Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [276]
February 22, the date designated for the advance, arrived and went with Lincoln deeply preoccupied by Willie’s death and Tad’s grievous illness. A disheartened Stanton noted that “there was no more sign of movement on the Potomac than there had been for three months before.” When he first took his cabinet position, Stanton later explained, he “was, and for months had been the sincere and devoted friend of General McClellan,” but he had quickly grown disenchanted. After less than two weeks as secretary of war, he told a friend that “while men are striving nobly in the West, the champagne and oysters on the Potomac must be stopped.” Stanton’s remark alluded to the sumptuous dinners McClellan hosted each evening for nearly two dozen guests, many of whom were prominent figures in Washington’s Southern-leaning society.
Stanton was further disgruntled when McClellan kept him waiting on a number of occasions. Unlike Lincoln, the proud war secretary did not ignore the arrogance of the general in chief. After one particularly galling experience, when he had been forced to wait for an hour after stopping by McClellan’s headquarters on his way to the War Department, Stanton angrily announced: “That will be the last time General McClellan will give either myself or the President the waiting snub.” A few weeks later, Stanton delivered orders to transfer the telegraph office from McClellan’s headquarters to a room adjoining his office in the War Department. Dispatches from the miraculous new system that connected Washington with army officials, camps, and forts throughout the entire North would no longer be funneled through McClellan. McClellan was furious, considering the transfer “his humiliation.” He had, indeed, lost significant influence, for the adjacent telegraph office not only allowed Stanton to exercise control over all military communications, but ensured that Lincoln would now spend many daily hours with his war secretary rather than his general in chief.
Still, McClellan had powerful allies in the cabinet, including the influential Montgomery Blair. The Democratic press largely credited the “young Napoleon” for the victories at Forts Henry and Donelson, as if Grant and the troops were merely puppets with McClellan pulling the strings from Washington. Stanton noted satirically that the image portrayed in the papers of a heroic McClellan, seated at the telegraph office, “organizing victory, and by sublime military combinations capturing Fort Donelson six hours after Grant and Smith had taken it,” was “a picture worthy of Punch.”
As it turned out, the victories in the West increased the pressure on McClellan to act. At last, on the weekend of March 8, the massive Army of the Potomac prepared to break camp. Anticipating the move, the Confederates began to pull their batteries back from Manassas to the banks of the Rappahannock. Hearing reports of the fallback, McClellan led his armies on a short foray to catch the remaining troops. But once there, he found to his great embarrassment that the entire Confederate force had already departed with their tents, supplies, and weapons. Still more humiliating, the supposedly impregnable fortifications that had deterred him for months turned out to be simply wooden logs painted black to resemble cannons. Had McClellan attacked anytime in the previous months, he would have had superiority in numbers and weapons.
The “Quaker gun” affair, as the stage-prop guns were called, provoked the wrath of radicals. “We shall be the scorn of the world,” Senator Fessenden wrote his wife. “It is no longer doubtful that General McClellan is utterly unfit for his position…. And yet the President will keep him in command.” The embarrassing situation should have been expected, Fessenden lamented, for “we went in for a railsplitter, and we have got one.” Echoing Fessenden’s dismay, the Committee on the Conduct of the War demanded McClellan’s resignation. When Lincoln asked who they