January 16, 1815–January 9, 1872
HIGHEST RANK:
Union General
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN:
Capricorn
NICKNAMES:
Old Brains, Old Woodenhead
WORDS TO REMEMBER:
“War, on the smallest scale, is not without its horrors; and even in this by-place of the earth, many a suffering female and helpless orphan live to call down the vengeance of heaven upon the heads of profligate statesmen who involve nations in useless and unnecessary wars.” (in La Paz, California, during the Mexican War)
In March 1865, four very powerful men met on a vessel moored off City Point, Virginia, to discuss how best to expedite the collapse of the rebellion. They were Abraham Lincoln, Admiral David Porter, Lieutenant General Ulysses Grant, and Major General William T. Sherman. One particular officer was conspicuous for his absence: Henry Halleck. He was chief of staff and, before that, general in chief, two titles that have “Gosh, I’m important!” written all over them. So why were the president and his military chiefs treating him like the unhygienic guy who never gets invited anywhere?
The short answer, perhaps, is that he simply wasn’t needed. Halleck had long since developed a rare and peculiar talent for accreting significance while simultaneously reducing accountability, a process that made him a fixture of the Lincoln administration who was as familiar as he was inert. By the war’s waning months, he was like a creaky floorboard that was easier to walk around than to replace.
As the Civil War raged on, Union general Henry Halleck found the time to translate and publish a French military text. No wonder so many of his colleagues despised him.
That such a situation had come to pass was shocking, given Halleck’s credentials. He was born (along with a twin sister who died shortly after birth) the first of a large brood in Westernville, New York, to descendants of some of the state’s oldest families. Though pressured to help run the family farm, Henry had dreams of going far afield—dreams that required an education to fulfill. The result was a very ugly impasse with his stubborn father, Joseph Halleck, a hard-bitten sort who had little use for the intellectual life and even less for a son who wanted it. With the sponsorship of his grandfather and a very understanding uncle, Henry managed to get the education he craved, but at the price of a relationship with Dad. Until well into adulthood, he had dropped “Halleck” from his official name, answering only to Wager (pronounced “Way-gur”), which was his mother’s maiden name. As for Joseph—his eldest son never mentioned him again.
When Halleck entered West Point, he had an impressive amount of learning under his belt, including a stint at Union College. But he had also succumbed to the inflexibility that had made his father so easy to hate. Accordingly, much of his time at the academy was spent in judgment of his fellow cadets, most of whom showed a sincere disdain for sobriety that the uptight Halleck found repugnant. He soldiered on manfully, however, and showed a level of intellectual acumen that was truly striking, excelling in virtually every subject. So exemplary was his performance, in fact, that the faculty made him an assistant professor of chemistry six months before his graduation. He ranked third in the class of 1839, earning a coveted appointment in the engineers.
His first year after graduation was spent teaching under the esteemed and infamous Dennis Hart Mahan, West Point’s demanding professor of military and civil engineering. A bona fide celebrity in military circles, Mahan was an ideal (if crabby) first mentor for Halleck, who would go on to do all the things he had once dreamt of as a young man, and much more. Halleck had a brilliant analytical mind that got stronger with all the exercise he gave it: designing and building fortifications in New York Harbor, speaking before Congress on the state of the nation’s defenses, teaching at the Lowell Institute in Boston, traveling to France to learn about that country’s renowned techniques in defensive architecture, and publishing a book that made him a military star, Elements of Military Art and Science. By the outbreak of war with Mexico, he had built himself into a one-man brain trust and one of the army’s most admired engineering virtuosos. No wonder they called him “Old Brains.”
He was sent to California in 1846 via a lengthy, storm-swept sea voyage around Cape Horn. Once there, he set about fortifying Monterey and even got to fight meager Mexican forces for control of the state. But Halleck made his biggest mark away from the shooting, serving as the military government’s secretary of state in California and lieutenant governor of Mazatlan. For all these extraordinary services, he was awarded a brevet at the conclusion of the war and went on to play a leading role in California’s early history. Having taken to the rough-hewn territory that had underwhelmed him at first sight, Halleck became indispensable to California—a scholarly entrepreneur whose training, education, and drive made him a founding father of the state that would one day be America’s largest by population. In addition to maintaining his engineering duties as inspector of lighthouses and fortifications, he immersed himself in the study of law and even helped to write the California constitution before resigning his commission in 1854. He proved even more dynamic in civilian clothes, becoming a partner in the state’s largest law firm, a very successful businessman, and the author of groundbreaking books on such scintillating topics as mining law. Even his choice in brides was meant to impress: In addition to being sixteen years his junior and an accomplished equestrienne, Elizabeth Hamilton was the granddaughter of Alexander Hamilton, founding father and Aaron Burr–nemesis. It seemed Old Brains could do no wrong.
