CHAPTER 25

We Are Coming, Father Abraham

When the war started, neither Union nor Confederate leaders had the slightest idea of the enormous loss of life they were about to unleash. But in New York City, Elizabeth Blackwell and her sister Emily foresaw the coming holocaust right away. Elizabeth was a friend and student of Florence Nightingale, and she had learned from Nightingale’s experiences in the Crimean War. Elizabeth knew what she was doing better than many men in the medical establishment. The problem was convincing them of that. This was a battle she had been fighting for a decade by then, as the first woman M.D. in America.

Within a week of Lincoln’s call for volunteers in April 1861, the Blackwells began organizing the Women’s Central Association of Relief (WCAR). They held a meeting at Cooper Union where some three thousand New York women volunteered to be trained as nurses and hospital workers.

Elizabeth Blackwell had grown up one of nine children in a loving Congregationalist household in Bristol, England, where her father ran a successful sugar refinery. Despite—or maybe because of—sugar’s direct link to the African slave trade, he became involved in England’s abolition movement. In the summer of 1832, when Elizabeth was eleven, he packed his whole brood aboard a merchant steamer for the twelve-day passage to New York City. They found the city almost deserted, as everyone who could afford it had fled the same dreadful cholera epidemic that twenty-one-year-old Horace Greeley witnessed in his second year as a New Yorker. Mr. Blackwell started the Congress Sugar Refinery, joined Samuel Cox’s congregation, and welcomed American abolitionists like Garrison into his home. Meanwhile, his children stopped eating sugar as their own antislavery gesture.

With his business failing in New York, Blackwell moved the family to Cincinnati, then died of a fever when Elizabeth was seventeen. By the mid-1840s she was saving up to apply to medical school, despite universal advice against it (including from Harriet Beecher Stowe, still living in Cincinnati), since no woman had ever been admitted before. At the time, “female physician” was a euphemism for abortionist. “The gross perversion and destruction of motherhood by the abortionist filled me with indignation, and awakened active antagonism,” Elizabeth later wrote. “That the honorable term ‘female physician’ should be exclusively applied to those women who carried on this shocking trade seemed to me a horror. It was an utter degradation of what might and should become a noble position for women.” One school after another rejected her out of hand until she was admitted, almost on a lark, by the Geneva Medical College in upstate New York. She earned her M.D. in 1849. By the start of the war around two hundred American women, including her sister Emily, had been inspired by her example to get their own degrees.

In the early 1850s Elizabeth returned to New York City to start a practice. “I took good rooms in University Place, but patients came very slowly to consult me. I had no medical companionship, the profession stood aloof, and society was distrustful of the innovation. Insolent letters occasionally came by post, and my pecuniary position was a source of constant anxiety.” She and most of the women doctors she’d inspired found themselves restricted to working only with female patients. In 1857 she and Emily opened the New York Infirmary for Women and Children on Bleecker Street, with Henry Ward Beecher and a few other pillars lending moral support. Although the sisters and their female staff did all the medical and surgical work, they wisely set up an all-male board of “consulting physicians” to help disarm the skeptical and the scandalized.

They used the same approach in 1861, recruiting the Reverend Henry Whitney Bellows, the popular pastor of the Unitarian All Souls Church at Fourth Avenue and East 20th Street, as the male figurehead of the WCAR. Over the summer this developed into the United States Sanitary Commission (USSC), a civilian-run quasi-federal agency. Frederick Law Olmsted signed on as its secretary-general. Julia Ward Howe’s husband, Samuel, also joined.

Initially the men of Washington’s military and medical establishments rebuffed the group. Lincoln himself fretted that they would become “a fifth wheel to the coach.” The Union Army Medical Bureau was a small fiefdom completely unprepared for the coming Armageddon. In April 1861 it included 114 surgeons, 24 of whom left to join the Confederacy. The surgeon general died of old age that May, to be replaced by another old incompetent. The thousands of physicians who soon joined up had little to no military experience; many also lacked basic knowledge of how to deal with the diseases—malaria, smallpox, measles, typhoid, dysentery—that would kill two Union soldiers for every one who died in battle.

