Chapter 17

The Hundred Days to Bull Run

“The imbecility of the Administration culminated in that catastrophe.”

Lincoln, in fact, had accomplished the failure of secession in Maryland. When the Maryland legislature met on April 26, it stormed and fumed, it protested solemnly against the war and gave its “cordial assent” to the independence of the Southern states, but it did not secede. Within a week, the Baltimore merchants realized their trade with the North was gone, and by the next week rebellion there was ended. On May 4, Hay wrote in his diary, “The Maryland Disunionists … called today upon the President. Their roaring was exquisitely modulated. It had lost the ferocious timbre of the April days. They roared as gently as twere any nightingale.” Baltimoreans hurried to restring the telegraph lines and rebuild the burned bridges, and normal traffic was restored by the middle of May.

When Lincoln drafted his proclamation of April 15, there had been the question of when to convene the Congress. In this decision he was influenced by Seward, who advised him not to hurry, saying, “History tells us that kings who call extra parliaments lose their heads.” A confusion of voices among the leaders now could be deadly to the Union. Border State delegates might block urgent action. Radicals from the Northeast might alarm conservatives every-where. Lincoln put the emergency session off until July 4, eighty days away.

image

In the meantime, he took unto himself the powers of a dictator:

None of these measures was much criticized. The nation, after all, was still at a high pitch of patriotism, and Northern editors were daily encouraging high officials to use any means necessary to put down the rebellion. The phenomenal power Lincoln seized during these weeks was a source of wonder to European onlookers. After all, this was a country so suspicious of central power that, for fear of it, a civil war had just broken out. A German diplomat marveled, “One of the interesting features of the present state of things is the illimited power exercised by the government. Mr. Lincoln is, in that respect, the equal, if not the superior, of Louis Napoleon.”

The only measure that aroused controversy in these first weeks—and continues to do so today—was Lincoln’s suspension of the safeguard of civil liberties written into the Constitution: the writ of habeas corpus. It was this rule that, since Anglo-Saxon times, had prevented arbitrary imprisonment. Without it, the military could arrest anyone suspected of aiding the enemy and hold him indefinitely without bothering to bring charges. On April 27, Lincoln suspended habeas corpus on the military line between Philadelphia and Washington. It was a secret, however, and drew no outcry from Lincoln’s critics until, in the early morning of May 25, John Merryman, a wealthy secessionist and lieutenant in the Maryland militia who had had a hand in burning the bridges after the Baltimore riot, was dragged from his bed and thrown into prison at Fort McHenry.

Merryman sent a petition for a writ of habeas corpus to the United States district court in Baltimore, which, as it happened, was on the circuit of the eighty-four-year-old Chief Justice of the United States, Roger Taney—the proslavery justice who had written the Dred Scott decision in 1857. Taney solemnly issued the writ, which was disobeyed by the commander at Fort McHenry, who produced, not the prisoner, but a short reply that he was under “instructions from the President.” The stage was set for a showdown, not only between Taney and Lincoln, but between the judicial and executive branches of the government. On May 28, 1861, in one of the greatest moments of drama in American judicial history, the ancient, dignified Taney approached the courthouse in Baltimore on the arm of his grandson as an admiring crowd opened a path before him. Inside, he slowly read an opinion known as Ex parte Merryman, which would serve for the rest of the war as the source document for all who opposed Lincoln’s repression of civil liberties. In it, he cited many precedents to argue that the President had usurped the power to suspend the writ of habeas corpus from Congress, and usurped “judicial power also by arresting and imprisoning a person without due process of law.” Lincoln was taking, he said, “more regal and absolute power over the liberty of the citizen than the people of England have thought it safe to intrust to the Crown—a power which the Queen of England cannot exercise at this day and which could not have been lawfully exercised by the sovereign even in the reign of Charles the First.”

In speaking out, Taney worried that he himself might be imprisoned. Lincoln did not arrest Taney, but he felt he could not give in to the Chief Justice on this question, and he ignored Taney’s opinion—Merryman continued to languish in his cell in Fort McHenry. Taney’s opinion, however, was quickly published in newspapers and pamphlets in Baltimore and across the Confederacy. A few members of the Northern Democratic press also took up the issue. The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, for example, protested that the Constitution “is an instrument whose powers can not be enlarged or abridged to meet supposed exigencies at the caprice or will of the officers under it…. Exigencies and necessities will always arise in the minds of ambitious men, anxious to usurp power—they are the tyrants’ pleas, by which liberty and constitutional law, in all ages, have been overthrown.” Complaining about Lincoln’s unconstitutional enactments and his suspension of habeas corpus, The Crisis borrowed Thomas Jefferson’s phrase for King George III from the Declaration of Independence, crying, “Is he not a President, ‘whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, unfit to be the ruler of a free people?’”

