Free Two Miserable Presidents by Steve Sheinkin

Lincoln listened patiently to the complaints about General Grant. Grant had made mistakes, Lincoln admitted. And he certainly had a drinking problem—though rumors of him drinking during battle were false. In any case, the Union desperately needed generals who were not afraid to attack. As Lincoln said of Grant, “I can’t spare this man—he fights!”
    The early months of 1862 brought more good news/bad news to Lincoln’s desk. The good news: Union ships in the Gulf of Mexico entered the Mississippi River and began blasting their way north through Louisiana. In April, Union ships captured New Orleans, the South’s busiest port and biggest city.
    The bad news? As you might expect, the South’s biggest city was full of Southerners. Union soldiers had a serious problem controlling this angry population—especially the women. “Oh! How I hate the Yankees!” cried one Southern woman. The women of New Orleans insulted Union soldiers and spat on them in the street. A few women even leaned out upstairs windows and emptied chamber pots onto soldiers’ heads.
    Then there was some good news: after eight months of delays, General George McClellan was finally ready to march his massive army toward Richmond. At least, he said he was ready. The bad news: McClellan’s army was moving very slowly, very cautiously. Lincoln sent telegrams practically begging McClellan to get on with the attack. “He’s got the slows,” Lincoln groaned.
    Miserable in Richmond
    F rom Jefferson Davis’s point of view, McClellan was moving fast enough. The Union army was approaching Richmond, and the entire city was beginning to panic. Davis decided that his wife, Varina, and their children should move to a safer location. But after they left, he lay awake nights, missing them terribly. “Oh, mother, Uncle Jeff is miserable,” wrote Davis’s niece when she came for a visit.
    He had good reason to be. The losses at Shiloh and New Orleans were painful blows. And like Lincoln, Davis faced a constant stream of criticism from newspapers and political leaders. Unlike Lincoln, Davis took every insult personally. “I wish I could learn just to let people alone who snap at me,” he wrote to Varina. Instead, he lashed back at anyone who dared to question him. “Jefferson Davis now treats all men as if they were idiotic insects,” complained one Southern newspaper.
    It hardly helped Davis’s mood that the South was facing some major challenges in this war.

    â€œThe enemy greatly outnumber
us, and have many advantages in
moving their forces.”

    Jefferson Davis
    The North simply had more of everything—more people, more soldiers, more railroads and ships, more factories to produce guns and ammunition. The South
came up with some creative solutions, such as melting down church bells for metal to make cannons. Southern newspapers even urged families to save their urine—it contains a chemical needed to make gunpowder.
    The South did have a few advantages, though. They were fighting on their own land, and soldiers always seem to fight extra hard when they’re defending their homes. Also, when the war started, many of the country’s most talented military leaders went south. Now that Union soldiers were closing in on Richmond, Jefferson Davis turned to two of those men: Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.
    Jackson’s Distraction
    R obert E. Lee knew that 100,000 Union soldiers were marching toward Richmond. He looked over his maps and saw that there were another 40,000 Union soldiers in the nearby Shenandoah Valley. Somehow Lee had to keep them there—keep them from joining the attack on Richmond.
    This was a job for the quiet and secretive Stonewall Jackson. Hiding his plans even from his own soldiers, Jackson began a series of quick, confusing marches back and forth across the Shenandoah Valley. His army of 17,000 kept showing up where Union generals