That ratio was a significant improvement over former wars. In the Mexican War seven men had died from disease for every one killed on the battlefield; in the Crimean War, Nightingale’s practices had reduced it to four to one. Medical historian Margaret Humphries attributes the improvement to the more than twenty thousand Civil War women who mobilized to make military hospitals—both the field hospitals near the battle lines and the “general hospitals” far behind the lines—as clean and conducive to health as was possible in the 1860s. They served as nurses, cooks, laundresses, and administrators.

Those women did not include the Blackwell sisters. Because they had dared to invade the male realm of the physician, men froze them out of any significant role in the USSC. To recruit nurses the men brought in Dorothea Dix, the crusading New England reformer of asylums for the poor and insane. Dix (no relation to New York’s General Dix) was the very model of the starched Victorian spinster, and she had no medical training to threaten the males’ egos. The “jealousies were too intense for us to assume our true place,” Elizabeth wrote. She and Emily returned to their infirmary. Elizabeth would go back to England after the war. She would actively campaign for social and health reform on a wide array of fronts, usually to the same cold reception that had frustrated her in America. When she died in 1910 her pioneering efforts had largely been forgotten.

Although the Blackwells were ostracized from the movement they’d started, at least Olmsted was in place to carry on. He was appalled to learn that men wounded at Bull Run lay on the battlefield for up to four days before help arrived. He was in Washington when the defeated rabble filled the city. “Human nature has seldom showed itself so degraded,” he wrote. He described the demoralized soldiers as “pale, grimy, with bloodshot eyes, unshaven, unkempt, sullen, fierce, feverish, weak, and ravenous.… They were wearing parts of different uniforms, soiled and dank with dew.” Some huddled like crows “in rows along the curb; others went from house to house begging for food.” Sanitary Commission volunteers fanned out among them, interviewing them about their experiences; Olmsted prepared the resulting Report on the Demoralization of the Volunteers, a blistering denunciation of the political and military leaders—blackguards, knaves, and tyrants, he labeled them—who had flung the men into this disaster and made virtually no plans to treat the wounded. He successfully lobbied to have the aged surgeon general—“a self-satisfied, supercilious, bigoted block-head”—replaced. The army’s medical and sanitation procedures improved immeasurably as the war went on, largely through the constant and fierce criticisms of Olmsted and the USSC.

To whip the post–Bull Run mob into a functioning army, Lincoln called on General George McClellan. Lincoln and McClellan were different in almost every way possible. In photographs the tall, swarthy president towers ludicrously over the stout and fair “Little Mac,” who was of average height for the time, five foot eight, but something about his gamecock demeanor gave the impression he was smaller. Where Lincoln generally looked like his clothes had been thrown on him from a distance, Mac was always impeccably turned out, from his jaunty kepi to his precise little goatee to his gold buttons.

Born into Philadelphia high society, McClellan had entered West Point at fifteen. Among his classmates he associated only with other young gentlemen of breeding, mostly Southerners. He graduated second in his class just in time to go off to the Mexican War in 1846. As a second lieutenant he served under Generals Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott, and Captains Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant. He developed a reputation as a haughty and argumentative popinjay, often contemptuous of his superiors.

After that he became something of a pet of President Pierce’s secretary of war, Jefferson Davis. Bored in the peacetime army, he resigned his commission in 1856, at the age of thirty, and took an executive job with the Illinois Central Railroad, rising rapidly to chairman. (West Point stressed engineering, and many graduates went on to civil engineering and railroading in their civilian careers.) He met Lincoln, did not think highly of him, and put the Illinois Central at the disposal of Stephen Douglas’s campaign in their 1858 senatorial contest. Because the railroad’s financial offices were in New York, McClellan spent much time in the city developing important business and social connections, and he was married there.