In these early months of the rebellion, however, with distrust widespread and fear of traitors rife, the protest lacked heat. In fact, Lincoln was so emboldened by the low political price he paid for this first repression of civil liberties in Maryland that, one month later, on July 2, he stretched the area of suspension of habeas corpus to “the vicinity of any military line … between the City of New York and the City of Washington,” and in October he stretched it all the way to Bangor, Maine. Along the line, due process of law was voided and military power ruled. And this new “line” was ill defined. It ran between places far apart on the map, and included a large percentage of the population.

It was only later in the war that the opposition press would voice sustained outrage over the loss of freedoms. For now, Lincoln’s most important critics on this issue were in Congress. They ratified Lincoln’s emergency orders grudgingly, on the last day of the special July 4 session of Congress. Even then, the ratifying provision had to be sugar-coated by tucking it away as a “rider” in a popular bill increasing soldier pay. Also, there was an important exception to Congress’ late show of support: despite a whopping two-thirds Republican majority in both Houses, Lincoln’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus was not mentioned in the approval. Opposition had come, not only from all the Democrats and Border State congressmen, but also from Republicans unwilling to concede Lincoln’s encroachment on what had always been a Congressional power. Senator Trumbull, from Lincoln’s own state of Illinois, spoke for many: “I am not disposed to say that the Administration has unlimited power and can do what it pleases, after Congress meets.”

image

The controversy was muted, however, because while Congress debated, huge armies were gathering for battle—despite the fact that, in mid-July, when the three-months troops Lincoln had called up on April 15 were ready to go home, they were still little more than an armed rabble, woefully unready to attack.

From the beginning, Lincoln had been the Commander-in-Chief of a halting, creaking war machine. The unmilitary chief of an unmilitary nation, he had privately sworn on April 21—after the national humiliation of promising Mayor Brown he would detour troops around Baltimore—that it was the last time he would interfere in military concerns. He gave over army matters entirely to General Scott. Lincoln was open about his martial naiveté. At an early meeting with his generals, when Seward admitted that he and Lincoln didn’t understand the technical terms for fortifications, Lincoln piped up, “that’s so, but we understand that the rare rank goes right behind the front!”

Without leadership from Lincoln, military matters immediately became confused. On April 22, Hay overheard Chase telling Lincoln, “All these failures are for want of a strong young head. Everything goes in confused disorder. General Scott gives an order, Mr. Cameron gives another. Half of both are executed, neutralizing each other.” Indeed, Cameron was an unfortunate choice for Secretary of War. He was a weak reed—a poor administrator, easily overwhelmed. Visitors to the Secretary found him evasive, his office aimless and cluttered. General-in-Chief Winfield Scott was unsteady as well, immobilized by vertigo, gout, and chronic fatigue and edema from what was probably congestive heart failure—the inroads of age and gluttony on his six-foot-four, three-hundred-pound body. He frequently dozed off at meetings, and could no longer mount a horse. When the old general rode to the White House for a conference, Lincoln frequently came down to the driveway and stood beside his buggy to spare him the pain of climbing the stairs.

Lincoln’s situation was further complicated by the poor financial condition of the national government. The treasury was empty. There was no national bank, no national currency. The sprawling economy, with its myriad local banks, was not suited for huge national projects. There had been no Federal taxes for thirty-five years. Americans were not used to paying them, and a new tax would have crippled the war spirit. Lincoln, without a treasury, without an army, and without laws adequate to create them, was forced to fall back on the vigor of the individual states to raise, officer, and equip the 75,000 troops he had called up.

The troops that answered the emergency call of April 15 could, by an antique law, serve for only three months. Those months—May, June, and July—saw a jumbled, uncoordinated effort by the Northern governors to improvise an army many times larger than had ever been fielded in the nation’s history. They labored in the face of chronic shortages, waste, and delay, and with little help from Secretary Cameron and his miniscule staff. Soon-to-be-general Oliver Otis Howard complained that during June and July “no one seemed to know what was to be done or what could be done.” Lincoln, in fact, made matters worse by authorizing, willy-nilly, new regiments pressed by ambitious men, with no thought for the War Department’s losing battle with logistics. James Wadsworth, a wealthy New Yorker who had come to Washington to seek an officer’s commission, bemoaned the confusion Lincoln wrought: “[T]he Government is weak, miserably weak at the head. The President gets into at least one serious scrape per diem by hasty, inconsiderate action. While I was there he accepted X          ’s regiment and regretted it an hour later.”

