CHAPTER 23
Thirty noted thieves and pickpockets of New York have sent a formal protest to the metropolitan police board against the disgrace inflicted upon them by placing the pictures of Davis, Cobb, Toucey, Floyd, and other public villains alongside of their own in the rogues gallery.
—SPRINGFIELD WEEKLY REPUBLICAN, AUGUST 3, 1861
Lincoln ~ Tyler ~ Buchanan ~ Pierce ~ Fillmore
Abraham Lincoln was fighting a war to preserve the Union. His success depended on the status of the border states, where the Union now had tenuous control. Any agitation over the slavery question could easily turn the tide, and so the president preferred to avoid it, for now. But the question could not be skirted entirely. American military forces operating in the South were encountering slaves and being forced to decide: Should they be freed or returned to their masters? Could they be put to work for the Union in some way?
The summer session of Congress had passed the First Confiscation Act, divesting owners of their slaves when used to assist the rebellion. Shortly thereafter, General John C. Fremont, Republican nominee for president in 1856, took it upon himself to emancipate all of the slaves in Missouri belonging to owners who supported the Confederates. Lincoln responded quickly, writing to Fremont that parts of his proclamation “give me some anxiety.” He calmly explained, “I think there is great danger . . . in relation to the confiscation of property, and the liberating slaves of traitorous owners, will alarm our Southern Union friends, and turn them against us—perhaps ruin our rather fair prospect for Kentucky.” He asked Fremont to modify his order to conform to the Confiscation Act. “The Kentucky legislature would not budge till that proclamation was modified,” Lincoln noted, and “a whole company of our [Kentucky] Volunteers threw down their arms and disbanded. I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game. Kentucky gone, we can not hold Missouri, nor as I think, Maryland. These all against us, and the job on our hands is too large for us.”
On August 1, 1861, John Tyler arrived in Richmond to take his seat as a delegate in the Provisional Confederate Congress. Going about his business with the vigor of a much younger man, he presented petitions from his constituents and focused on the issue of Confederate coinage, weights, and measures. Tyler also proposed and chaired a committee “to drive Union forces from Virginia waters.” Their findings were sent to the secretary of war and the commander of the navy.
Late that summer a messenger arrived on horseback at Sherwood Forest. “Mr. President, you are elected, sir! You are elected!” Tyler, who had last been before the people as a candidate for vice president, had won his race for a seat in the permanent Congress of the Confederate States of America. The Richmond Examiner noted, “John Tyler, the patriot sage and statesman of Virginia, receives a majority of three hundred and eight-five votes over his principal competitor . . . and a majority of sixty-six over the combined vote” of his opponents. “The vote in Richmond is indeed a triumph. The friends of Mr. Tyler resorted to no unusual effort or appliances in his behalf. They were content to trust his claims to the good sense and intelligence of the people.”
It made headlines around the country, the news that a former president had been elected to continue his service to the Confederacy. Meanwhile, other former presidents took a shot from the press when a Vermont couple had triplets and wrote to the sitting president to name them. Lincoln forwarded the request to the War Department. The names that came back were Abraham Lincoln, Gideon Welles, and Simon Cameron. One newspaper printed that it was in bad taste to name babies after the living. After all, “How many innocent young chaps have been disgraced by the odium of such names as James Buchanan and Frank Pierce?”
On September 16, Millard Fillmore responded to a request that he republish his presidential letters ordering troops to Charleston Harbor, especially his curt dismissal of South Carolina’s governor. “Those who have succeeded me in the administration, and who have pursued a different course, might infer that I intended to censure them for not nipping rebellion in the bud as I did, instead of leaving it to bear fruit, and scatter its baneful seeds throughout the land,” he said, a thinly veiled attack on Buchanan. But “knowing the embarrassments under which the administration is laboring and feeling that for the sake of our common country nothing should be done to weaken the confidence of the public in its wisdom . . . I must respectfully advise against it.”
While Fillmore was careful not to undermine the war effort, Franklin Pierce arrived in Kentucky on a supposed mission of the opposite purpose. Henry McFarland, a newspaper editor in Concord, New Hampshire, wrote Secretary of War Cameron about Pierce’s trip. “There is very general suspicion here that his mission there is not one friendly to the government. If the government has any way to observe his motions I hope it will do so.” Cameron brought it to the president.
“I think it will be well that P. is away from the N.H. people,” Lincoln responded. “He will do less harm anywhere else; and, by when he has gone, his neighbors will understand him better.” In the fall, Pierce arrived in Michigan, in “the fulfillment of a long and cherished purpose to visit the Great West.” While Lincoln dismissed Pierce’s journey, not every member of the administration would be so sanguine.