After McClellan’s forces successfully routed Confederate troops from western Virginia in the spring of 1861, the Herald and other papers cheered him as the Union’s “Young Napoleon.” Visiting his friends in New York, he had Brady take his portrait with one hand thrust into his jacket; this Napoleonic pose was reproduced as a carte de visite distributed throughout the North.

When Lincoln called him to Washington in July, Little Mac entered the city a conquering hero. Already vainglorious to a fault, he let the huzzahs go to his head. “I find myself in a new & strange position here,” he exulted in a letter to his wife, Ellen. “Presdt, Cabinet, Genl Scott & all deferring to me—by some strange operation of magic I seem to have become the power of the land.” If he wanted to, he playfully wrote her, he could become “Dictator.”

At first he lived up to the great expectations. His initial act was to sweep all the men in uniform out of Washington’s bars and brothels and put them back on the parade ground. He also put down a mutiny by the Highlanders, who wanted to go home to New York and recruit new men to replace the ones who’d fallen. McClellan trained artillery on them, clapped the ringleaders in irons, and as the final humiliation took away their regimental flags. He returned them a month later when the Highlanders showed better discipline. Unlike other military leaders at the start of the war, McClellan approved of the Sanitary Commission’s work and ensured that his army cooperated.

Through that summer and into the fall, McClellan transformed the rabble into a spit-and-polish army that impressed and heartened all who watched it march and drill. He gave the men back their pride and they loved him for it. He seemed to be everywhere at once, trailing a large staff of aides that included one of New York City’s wealthiest men, John Jacob Astor III. Astor retained his civilian status but held the honorary rank of colonel. With him came his valet, his chef, and his steward.

Watching McClellan’s increasingly grand army march around that autumn, banners snapping and fifes tootling, was some of the best entertainment civilians could find in Washington. It helped inspire one visitor, Julia Ward Howe, to pen the lyrics for one of the most popular Civil War anthems. She was on her first visit to Washington in the fall of 1861. She and Samuel stayed at Willard’s and were in a small group who met with Lincoln in one of the White House drawing rooms. As she recalls it, the men did all the talking as usual, while she observed “the sad expression of Mr. Lincoln’s deep blue eyes, the only feature of his face which could be called other than plain.”

In a carriage on a street choked with soldiers, her party began to sing the new song “John Brown’s Body,” which had a curious background. The tune was from an old camp meeting spiritual. Volunteers of a Massachusetts regiment are credited with first singing it as a marching song at the start of the war, with lyrics that referred at first not to the abolitionist martyr but to a Sergeant John Brown among them. Thus the odd lines about John Brown’s knapsack and hanging “Jeff Davis to a tree” and such. As it spread to other units it became associated with Brown the abolitionist and the lyrics morphed into many variations. Now, as Howe’s group sang it, the soldiers cheered, and a member of her party urged her to write new lyrics for the tune.

“I went to bed that night as usual, and slept, according to my wont, quite soundly,” she wrote. “I awoke in the gray of the morning twilight; and as I lay waiting for the dawn, the long lines of the desired poem began to twine themselves in my mind.”

It was “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” First published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1862, it would be sung ubiquitously in the North throughout the war.

Based on intelligence fed him by Allan Pinkerton, McClellan told General Scott and Secretary of War Cameron that a Rebel force of 150,000 was massing around Manassas Junction, and that he must match them with more troops, more guns, more everything. But Pinkerton’s information was very faulty: The Confederates had maybe a third of the force he reported. Scott and Cameron brushed McClellan off. He publicly feuded with Scott, whom he called “a perfect imbecile”; in November, truly sick and tired, Old Fuss and Feathers resigned. He took a train back to New York City, where he lived the rest of the war, dying at West Point in 1866. Cameron would resign in January, to be replaced by Dan Sickles’s friend Edwin Stanton. Bearded like a billy goat and notoriously pigheaded, Stanton would argue often with Lincoln and fellow cabinet members, especially the prickly secretary of the navy, Gideon Welles. But Stanton was a loyal unionist and Lincoln came to depend on him heavily. A Democrat, Stanton would switch to the Republican Party and then gravitate toward the Radical wing. McClellan feuded with him as well, telling Ellen he was “the most depraved hypocrite & villain.”