The federal government was exposed for the poor power it was. Muskets, uniforms, blankets, tents, and medical equipment were in short supply. Even when orders had been written and contracts signed, arms and provisions were slow to arrive. Recruits were ill-fed, ill-clothed, and ill-housed. Camps were improvised. There was a lack of facilities, equipment, weapons, kitchens, even military plans. Out of a desire not to provoke Southerners and Border State men, no warlike preparations had been made, not even for the security of the capital. Some recruits were installed in public buildings, others in camps located without regard for defense or drill.

When, by the middle of May, Washington was secure, Lincoln was pressed with the problem of what to do next. His April 15call for troops had announced that “the first service assigned to the forces hereby called forth will probably be to re-possess the forts, places, and property which have been seized from the Union,” and on the afternoon of April 25, after the arrival of the 7th New York regiment, Lincoln repeated to Hay that his plans were to “provide for the entire safety of the Capital … and then go down to Charleston and pay her the little debt we are owing her.” But this pipe dream soon evaporated.

Instead, General Scott, meaning to avoid a long, bitter struggle by limiting the horrors of war, revealed on May 3 a plan that would “envelop the insurgent States and bring them to terms with less bloodshed than by any other plan.” Instead of an invasion, Scott proposed to rely on “the sure operation of a complete blockade of the Atlantic and Gulf ports,” along with “a powerful movement down the Mississippi to the ocean” with a fleet of gunboats supported by soldiers, undertaken in November, when the weather was cool and the troops were trained. Thus surrounded, the rebel government would suffocate and finally surrender. This method would take a long time to work, and the thrust would be in the West, while the eastern army stood on defense. Scott saw that this last piece would not be popular in the teeming East, and that his plan’s greatest obstacle would be “the impatience of our patriotic and loyal Union friends. They will urge instant and vigorous action, regardless, I fear, of consequences.”

In this, Scott proved a great prophet. Newspapers scoffed at the slowness of his scheme, calling it the “Anaconda Plan.” In fact, Lincoln had already heard the first note of impatience as soon as troops started stepping off the trains at the Washington depot. Almost before the first arrivals could throw down their bedrolls in the Capitol building, the popular view was that Lincoln was not doing enough to subdue the rebellion. On May 1, two eminent Massachusetts abolitionists, Senator Henry Wilson and Judge Rockwood Hoar, called on Lincoln and every member of the Cabinet, urging aggressive fighting. On their heels, radicals Ben Wade and Zachary Chandler assailed Lincoln, “hot for war,” according to a witness. They spoke for millions in the North who, out of jingoism, impatience, and military ignorance, were weary of “drift” and infatuated with the fantasy of crushing treason with a single blow.

To the war lovers in Congress and the millions at home cheering their boys off at train stations across the North, Lincoln seemed to be dragging his feet. Hostile campfires flickering every night on the Arlington Heights? Well, go get the traitors and hang them! The prickly Count Gurowski grumbled in his diary:

Instead of boldly crushing … instead of striking at the traitors, the administration is continually on the lookout where the blows come from, scarcely having courage to ward them off. The deputations pouring from the North urge prompt, decided, crushing action. This thunder-voice of the twenty millions of freemen ought to nerve this senile administration. The Southern leaders do not lose one minute’s time; they spread the fire, arm, and attack with all the fury of traitors and criminals.

The Northern merchants roar for the offensive; the administration is undecided.

To many, Lincoln was yet again proving himself hopelessly unready. New York Senator Preston King thought him “not only unequal to the present crisis, but to the position he now holds at any time.” Consul to Paris John Bigelow, after listening to Lincoln discuss military matters for half an hour, came away struck by

a certain lack of sovereignty. He seemed to me … like a man utterly unconscious of the space which the President of the United States occupied that day in the history of the human race, and of the vast power for the exercise of which he had become personally responsible. This impression was strengthened by Mr. Lincoln’s modest habit of disclaiming knowledge of affairs and familiarity with duties, and frequent avowals of ignorance, which, even where it exists, it is as well for a captain as far as possible to conceal from the public.

