Eighteen Hundred and Sixty-two—The Plan of the War, and Strength of the Armies—General M‘Clellan—The General Movement, January 27th, 1862—The brilliant Western Campaign—Removal of M‘Clellan—The Monitor—Battle of Fredericksburg—Vallandigham and Seymour—The Alabama—President Lincoln declines all Foreign Mediation.
The year 1861 had been devoted rather to preparation for war than to war itself; for every day brought home to the North the certainty that the struggle would be tremendous—that large armies must fight over thousands of miles—and that to conquer, men must go forth not by thousands, but by hundreds of thousands, and endure such privations, such extremes of climate, as are little known in European warfare. But by the 1st Dec., 1861, 640,000 had been enrolled. The leading features of the plan of war were an entire blockade of the rebel coast, the military control of the border Slave States, the recovery of the Mississippi river, which is the key of the continent, and, finally, the destruction of the rebel army in Virginia, which continually threatened the North, and the conquest of Richmond, the rebel capital. General M‘Clellan had in the army of the Potomac, which occupied Washington and adjacent places, more than 200,000 men, well armed and disciplined. In Kentucky, General Buell had over 100,000. The rebel force opposed to General M‘Clellan was estimated at 175,000, but is now known to have been much less. General M‘Clellan made little use of the spy-service, and apparently cared very little to know what was going on in the enemy’s camp—an indifference which before long led him into several extraordinary and ridiculous blunders. As Commander-in-Chief, General M‘Clellan had control over Halleck, Commander of the Department of the West, while General Burnside commanded in North Carolina, and Sherman in South Carolina.
But though General M‘Clellan had, as he himself said, a “real army, magnificent in material, admirable in discipline, excellently equipped and armed, and well officered,” and though his forces, were double those of the enemy, he seemed to be possessed by a strange apathy, which, at the time, was at first taken for prudence, but which is perhaps now to be more truthfully explained by the fact that this former friend of Jefferson Davis, and ardent admirer of Southern institutions, was at heart little inclined to inflict great injury on the enemy, and was looking forward to playing the rÔle which has led so many American politicians to their ruin—of being the great conciliator between the North and South. Through the autumn and winter of 1861-62, he did literally nothing beyond writing letters to the President, in which he gave suggestions as to the manner in which the country should be governed, and asked for more troops. All the pomp and style of a grand generalissimo were carefully observed by him; his personal camp equipage required twenty-four horses to draw it—a marvellous contrast to the rough and ready General Grant, who started on his vigorous campaign against Vicksburg with only a clean shirt and a tooth-brush. Before long, notwithstanding the very remarkable personal popularity of General M‘Clellan, the country began to murmur at his slowness; and while the President was urging and imploring him to do something, the malcontents through the North began to blame the Administration for these delays. It was said to be doing all in its power to crush M‘Clellan, to keep him from advancing, and to protract the war for its own political purposes.
General Ulysses S. Grant.
Weary with the delay, President Lincoln (January 27th, 1862) issued a war order, to the effect that, on the 22nd February, 1862, there should be a general movement of all the land and naval forces against the enemy, and that all commanders should be held to strict responsibility for the execution of this duty. In every quarter, save that of the army of the Potomac, this was at once productive of energetic movements, hard fighting, and splendid Union victories. On the 6th November, General U. S. Grant had already taken Belmont, which was the first step in his military career, and on January 10th, Colonel Garfield defeated Humphrey Marshall at Middle Creek, Kentucky, while on January 19th, General G. H. Thomas gained a victory at Mill Spring over the rebel General Zollikoffer. The rebel positions in Tennessee and Kentucky were protected by Forts Henry and Donelson. In concert with General Grant, Commodore Foote took Fort Henry, while General Grant attacked Fort Donelson. After several days’ fighting, General Buckner, in command, demanded of General Grant an armistice, in which to settle terms of surrender. To this General Grant replied, “No terms except unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately on your works.” General Buckner, with 15,000 men, at once yielded. From this note, General U. S. Grant obtained the name of “Unconditional Surrender Grant.” These successes obliged the rebels to leave Kentucky, and Tennessee was thus accessible to the Federal forces. On the 15th February, General Mitchell, of General Buell’s army, reached Bowling Green, executing a march of forty miles in twenty-eight hours and a-half, performing, meanwhile, incredible feats in scaling a frozen steep pathway, a position of great strength, and in bridging a river. On the 24th February, the Union troops seized on Nashville, and on February 8th, Roanoke Island, North Carolina, with all its defences, was captured by General Burnside and Admiral Goldsborough. In March and April, Newbern, Fort Pulaski, and Fort Mason were taken from the rebels. On the 6th, 7th, and 8th of March was fought the great battle of Pea Ridge, in Arkansas, by Generals Curtis and Sigel, who had drawn General Price thither from Missouri. In this terrible and hard-contested battle the Confederates employed a large body of Indians, who, however, not only scalped and shamefully mutilated Federal troops, but also the rebels themselves. On the 7th April, General Pope took the strong position, Island No. 10, in the Mississippi, capturing with it 5000 prisoners and over 100 heavy siege guns. These great and rapid victories startled the rebels, who had been taught that the Northern foe was beneath contempt. They saw that Grant and Buell were rapidly gaining the entire south-west. They gathered together as large an army as possible, under General Albert S. Johnson and Beauregard, and the opposing forces fought, April 6th, the battle of Shiloh. Beauregard, with great sagacity, attacked General Grant with overwhelming force before Buell could come up. “The first day of the battle was in favour of the rebels, but night brought Buell, and the morrow victory, to the Union army.” The shattered rebel army retreated into their strong works at Corinth, but “leaving the victors almost as badly punished as themselves.” General Halleck now assumed command of the Western army, succeeding General Hunter. On the 30th May, Halleck took Corinth, capturing immense quantities of stores and a line of fortifications fifteen miles long, but was so dilatory in his attack that General Beauregard escaped, and transferred his army to aid the rebels in the East. For these magnificent victories, President Lincoln published a thanksgiving proclamation.