From the fall of 1861 into the spring of 1862, McClellan expanded his grand Army of the Potomac into the largest and best-equipped fighting force in the Western Hemisphere, but he always found some fresh excuse not to march it south. The longer he delayed, the more frustrated Lincoln, Stanton, and Seward (“a meddlesome, officious, incompetent little puppy”) became with him. McClellan also picked fights with Sumner, whom he detested, and the Radical Republicans, going out of his way to tell them that he would fight to save the Union but never to free the “niggers.” He decided the politicians were his real enemies, not the Confederates. He called Lincoln “an idiot” and “nothing more than a well meaning baboon” and reported to his wife, “I went to the White House shortly after tea where I found ‘the original gorilla,’ about as intelligent as ever. What a specimen to be at the head of our affairs now!”

Finally, responding with greatest reluctance to an ultimatum from the president, McClellan did shift his enormous force of 120,000 men (not the 300,000 he wanted), with forty-four artillery batteries and more than 14,000 draft animals, off the parade ground in March 1862. But rather than hit the Rebels at Manassas and proceed south to Richmond, he devised a flanking maneuver. He would sail his troops in a vast armada, the largest amphibious assault ever assembled, down to the lower Chesapeake Bay, to commence a westward advance up the Virginia Peninsula twenty-five miles to Richmond. The fleet took three weeks to ferry Mac’s massive force the short distance.

Among the units were Sickles’s Excelsior Brigade, the Mozart Regiment, and Meagher’s Irish Brigade. The 61st New York Volunteer Regiment was also in McClellan’s army, led by the boyish-looking Colonel Francis (Frank) Channing Barlow. He was born in 1834 in Brooklyn, to which his Yankee father had just come to be pastor of the First Unitarian Church. Two years later, Pastor Barlow was removed from the pulpit for displays of “mental stress” and abandoned his family. Frank’s mother returned to her home state of Massachusetts and raised her boys at Brook Farm and in Concord. Emerson, Charles Dana, and Margaret Fuller were among Frank’s early mentors. He graduated from Harvard the class valedictorian in 1855 and moved straight to New York, where he tutored college-bound students, including Robert Gould Shaw. After passing the bar he founded his own law firm, while writing occasional legal articles for Greeley and Dana at the Tribune. He socialized in Charles and Maria Daly’s circle, and with the writers and artists they patronized. The latter included Winslow Homer, who happened to be a distant cousin of Frank’s. It was probably through the Dalys that Frank met Arabella Griffith, called Belle. Like Maria Lydig when she met Daly, Belle was an unmarried “spinster” in her midthirties, ten years older than the youthful-looking Barlow. In her diary, Maria calls Frank “Arabella’s boy-husband” and snipes that when they came calling, her maid thought Belle was Frank’s mother.

Frank and Belle were married at St. Paul’s Chapel on April 20, 1861, the evening of the day he enlisted for three months with the 12th New York Volunteer Regiment. He was commissioned a lieutenant despite never having held a gun. Then again, his commanding officer, Colonel Dan Butterfield, had done little more than march around a few parade grounds himself. Butterfield’s father was one of the founders of American Express in 1850. Dan had come to New York City from upstate to run the company’s offices at Hudson and Jay Streets in today’s Tribeca. He was a playboy, a drinking and womanizing buddy of Dan Sickles, and Barlow disliked him.

