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of Military Railroads. Stanton had briefed McCallum earlier in the evening and directed him to prepare an estimate of the time necessary to transfer the troops by rail if all available trains were put at his disposal. When McCallum entered, Lincoln described the proposition and asked him to estimate how long it would take to achieve the goal. Without disclosing that he had received prior notice to consider the matter, McCallum asked for a moment to “make a few figures.” Seated at a desk with timetables spread before him, he worked for some time while the room remained silent. Finally, he stood up and said: “I can complete it in seven days.”

“Good!” Stanton exclaimed, turning contemptuously to Halleck. “I told you so! I knew it could be done! Forty days! Forty days indeed, when the life of the nation is at stake!” He then addressed McCallum: “Go ahead; begin now.” At this point, Lincoln interrupted. “I have not yet given my consent,” he reminded the secretary of war. “Colonel McCallum, are you sure about this?” Lincoln asked. “There must be no mistake.” When McCallum said he would “pledge [his] life to accomplish it inside of seven days,” Lincoln was satisfied. “Mr. Secretary, you are the captain. Give the necessary orders and I will approve them.”

Relentlessly, Stanton worked for more than forty-eight hours straight, commandeering trains for military use, telegraphing railroad managers along the route, determining the various gauges of the tracks. He acquired the provisions necessary for soldiers and horses to travel straight across the Alleghenies into East Tennessee without a stop to resupply.

The first train left Washington at 5 p.m. on September 25, with departures every hour until 23,000 men and 1,100 horses, 9 batteries, and hundreds of wagons, tents, and supplies arrived in Tennessee ready to join Rosecrans in defense of Chattanooga. Monitoring reports from every station along the way, Stanton refused to go home. When exhaustion overtook him, he would collapse on his couch for a few hours, a cologne-moistened handkerchief tied around his forehead. Only when it became clear that the movement would succeed within the promised seven days did he agree to leave his post. “It was an extraordinary feat of logistics,” James McPherson writes, “the longest and fastest movement of such a large body of troops before the twentieth century.”

The immediate peril was past, but Dana’s reports in the following weeks indicated that the rebels had cut off supply routes into Chattanooga and that the troops had lost confidence in Rosecrans. Lincoln and Stanton decided that the time had come for a change in command. Stanton telegraphed Grant to leave Cairo, Illinois, for Louisville, Kentucky, where he would “meet an officer of the War Department” and receive new instructions. When Grant reached Indianapolis, he discovered that the War Department officer was Stanton himself. This was the first meeting between the two men.

Stanton presented Grant with a choice between two orders. Both offered him command of a new “Military Division of the Mississippi” encompassing the Departments of the Cumberland, the Ohio, and the Tennessee. The first left the departmental commanders in place. Grant chose the second order, which replaced Rosecrans with Thomas. Stanton spent a day with Grant discussing the overall military situation before the general departed for Chattanooga. There, under his leadership, the Federals eventually drove the rebels from Tennessee after a stunning victory at Lookout Mountain.

In his memoirs, Grant credits Stanton for playing an important role in saving Chattanooga. The unprecedented troop movement prevented a retreat that, Grant acknowledged, “would have been a terrible disaster.” Chase, too, lauded Stanton. “The country does not know how much it owes Edwin M. Stanton for that nights work.”

It was this indomitable drive that Lincoln had sought when he put aside any resentment at the humiliation Stanton had inflicted years earlier in Cincinnati. The bluntness and single-minded intensity behind Stanton’s brusque dismissal