But while these fierce battles and great victories went on in the West, and commanders and men became alike inured to hardship and hard fighting, the splendid army of the Potomac had done nothing beyond digging endless and useless trenches, in which thousands found their graves. The tangled and wearisome correspondence which for months passed between President Lincoln and General M‘Clellan is one of the most painful episodes of the war. The President urged action. General M‘Clellan answered with excuses for inaction, with many calls for more men, and with repartees. At one time, when clamorous for more troops, he admitted that he had over 38,000 men absent on furlough—which accounted for his personal popularity with his soldiers. “He wrote more despatches, and General Grant fewer, than any General of the war.” Meanwhile, he was building up a political party for himself in the army, and among the Northern malcontents, who thought it wrong to coerce the South. When positively ordered to march, or to seize different points, he replied with protests and plans of his own. After the battle of Antietam, September 16th, 1862, President Lincoln again urged M‘Clellan to follow the retreating Confederates, and advance on Richmond. “A most extraordinary correspondence ensued, in which the President set forth with great clearness the conditions of the military problem, and the advantages that would attend a prompt movement by interior lines towards the rebel capital.” In this correspondence, Lincoln displays not only the greatest patience under the most tormenting contradictions, but also shows a military genius and a clear intelligence of what should be done which indicate the greatness and versatility of his mind. He was, to the very last, kind to M‘Clellan, and never seems to have suspected that the General “whose inactivity was to some extent attributable to an indisposition to inflict great injury upon the rebels,” was scheming to succeed him in his office, and intriguing with rebel sympathisers. When at last the country would no longer endure the ever-writing, never-fighting General, he removed him from command (November 7th, 1862), and appointed General Burnside in his place. “This whole campaign,” says Arnold, “illustrates Lincoln’s patience, forbearance, fidelity to, and kindness for, M‘Clellan. His misfortunes, disastrous as they were to the country, did not induce the President to abandon him. Indeed, it was a very difficult and painful thing for him ever to give up a person in misfortune, even when those misfortunes resulted from a man’s own misconduct.” But though he spoke kindly of General M‘Clellan, Mr. Lincoln could not refrain from gently satirising the dilatory commander. Once he remarked that he would “very much like to borrow the army any day when General M‘Clellan did not happen to be using it, to see if he could not do something with it.”
On the 9th March, an incident occurred which forms the beginning of a new era in naval warfare. The rebels had taken possession of the steam frigate Merrimac at Norfolk, and covered her with iron armour. Sailing down the James river, she destroyed the frigates Cumberland and Congress, and was about to attack the Minnesota, when, by strange chance, “there came up the bay a low, turtle-like nondescript object, bearing two heavy guns, with which she attacked the Merrimac and saved the fleet.” This was the Monitor, built by the celebrated engineer Ericsson.
There were many in the South, during the war, who schemed, or at least talked over, the assassination of President Lincoln. On one occasion, when he learned from a newspaper that a conspiracy of several hundred men was forming in Richmond for the purpose of taking his life, he smiled and said, “Even if true, I do not see what the rebels would gain by killing me.... Everything would go on just the same. Soon after I was nominated, I began to receive letters threatening my life. The first one or two made me a little uncomfortable, but I came at length to look for a regular instalment of this kind of correspondence in every week’s mail. Oh! there is nothing like getting used to things.”