To compensate for his boyish affect and lack of experience (a fellow officer remarked that Barlow looked like “a highly independent mounted newsboy”), Barlow drilled his men relentlessly. One of his men, Private Charles Fuller, who had rushed from upstate to New York City to sign up, later wrote, “At first, from his exacting requirements and severity he was quite disliked, if not well hated.” When the 61st sailed with McClellan for the Peninsula, the twenty-five-year-old Barlow had been promoted to colonel.

Winslow Homer met up with him on the Peninsula. Born in Boston, Homer had moved to New York City in 1859. He studied at the National Academy of Design a few doors up from Pfaff’s on Broadway, fell in with the artists and bohemians, and began freelancing for Harper’s Weekly. Twenty-five when the war broke out, Homer went to the front as a special artist. He would spend two months on the Peninsula, mostly with New York units, creating dozens of sketches that Harper’s reproduced as engravings. He would dine out for years on his brief time at the front, using his sketches as studies for celebrated paintings like Prisoners from the Front, in which he used Barlow as the model for the haughty young Union officer, and The Briarwood Pipe and Pitching Horseshoes, which immortalized Duryee’s Zouaves.

Olmsted and the Sanitary Commission sailed with McClellan as well. They had converted a handful of steamboats and ferries into hospital ships, staffed with surgeons, wound-dressers, and both male and female nurses. Their main role was to carry the sick and wounded to general hospitals in the North, away from the battlefront. They met stiff resistance from many officers, who feared—not without reason—that if the men were taken too far away from the fighting, they wouldn’t return when they were fit again.

Maria Daly’s friend Harriet Whetten from Staten Island was among the nurses. Daly treated Whetten, who was also still unmarried in her thirties, with condescending fondness. She thought Whetten too “impractical” and flighty to be of any use in the hospitals. “I don’t believe in dilettante nursing,” Daly commented in her diary. “If I were [one of] the boys, I would not want a lady about my sickbed unless she were some motherly person with a snowy-white cap and ample shape. Harriet will never be a motherly-looking person.” As time went on and Whetten continued to serve, Daly would relent somewhat.

Low in the pecking order, volunteers like Whetten mostly did housecleaning, served meals, and offered “motherly” tenderness to the boys. The Peninsula Campaign kept them busy. The men came from the battlefield stuffed into boxcars. In her Peninsula diary, Whetten described one group as “in a wretched condition, their wounds full of maggots, their clothes of vermin & nearly starved.”

Convinced he was facing an army twice the size of his, when in fact the reverse was true, McClellan moved his great force toward Richmond so slowly and gingerly that he earned the nickname “the Virginia Creeper.” As April flowed into May, he kept preparing for an apocalyptic battle that never came, while all of Washington howled. Lincoln complained that “Tardy George” had a bad case of “the slows.” While Lincoln and Stanton grumbled, many of Little Mac’s officers and common soldiers loved him for his caution: Every day he avoided a fight was a good day for them. Halpine had Private Miles O’Reilly sing:

Wid patient toil an’ pityin’ breast

You sought your soldiers’ blood to threasure,

Nor ever tried the cruel test

How much we could endure to measure.

All the New York papers had sent specials to the front; Bennett sent the most—fourteen. Despite the ribbing he’d taken after Bull Run, Raymond was on hand through most of the campaign to boss his Times specials around. That sort of up-close meddling by an editor came to be known among journalists as “bigfooting,” and still is. The army reviewed all dispatches to censor any information, such as troop strengths or movements, that might aid the Confederacy. And it banned one correspondent outright: the London Times’ Russell, whose reports on the debacle at Bull Run had been so negative and embarrassing. He returned to England.

Except for the Tribune, the New York papers tended to take Mac’s side. They dutifully reported his grossly inflated estimates of enemy strength and wrote up every skirmish as a grand victory. In the Herald, Bennett warned McClellan’s enemies in Washington to “draw in their horns.” The World and Journal of Commerce suspected Lincoln and Stanton of conspiring with radical abolitionists to engineer McClellan’s downfall.