All of which goes a long way toward explaining why he was considered such an asset by Union authorities at the beginning of the Civil War. After Halleck’s return to the army, Lincoln made him a major general and in autumn 1861 sent him to St. Louis. His first assignment—cleaning up the outrageous administrative mess into which his predecessor, John Frémont, had sunk the Department of the Missouri—was ideally suited to Halleck’s managerial genius. After presiding as department commander over men like Ulysses Grant and John Pope, whose successful campaigns made the West a place of Union hope and victory, Halleck took the field himself for the advance on Corinth, Mississippi, in spring 1862. In truth, advance is probably the wrong word. It was more like a crawl. Nevertheless, a key rail junction had been captured; while his critics gasped at the fact that an enemy army was allowed to escape intact, Halleck was openly patting himself on the back for having taken a juicy target with such little loss of life.
If this was an indication of what Halleck was like in his first command over an army in the field, Lincoln didn’t seem to notice. Unlike the eastern theater of operations, things in the West had been going the North’s way, and Halleck was in ultimate command. Besides, he was Old Brains, the guy everybody looked up to as the egghead with the answers. For these reasons, the president called Halleck to Washington in July 1862 to assume the position of general in chief, previously held by the venerable Winfield Scott and, more recently, by George McClellan. The president, by his own admission no military man, needed an advisor who could span the gulf between civilian leadership and military expertise—a multifaceted director who would explain strategy, lead officers with firmness and charisma, and shape war policy in a time of momentous national crisis.
What Lincoln got was … well, something else. For years, Halleck had been convinced of his own superiority, a hubris supported by numerous impressive accomplishments. Now, imbued with supreme power, he dreaded suggesting that he wasn’t all that. Fear of failure stalked him, nudging him into a strange sort of effort: He would use his authority to move responsibility onto the shoulders of others. A consummate intellectual, Halleck warmed to the role of advisor. It carried no burden of culpability. It allowed him to give full vent to the theories and cognitive efforts that had preoccupied him, and it put him into contact with the officers whose armies would smash their way to bloody victory. It conveniently left him out of the line of fire when it came time for heads to roll.
But Lincoln wanted a leader, not a poser. And, though Halleck’s presence was like having a professor of military history around, Old Brains soon proved to be Old Bane. He buried himself in minutiae, a quality that had its merits when trying to whip the ungainly Northern armies into shape, but such pedantic pursuits were lost in the big picture, where Lincoln needed him most. Moreover, the tactics whose elucidation had made Halleck famous were quickly becoming obsolete in the face of a civil war increasingly decided by modern wonders like the telegraph, railroad, and the rifled musket. Halleck, the stern disciplinarian with a faith in dogma, began to look like a relic and a martinet, and worse, the ones who were making him look that way were the sort of fellows he once derided as boors, slackers, or amateurs. Chief among them were Grant, whom Halleck once thought a poor excuse for an officer, and Sherman, who had crossed tempers with Halleck back in California and would learn to loathe Old Brains with volcanic intensity Men like these fought from the hip, making things up as they went along and sometimes ignoring the rules that had made Halleck a legend. But more important, they led within killing distance of the firing line—another fact that separated them from “Old Woodenhead.” And, as indicated by his relentless refusal to travel to front lines only a few miles away, it was a contrast that clearly didn’t bother him.
All of this provided more than enough reason to question why on earth Halleck was maintained as the highest-ranking officer in the land. But the worst thing about him was his complete lack of firm supervision. Halleck’s deference to his subordinates was simply weird. McClellan, a fellow engineer who was much younger but far more charismatic, held Halleck’s awe like a magician before a mystified onlooker, absolutely undermining the older officer’s capacity to assume command over him. Other generals were just as unlikely to get cut-and-dried orders. “You must judge for yourself,” he was fond of wiring to them. “In regard to the operations of your own army,” he once told Joseph Hooker, “you can best judge when and where it can move to the greatest advantage.” And so it went, month after month. “Make the particular dispositions that you deem proper.” “Your army is free to act as you deem proper.” “Do not be influenced by any dispatch here against your own judgment. Regard them as suggestions only.” Here’s a winner: “You have the same discretion in executing orders communicated through me that I have in sending them.” But the quote that really says it all: “I don’t like to subject myself to the charge of impertinent meddling.”