Edwin Stanton was in harmony with King and Bigelow, blasting “the painful imbecility of Lincoln” in a letter to General John Dix in New York.

The impatient multitude who demanded immediate action, however, had to wait—no move could be made against Virginia, after all, until its people voted to ratify its leaving the Union. And indeed, on May 23, the day the citizens of Virginia voted to secede, the Lincoln administration struck a blow. That night, under a full moon, Union troops ran across two bridges on the Potomac and fanned out over Arlington Heights and Alexandria. They seized a thin swath of Confederate soil against no opposition, with the loss of only one soldier, who, after racing to the roof of an Alexandria hotel to cut down a Confederate flag, was shotgunned by the owner.

That soldier, however, was the young, impetuous Elmer Ellsworth, colonel of New York’s colorful Fire Zouaves and a dear friend of the President. News of his loss plunged the nation into mourning. Alexander McClure explained, “public sentiment had at that time no conception of the cruel sacrifices of war. The fall of a single soldier, Colonel Ellsworth, at Alexandria cast a profound gloom over the entire country.” Ellsworth’s lone sacrifice instantly blew new wind into the sails of the North’s ardor for battle. On May 27, New York lieutenant Francis Barlow wrote that the popular impatience for a crushing blow on the rebellion was so great that if Lincoln did not attack immediately, a military dictatorship might replace him. “Already the murmurs of discontent are ocean-loud against the slow and cautious courses of the war,” said Barlow.

As the July 4 special session of Congress approached, Lincoln became absorbed in writing his Opening Message, and he depended more and more on General Scott to oversee military preparations. After June 19 he refused visitors so that he could devote himself to the Message entirely. His absence from the military hum caused the many who already considered him a puppet to further discount his influence in affairs. The New York Herald flew the headline “Something Wrong in High Quarters,” and warned that his “feeble” measures would weaken the Union cause in Europe. At the same time, Horace Greeley was fuming that instead of “energy, vigor, promptness, daring, decision,” there was “weakness, irresolution, hesitation, and delay.” The troops, he said, were “being demoralized by weeks of idleness.”

Greeley’s frustration soon boiled over into print. On June 21, the editorial in his New York Tribune had a sarcastic bite: “Our soldiers have been requested to fire blank cartridges in all engagements with Southern forces … there is no intention to press this suppression of the rebellion … we are to run after the old harlot of a compromise.” Then, on June 24, a banner flared across the top of its editorial page:

THE NATION’S WAR CRY

Forward to Richmond! Forward to Richmond! The Rebel Congress must not be allowed to meet there on the 20th of July! BY THAT DATE THE PLACE MUST BE HELD BY THE NATIONAL ARMY!”

The banner was reprinted day after day through early July, and the “Forward to Richmond!” cry was taken up in the Northern press, including the New York Times. “By no government in the wide world other than this of ours,” it ranted, “is treason treated so kindly or rebellion sprinkled with so much rosewater.” Even the faithful New York Evening Post had finally grown restless, observing, “The whole administration has been marked by a certain tone of languor…. We have been sluggish in our preparation and timid in our execution.”

Greeley, the editors, the congressmen, and the millions knew nothing of war. William Russell of the London Times mocked “the arrogant tone with which writers of stupendous ignorance on military matters write of the operation which they think the generals should undertake.” Armies were not made from scratch in a week, or even a season. Winfield Scott, already dead set against an invasion, distrusted the fighting ability of the green volunteers gathering in Washington and continued to counsel delay at least until the soldiers could learn the basic elements of drill and maneuver.

Gurowski scribbled the rebuttal to military men like Scott into his diary: “Strategy—strategy repeats now every imbecile, and military fuss covers its ignorance by that sacramental word…. The people’s strategy is best: to rush in masses on Richmond.” At this early point in Lincoln’s presidency, when he lacked the stature to lead, the voice of the people was not something he could ignore. Northern morale must be sustained—by fighting, if necessary.

Everyone knew the Confederate army was busy. Southern recruits were massing in Virginia at Harpers Ferry and the Norfolk naval yard. At Manassas Junction—only thirty miles from Washington—a small army assembled to defend the direct route to Richmond. This rebel mob so near the capital acted on the Northern public like a red flag to a bull. As one general ruefully recalled soon afterward, “The country could not understand, ignorant as it was of war and war’s requirements, how it could possibly be true that, after three months of preparation and of parade, an army of thirty thousand men should be still utterly unfit to move thirty miles against a series of earthworks held by no more than an equal number of men.” After all, Andrew Jackson had merely waved his hat, and his rude pioneers had beaten the British at New Orleans!

image

So on June 29, Lincoln convened a Cabinet meeting in his library to hear a plan of attack presented by Brigadier General Irvin McDowell, a protégé of Secretary Chase and a favorite of Radical Republicans. Unsurprisingly, it was the Radicals’ plan: a quick march to hit the rebels where they were. Lincoln approved it.