For now, the president had greater worries than Franklin Pierce’s travel schedule. As he told Nicolay, Fremont was ready to rebel, Salmon Chase was despairing, Simon Cameron “utterly ignorant,” totally incompetent, and “openly discourteous.” Financially, credit had been exhausted at St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Springfield, that day’s overdraft being $12 million. Chase advised that the government’s latest line of credit would be exhausted in eleven days, and there were “immense” numbers of claims that required congressional auditing. Militarily, Kentucky had been invaded by the Confederates, Missouri “virtually seized,” and instead of preparing to conquer along the Mississippi, the Army of the West seemed more likely to be forced to defend St. Louis.
One of Fillmore’s most faithful Washington correspondents was Isaac Newton, commissioner of agriculture. On October 14 Newton wrote, “We are very quiet here today but looking for a battle. Every hour the Rebels as drawn-up in a line for battle . . . our forces are ready to meet them at any moment.”
A poorly planned operation in northern Virginia resulted in the Battle of Ball’s Bluff, which claimed the life of Oregon senator Edward Baker, one of Lincoln’s closest friends. The president would be far from immune from the horrors of a war that would claim 2.5 percent of all Americans. Newton wrote Fillmore, “The loss of General Baker has cast a gloom over the people of this place.”
On October 26, Newton wrote to Fillmore again, saying “things look gloomy here . . . the loss of life . . . in the late battle was dreadful. The slaughter of our men is greater than we have had any account of yet.” Newton was losing confidence in the Union commanders, and he was not alone.
Nicolay, who had been sent to monitor General Fremont, wrote Lincoln: “The universal opinion is that he has entirely failed, and that he ought to be removed.” Lincoln promptly transferred his problematic general.
But when Lincoln had solved a problem with one commander, there would soon be something wrong with another. George McClellan was ascendant. Winfield Scott, who had entered the army during Washington’s presidency, had been elbowed aside, retiring for “health reasons.” McClellan had channeled the northern feeling into an incredible fighting force. By November, the southern head start was erased, and McClellan had three times the men and artillery as his opponents.
But success did not wear well on McClellan. He increasingly felt contempt for political leaders and developed unhealthy beliefs about himself. “I find myself in a new and strange position here,” he wrote to his wife, “President, Cabinet . . . all deferring to me. By some strange operation of magic I seem to have become the power of the land . . . who would have thought when we were married that I should so soon be called upon to save my country?”
In another letter he wrote, “I must save it, and cannot respect anything that is in the way . . . the President cannot or will not see the true state of affairs.” But McClellan, with such a massive advantage over the Confederates, kept his distance, refusing to take his forces into battle. Lincoln, he wrote, was “nothing more than a well meaning baboon” and an “idiot.”
To prod his reluctant general, Lincoln, Seward, and Hay went to McClellan’s house. McClellan was at a wedding, his servant explained, but would return shortly. After around an hour, McClellan came home, ignored the porter who told him of his guests, and passed the room where they were sitting. A half hour later, they sent a servant to remind the general that they were there. The servant returned, telling them that McClellan had gone to bed. On the way home Hay spoke to the president about it, “but he seemed not to have noticed it specially, saying it was better at this time not to be making points of etiquette and personal dignity.” Lincoln would later add, “I will hold McClellan’s horse if he will only bring us success.”
Lincoln would, now and for some time, have to look away from the Army of the Potomac for Union victories. The navy was charged with blockading ten deep sea ports throughout the South, as well as “180 inlets, bays, and river mouths navigable by smaller vessels” across thirty-five hundred miles of coast. With only two southern naval bases, Key West and Hampton Roads, the navy required another. Port Royal, South Carolina, strategically positioned between Savannah and Charleston, was targeted.
Admiral Samuel du Pont ordered his steamships to maneuver in an oval in front of the two fortresses guarding the landing, “pounding them with heavy broadsides while presenting moving targets in return.” Both forts surrendered four hours later. Inadvertently, the Union army that occupied the sea islands in Port Royal Sound found themselves at the head of a great new experiment. The plantation owners had fled, leaving thousands of slaves behind. What would become of them? Eventually, it was decided to put the slaves in charge of the land. Aid workers and missionaries soon found their way to Port Royal, with hopes of preparing the slaves for freedom.
Fillmore was encouraged by these naval successes, “and I trust that when General McClellan moves, he will win such a victory as will break the backbone of the rebellion. I shall wait patiently and anxiously for his first blow.”