What he lacked in assertiveness he made up for in animus. Having once been wealthy from his California ventures, he began to find it hard to support his family and his lifestyle on a military salary. This and the burdens of his office began to wear on his patience, making him notoriously irritable—to everyone, high and low, congressmen and corporals alike. Even foreigners caught his wrath: Once, on the steps of the Capitol, Halleck got into an argument with a Brit over the identity of the enormous new building. When the fellow attempted to defuse the situation by proffering his card, Halleck took it, threw it to the ground, and walked away.
At any rate, Lincoln eventually had a solution for the Halleck predicament. He demoted him to chief of staff under Ulysses Grant, who had been made commander in chief of all the Union armies in March 1864. That way, Halleck could still be squeezed for his excellent clerking abilities while lessening the impact of his damnable lassitude. It wasn’t a perfect solution; indeed, the public continued to heap derision upon Old Woodenhead, dismissing him as less than useless. But it served the administration until peace could be secured.
Halleck proved difficult after the war as well, when he was put in charge of the Military Division of the James. From his headquarters in Richmond, Halleck acted as inflexibly as ever, making enemies among the freedmen and causing much gnashing of teeth up in Washington. He was eventually reassigned to his beloved California and then to the Division of the South. He died in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1872, and remains the highest-ranking Northern general of the Civil War to have been all but forgotten.
HALE AND HARDY HALLECK
The Confederate invasion of Maryland that culminated in the climactic Battle of Antietam was a troubled time for the Union. Northern armies had been routed at Second Bull Run, the North seemed doomed to a perpetual defensive stance, and George McClellan was back in charge of the Army of the Potomac, despite the fact that Lincoln and his cabinet were suspicious of his ability. To make matters worse, the new general in chief, Henry Halleck, was already making enemies—McClellan chief among them. But there was another, lesser-known factor at work: Halleck was laid up with a debilitating case of hemorrhoids. Worse, he was treating the affliction with opium, which exacerbated his already weakened state, restricting him to a couch for most of the day and transforming his command anxieties into depression.
Commander of All Lincoln’s Armies As John Marszalek explains in, the stress seems to have led to a self-perpetuating cycle. If the hemorrhoids let up, they were replaced by crippling bouts of diarrhea and constipation, further ruining the general’s ability and self-confidence, and leading him to rely on more opium, alcohol, and tobacco. Tragically, it wasn’t long before the poor guy had become a balding, pasty, bug-eyed bundle of nerves with a contentious demeanor and a habit of absently scratching his elbow. No wonder he was irritable.
PRIORITIES
Scholarship was Henry Halleck’s first love, and not even war could change that. Saddled with responsibilities as general in chief that he usually found draining, and hoping to supplement his income, Halleck devoted time to a project he’d been working on for years: the translation of Henri Jomini’s Vie politique et militaire de Napoléon. It was a monumental accomplishment—and its publication in 1864, needless to say, did nothing to quell the widespread belief that Lincoln’s top general wasn’t exactly putting his nose to the grindstone. As longtime critic Count Adam Gurowski snapped, “What an inimitable narrow-minded pedant. If Halleck had brains, he would have realized that, during war, he could not have an hour leisure for translation.”
FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES
What little exercise Halleck could get was taken in Washington’s Lafayette Park, where he liked to stroll and ponder the issues and challenges that confronted him. Unfortunately, he once allowed his mind to wander until the city’s 10:00 curfew came and went. By the time he realized what had happened, he was locked in the park with only two options: escape somehow, or sleep within the park’s confines, no doubt to be awakened the following morning like some poor hobo—a story that was sure to make the papers. Given his puttylike physique, however, Old Brains would never have made it out were it not for the fact that he encountered a private who was similarly imprisoned. The soldier soon found himself standing on the shoulders of Honest Abe’s general in chief to get over the fence and find some help. From that night on, the fellow had a high-ranking guardian angel named Henry Halleck.
DON’T HOLD BACK, FELLAS
So many great things to say about Henry Halleck, so little time.
“Lincoln’s military clown.”—Count Adam Gurowski
“Little more than a first-rate clerk.”—Abraham Lincoln
“Put Halleck in the command of 20,000 men, and he will not scare three setting geese from their nests.”—Senator Benjamin Wade, on placing Halleck in charge of Washington’s defenses
“He, in short, is a moral coward, worth but little except as a critic and director of operations, though intelligent and educated.… [Halleck] originates nothing, anticipates nothing … takes no responsibility, plans nothing, suggests nothing, is good for nothing.”—Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles
“A great sinner against the mass of respectable mediocrities.”
—Admiral John Dahlgren
“Probably the greatest scoundrel and most bare-faced villain in America.”
—Secretary of War Edwin Stanton