The jump-off was scheduled for July 9, but was delayed because of a lack of horses and mules to pull the wagons. When McDowell’s army of some 30,000 finally lurched into motion on July 16, there were only enough wagons for ammunition and ambulances. There was no cavalry to scout ahead, no staff to provide information, and no good maps to guide the officers through the dense woods. The men, unused to discipline, treated the march like a lark, halting to fill their canteens when they crossed a stream and deserting their columns to pick blackberries whenever they got hungry.

Once McDowell’s men arrived in front of the rebels on July 18, it took three days before the real fighting started. On the day of the battle, July 21, Washingtonians hurried down to the battlefield—either in their carriages and buggies or on horseback—and spread out their blankets and baskets to enjoy a Sunday picnic while they watched the stirring spectacle of Union victory. When the cannon roared, one lady with an opera glass within earshot of William Russell exclaimed, “that is splendid. Oh, my! Is not that first-rate? I guess we will be in Richmond this time tomorrow.”

Things did not remain splendid. The thousands of Union soldiers who had been up all night marching around the enemy left flank were exhausted by the time the fighting began. The combat was prolonged, confusing, and often waged at very close quarters. The afternoon was waning when late-appearing rebel reinforcements reached the field. A rout ensued as the tired, panic-stricken Union soldiers pushed their way through the debris of battle amid the heat, dust, noise, and confusion. Then it started to rain, and the mob of refugees surged back toward the capital like the rush of a great river, soaked and streaked with the clay of the roads, throwing away knapsacks, belts, canteens, blankets, coats, and muskets. By the next morning, the residents of Washington awoke to find the beaten, footsore, mud-caked soldiers sleeping in the dripping rain—on the steps of houses, by basements or fences, on sidewalks, and in vacant lots.

As the wires carried news of the casualties from the battle of Bull Run across the North, citizens were horrified as the figures rose to 5,000 killed, wounded, and missing for both sides. Americans had never lost so many men in any battle in its history—this was closer to the losses in the entire War of 1812 or the entire Mexican War. Recriminations after the bloody debacle were many and fierce. The Richmond Enquirer, of course, knew right where to put the blame: “Of these men Abraham Lincoln is the murderer. We charge their blood upon him. May the Heavens, which have rebuked his madness thus far, still battle his demon designs.”

From Washington, Stanton wrote to Buchanan:

The imbecility of the Administration culminated in that catastrophe—an irretrievable misfortune and national disgrace never to be forgotten are to be added to the ruin of all peaceful pursuits and national bankruptcy as the result of Lincoln’s “running the machine” for five months. … The capture of Washington seems now inevitable…. While Lincoln, Scott, and the Cabinet are disputing who is to blame, the city is unguarded and the enemy at hand.

Stanton guessed that it would not be long “until Jeff Davis turns out the whole concern.”

Radical Senator Ben Wade of Ohio, too, sneered at Lincoln’s haplessness, saying, “I do not wonder that people desert to Jefferson Davis, as he shows brains; I may desert myself.” Illinois Senator Lyman Trumbull judged that Lincoln was “not equal to the occasion”; he lacked “positive action.” The New York Herald blamed the loss on the abolitionists, but rebuked Lincoln for weakness and for trusting “everything to his Cabinet, to his party and to Providence.” He must, insisted the Herald, “cease to be the politician, and perform the duties of the statesman.” Among those who blamed Lincoln for pushing the recruits prematurely into battle was General Scott, albeit in a backhanded way. “Sir,” Scott said to Lincoln, “I am the greatest coward in America…. I deserve removal because I did not stand up, when my army was not in condition for fighting, and resist it to the last.” Lincoln immediately perceived the slight, saying, “Your conversation seems to imply that I forced you to fight this battle.” Scott declined to pursue the subject further.

Greeley, wracked by guilt for his heavy hand in ordering the advance from the pages of the tribune and fearing the Union irrevocably gone, sobbed mightily to Lincoln in a letter dated “Midnight” for dramatic effect: “You are not considered a great man, and I am a hopelessly broken one.”