General Burnside, who accepted with reluctance the command of the army (November 8th, 1862), was a manly and honourable soldier, but not more fortunate than his predecessor. Owing to a want of proper understanding and action between himself and Generals Halleck, Meigs, and Franklin, the battle of Fredericksburg, begun on the 11th December, 1862, was finally fought on the 15th January, the Union army being defeated with a loss of 12,000 men. The spirit of insubordination, of delay, and of ill-fortune which attended M‘Clellan, seemed to have descended as a heritage on the army of the Potomac.
On May 3rd, 1861, President Lincoln had, in an order addressed to the Commander of the Forces on the Florida coast, suspended the writ of habeas corpus. The right to do so was given him by the Constitution; and in time of war, when the very foundations of society and life itself are threatened, common sense dictates that spies, traitors, and enemies may be imprisoned by military power. Inter arma silent leges—law must yield in war. But that large party in the North, which did not believe that anything was legal which coerced the Confederacy, was furious. On the 27th May, 1861, General Cadwalader, by the authority of the President, refused to obey a writ issued by Judge Taney—“the Judge who pronounced the Dred-Scott decision, the greatest crime in the judicial annals of the Republic”—for the release of a rebel prisoner in Fort M’Henry. The Chief Justice declared that the President could not suspend the writ, which was a virtual declaration that it was illegal to put a stop to the proceedings of the thousands of traitors in the North, many of whom, like the Mayor of New York, were in high office. In July, 1862, Attorney-General Black declared that the President had the right to arrest aiders of the rebellion, and to suspend the writ of habeas corpus in such cases. It was by virtue of this suspension that the rebel legislators of Maryland had been arrested, and the secession of the state prevented (September 16th, 1862). The newspapers opposed to Mr. Lincoln attacked the suspension of the writ with great fierceness. But such attacks never ruffled the President. On one occasion, when the Copperhead press was more stormy than usual, he said it reminded him of two newly-arrived Irish emigrants who one night were terribly alarmed by a grand chorus of bull-frogs. They advanced to discover the “inimy,” but could not find him, until at last one exclaimed, “And sure, Jamie, I belave it’s just nothing but a naise” (noise). Arrests continued to be made; among them was that of Clement L. Vallandigham, a member of Congress from Ohio, who, in a political canvass of his district, bitterly abused the Administration, and called on his leaders to resist the execution of the law ordering the arrest of persons aiding the enemy. For this he was properly arrested by General Burnside (May 4th, 1863), and, having been tried, was sentenced to imprisonment; but President Lincoln modified his sentence by directing that he should be sent within the rebel lines, and not be allowed to return to the United States till after the close of the war. This trial and sentence created great excitement, and by many Vallandigham was regarded as a martyr. A large meeting of these rebel sympathisers was held in Albany, at which Seymour, the Governor of New York, presided, when the conduct of President Lincoln was denounced as establishing military despotism. At this meeting, the Democratic or Copperhead party of New York, while nominally professing a desire to preserve the Union, took the most effectual means to destroy it by condemning the right of the President to punish its enemies. These resolutions having been sent to President Lincoln, he replied by a letter in which he discussed at length, and in a clear and forcible style, the constitutional provision for suspension of the writ, and its application to the circumstances then existing. Many such meetings were held, condemning the Emancipation Proclamation and the sentence of Vallandigham. Great complaint was made that the President did not act on his own responsibility in these arrests, but left them to the discretion of military commanders. In answer, the President issued a proclamation meeting the objections. At the next state election, Mr. Vallandigham was the Democratic candidate for Governor, but was defeated by a majority of 100,000.
The year 1862 did not, any more than 1861, pass without foreign difficulties. Mr. Adams, the American minister in London, had remonstrated with the British Government to stop the fitting out of rebel privateers in English ports. These cruisers, chief among which were the Alabama, Florida, and Georgia, avoiding armed ships, devoted themselves to robbing and destroying defenceless merchantmen. The Alabama was commanded by a Captain Semmes, who, while in the service of the United States, had written a book in which he vigorously attacked, as wicked and piratical, the system of privateering, being one of the first to oppose that which he afterwards practised. Three weeks before the “290,” afterwards the Alabama escaped from the yard of the Messrs. Laird at Birkenhead (July, 1862), the British Government was notified of the character of the vessel, and warned that it would be held responsible for whatever damage it might inflict on American commerce. The Alabama, however, escaped, the result being incalculable mischief, which again bore evil fruit in later days.
In the same year the Emperor of the French made an offer of mediation between the Federal and Confederate Governments, intimating that separation was “an extreme which could no longer be avoided.” The President, in an able reply (February 6th, 1863), pointed out the great recaptures of territory from the Confederates which had taken place—that what remained was held in close blockade, and very properly rejected the proposition that the United States should confer on terms of equality with armed rebels. He also showed that several of the states which had rebelled had already returned to the Union. This despatch put an end to all proposals of foreign intervention, and was of great use in clearly setting forth to the partisans of the Union the unflinching and determined character of their Government, and of the man who was its Executive head.