Fighting fierce battles, fever, and torrential rains, the Army of the Potomac lumbered toward Richmond. Meagher’s Irish Brigade fought with honor. One Union general remarked that if he ever saw the Irish running to the rear he’d run too, because he’d know the cause was lost. A Currier & Ives lithograph of Meagher heroically leading his men in a charge at Fair Oaks (Seven Pines) hung in many New York Irish homes and bars.

The Excelsior Brigade fought its first battle that May and lost almost eight hundred killed or wounded. The unburied dead “lay in heaps,” Chaplain Twichell wrote his father. “I shall remember it long.” Sickles was not with them that day. He’d gone off to Washington to politick and then to New York to recruit more troops. He first led the Excelsiors into battle at Fair Oaks later that month and was in the thick of it throughout, proving himself a plucky and even reckless commander, if not a trained one. Waud sketched the brigade in a bayonet charge across open ground toward Rebels firing at them from a stand of trees.

At Sherwood Forest, midway up the Peninsula, Julia Tyler put on a brave front as McClellan’s army surrounded her that May. She ran the plantation on her own now—John Tyler had sickened and died at the age of seventy that January. McClellan ordered his troops to respect the plantation and everyone on it. Except for pulling down Julia’s wooden fences for their campfires, the Union troops left it untouched. The presence of the Union army made Julia’s slaves “restless.” One by one, they began to walk off the plantation. In the fall she would send most of her children north to stay with her mother, who now lived on Staten Island in a large house and property called Castleton Hill.

By the start of June the Union army had ground its way to within a few miles of Richmond, close enough that its pickets could hear the church bells. There McClellan halted and hesitated to deliver the coup de grâce, while the city’s terrified citizens, including Varina Davis and her children, fled the expected invasion. It never came. For weeks McClellan sat and stewed and bickered with those meddling ignoramuses in Washington. The Confederates—led first by Joseph Johnston, then Robert E. Lee—saw their opening and came out fighting. McClellan, claiming wrongly as always that he’d been attacked by a vastly superior force, ordered his army to begin withdrawing back down the Peninsula.

The man who reputedly coined the nickname Virginia Creeper was outraged. Brigadier General Philip Kearny of New York City lived to do battle. He was a figure so heroic, fearless, and romantic that he almost seemed fictional. He was one of the most battle-tested officers in the Federal army. He was also probably the wealthiest (except for Astor, who wasn’t officially an officer).

He was born in 1815 in a grand house at the foot of Broadway, into a family of Scots-Irish-Huguenot heritage that had built an enormous fortune in shipping and on Wall Street. After his parents died when he was a boy his grandfather raised him and sent him to Columbia to study law, which bored him. When the grandfather died in 1836 he left Philip more than a million dollars. Of all the avenues open to a twenty-one-year-old with such unspeakable wealth, Philip chose a life of military adventure, following a history of fighting men on both sides of the family. He joined the U.S. cavalry and chased Indians out west. One of his superior officers was Jefferson Davis. A few years later he went to France, where he trained at the illustrious Ecole Royale de Cavalerie at Saumur. He rode into battle with the French Chasseurs in North Africa, fighting as they did with a sword in the right hand, a pistol in his left, and the reins in his teeth. From then on he sported French touches to his uniform—a kepi jauntily tilted on his head, a short cape, and a wide sash.

When the war with Mexico commenced he handpicked his own company of 120 dragoons and equipped them like no other unit in the army. Riding matching dappled gray horses, they served as Old Fuss and Feathers’s personal bodyguard. Leading his dragoons on a reckless and failed assault on Mexico City, Kearny lost his left arm. It only made him that much more a storybook hero. He was back in the saddle in days, reins in his teeth, and was reputedly the first man to storm into Mexico City when it was finally taken. General Scott would call him “the bravest man I ever knew.”

