerations,” explained John Nicolay and John Hay, Lincoln’s faithful secretaries. “Without a nation, without a Government, without money or credit, without popular enthusiasm which furnishes volunteers, or public support which endures conscription, there could be no army and no war.… War and politics, campaign and statecraft, are Siamese twins, inseparable and interdependent.”
    George McClellan was a colossal political reality, built up during the previous months into a hero for millions of Americans. He had created the Army of the Potomac, and now he was his soldiers’ idol. The Constitution might say that he was Lincoln’s subordinate, but political reality decreed him to be an independent power whose influence rivaled—and perhaps exceeded—Lincoln’s own. Elected by the smallest plurality in American history, Lincoln was “a minority president,” as he put it himself, while McClellan was “a majority general.” And despite Lincoln’s insistence on action, his senior commander was determined not to be rushed.
    True, McClellan’s deliberate pace had begun to tarnish his star, but Lincoln’s popularity was battered as well. He had infuriated ardent Republicans by removing Frémont, the party’s original standard-bearer, from command in Missouri. Lincoln had outraged bellicose patriots by apologizing to Great Britain over the Trent affair. He was too conservative for radical Republicans and too radical for conservative Democrats.
    Worst of all, the country was losing hope. Public pessimism was quickly eroding the president’s power. Congressman Henry L. Dawes, of Massachusetts, writing to his wife as the new year dawned, described the widespread lack of faith in Lincoln’s administration: “Times are exceedingly dark and gloomy—I have never seen a time when they were so much so. Confidence in everybody is shaken to the very foundation— The credit of the Country is ruined—its arms impotent, its Cabinet incompetent, its servants rotten, its ruin inevitable.”
    In such a weakened condition, Lincoln lacked the leverage necessary to budge an obstacle as weighty as General McClellan and unstick his motionless armies. No matter what Bates might believe, two or three or four presidential aides with West Point credentials would hardly alter that situation. Even so, fate had offered Lincoln a tiny opening: McClellan’s grave illness.
    Disease was rampant in filthy wartime Washington, where churches were hastily converted into hospitals by laying rough planks