Free Rise to Greatness by David Von Drehle Page A

do?” Though prone to his own occasional crises of confidence, Meigs proved sturdy that day, offering the distraught president a concrete plan. It was a variation on the maneuver that Lincoln employed on New Year’s Day: skip past McClellan and deal directly with the next level of generals. Meigs told the president he should convene a council of war.
    A hand-picked group gathered that evening at the White House. Chase was invited, as was Secretary of State Seward. Two generals from McClellan’s Army of the Potomac were summoned, one a friend of the general and one a rival. Meigs was a little late in arriving, along with Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, the only member of Lincoln’s cabinet with a West Point education. The secretary of war, Simon Cameron, was conspicuously missing; in his place was a deputy, Peter Watson.
    Cameron had become an insufferable obstacle to Union progress, a crucial department head who could not be counted on. His management of the War Department was impotent and widely seen as corrupt. He was so notorious for his habit of leaking vital information that the navy implored Lincoln to exclude him from meetings to plan the recapture of New Orleans. But because Cameron was head of a powerful political machine in the vital state of Pennsylvania, he had to be handled carefully. By this time, Lincoln had decided to fire Cameron as soon as he found a replacement, but he had confided this plan only to Seward.
    Lincoln opened the meeting with a soliloquy that proved his patience had worn thin. He offered a detailed recitation of woes, from the collapse of government finances, to the pressure from congressional radicals, to the lack of cooperation between Halleck and Buell. Most of all, there was the problem of McClellan, who once again had refused to see him. Lincoln must talk to someone, and so, he told the two generals, he was turning to them. If McClellan was not going to use the army, Lincoln said tartly, he “would like to borrow it,” as long as he “could see how it could be made to do something.”
    Not surprisingly, the generals—Irwin McDowell and William B. Franklin—provided two very different responses. McDowell, the Republican favorite, proposed a fresh march on Richmond by way of Manassas; in other words, he wanted to pursue the same strategy that had failed so disastrously the previous summer. Franklin, a member of McClellan’s clique of senior officers, countered by suggesting that the Army of the Potomac should instead move south by water, taking ships down Chesapeake Bay to flank the Confederates, land to the east of Richmond, and move quickly on the Rebel capital.
    Finally the cat was out of the bag: this was the secret plan that McClellan had been hatching. But Franklin was forced to acknowledge that it was far from mature; of the two strategies, only McDowell’s could be executed quickly. Lincoln’s options, then, were to wait some more, or fight another battle at Bull Run against an enemy that was, for all the war council knew, stronger than ever. Stymied again, he asked the generals to gather more information and return for yet another meeting.
    This cannot have felt like a turning point. Hemmed in and oppressed, Lincoln had an overpowering sense that he could afford to take only the smallest, most careful steps. According to Herndon, who paid a visit to Washington around this time, the president cryptically confided: “Traitors are under me, around me, and above me. I do not know whom to trust and must move slowly and cautiously.”
    Yet the ad hoc council marked a significant shift. Too much pressure for action was building; Lincoln had jostled too many generals and rubbed too many sensitive egos for the situation to remain frozen. Tiny fissures, almost imperceptible, were beginning to appear in the Union position, cracks that would soon widen. For one thing, McClellan’s letter to Halleck, dictated from his sickbed, evidently made an impression. Halleck was enough