In Paris in the 1850s he met and began openly living with Agnes Maxwell, the daughter of Hugh Maxwell, Zachary Taylor’s collector for the port of New York. Kearny abandoned his wife and four children, Agnes dropped her fiancé, and all of New York society was scandalized. It was a few years before his enraged wife would grant him a divorce. He built a mansion called Bellegrove for himself and Agnes across the Hudson in New Jersey. In 1859 he went back to France to ride as an officer in Emperor Louis Napoleon III’s Imperial Guard. For his courage at the Battle of Solferino he was the first American to be awarded the Légion d’honneur.

At the start of the Civil War he raised the first volunteer unit from New Jersey. McClellan gave him command of his Third Corps, which included the Mozart Brigade. They participated in the bloodiest battles of the Peninsula Campaign, Kearny leading as always from the front, looking magically impervious to Rebel shot and shell, shouting encouragements like “Don’t flinch, boys! They’re shooting at me, not you!” Lieutenant George Custer, who served as an aide to Kearny and then McClellan, said that Kearny “was always where the danger was greatest.” Confederates dubbed him “the One-Armed Devil.” In several battles his men charged ahead when all others were falling back. They took heavy casualties but adored their courageous commander.

When McClellan lost his nerve within sight of Richmond and began to fall back, Kearny fumed that he was “feeble” and judged that the order to retreat could only be “prompted by cowardice or treason.” Lee proceeded to humiliate McClellan in a bold series of harassments that came to be known as the Seven Days. By the first days of July, Lee had whipped Little Mac all the way back down the Peninsula to where he’d started. The hospital ships and field hospitals overflowed with the twelve thousand casualties McClellan’s army had sustained in just the one week.

Lincoln sailed down to the Peninsula again to ask McClellan what had gone wrong, and to review the troops on July 4. He promoted Kearny to major general that day. Kearny asked for the best bugler in his division to be by his side for the occasion. They sent him Gus Schurmann. Taking a shine to the thirteen-year-old, Kearny made Gus his orderly and gave him a new bugle to replace his battle-dented one.

After a full year of great expectations, after all the delays and buildup and brouhaha, McClellan had failed miserably. The North reeled from a defeat far grander and more dispiriting than Bull Run had been. One Republican fumed, “McClellan is an imbecile if not a traitor. He has virtually lost the army of the Potomac” and “deserves to be shot.” Lincoln took the Army of the Potomac away from him and gave it to John Pope, who’d done well fighting out west. The Peninsula Campaign was abandoned.

Instead of celebrating an end to the war, Lincoln was forced to issue a call for three hundred thousand more volunteers to sign up for three years. In the Tribune, Greeley approved, declaring that “a ‘speedy conclusion’ of the war is what the nation demands.” The Evening Post published a poem that Stephen Foster set to a spritely march to create a new recruiting song:

We are coming, Father Abraham, 300,000 more,

From Mississippi’s winding stream and from New England’s shore.

We leave our plows and workshops, our wives and children dear,

With hearts too full for utterance, with but a silent tear.

But the gung-ho sentiment was far from universal. Enlistment did not pick up. In July, Congress passed the Militia Act, allowing a state to draft militiamen if it did not reach its quota of volunteers. It was the first step toward a national draft, requiring all males between eighteen and forty-five to register. The Union’s first draft dodgers began heading for Canada shortly thereafter. New York City Republicans and War Democrats organized a National War Committee and threw another big rally in Union Square to drum up volunteers. Judge Daly told the crowd, “If a man is unwilling to defend this free government when the lot falls upon him, he is unworthy to live in it and to enjoy its blessings.” He explained that if not enough men volunteered, “we must draft.” In the Times, Raymond called on Lincoln to begin conscription immediately, and many political heavyweights in the city agreed. McClellan’s failure on the Peninsula had convinced them that the war could drag on for a very long time unless the Union took extraordinary measures, and quickly. Even Archbishop Hughes preached a sermon in which he declared, “The people should insist on being drafted, and so bring this unnatural strife to a close.” The people would show they had very different thoughts about that.