Rise to greatness : Abraham Lincoln and America's most perilous year

201 Pages·2012·1.18 MB·English

by  Von Drehle

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For Henry, Ella, Addie, and Clara:
Never doubt the power of courage and determination.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Prologue: “So Much Was All Compressed”
1. New Year’s Day
2. January
3. February
4. March
5. April
6. May
7. June
8. July
9. August
10. September
11. October
12. November
13. December
Epilogue: “A New Birth of Freedom”
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
Also by Daid Von Drehle
About the Author
Copyright
PROLOGUE
“SO MUCH WAS ALL COMPRESSED”
The year began with a day so warm and fine that only the
calendar said January. There would be few pleasant
moments in 1862, but New Year’s Day in Washington,
D.C., was one of them. Everyone was out enjoying the
sunshine that morning—women in demure bonnets, men
wishing they had left their overcoats at home, children
dodging and shouting. The dusty streets of the half-built
city were filled with people making their way toward the
White House, where, by tradition, the president threw
open the doors on the first day of each year.
Never had there been so large a crowd. The capital had
doubled in size in the previous six months and was
rapidly doubling again, as young men by the tens of
thousands poured into Washington to join the Army of
the Potomac. In April 1861, when war broke out between
North and South, the entire U.S. Army numbered about
16,000 men, spread in little garrisons across the
continent. By November, nearly five times that number,
some 75,000 troops, could be mustered in a single field
outside Washington for a presidential review. The
ranking U.S. general planned to lead a column of more
than a quarter of a million troops against the rebellious
South.
Everywhere one looked in the capital, there were
soldiers and more soldiers, brimming with zeal, eager for
action, ignorant of war. They filled camps covering miles
of hillsides in all directions. By day, the untested warriors
marched and drilled, or cut logs and dug trenches to ring
the capital with forts and firing pits. By night, some
crowded into slapdash saloons and boardinghouse
brothels. This instant army, like a great magnet, attracted
regiments of merchants, job seekers, journalists, do-
gooders, adventurers, spies, thieves, and would-be war
contractors. A dull, swampy city was transformed in
weeks into an overcrowded hive of patriotism,
opportunism, and paranoia.
On the new year’s first morning, multitudes packed
themselves into the blocks around the Executive
Mansion, flowing down wooden sidewalks and dirt
streets onto Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington’s only
paved thoroughfare. There, the clip-clop of horseshoes
and clanking of swords signaled the passage of freshly
minted officers in full regalia: gold braid, white gloves,
yellow sashes, obsidian boots. Carriage wheels rattled
and friends called greetings, while somewhere in the
distance, a Marine band blared martial music. Directly
north of the White House, in the grand town houses
around Lafayette Square, servants hurried to finish
polishing the silver and laying out refreshments, for it
was also tradition that the owners of these houses—
cabinet members and sea captains and confidants of
presidents past and present—would open their own doors.
The New Year’s Day open house was a ritual of
democracy in the spirit of Andrew Jackson, whose statue,
atop a rearing horse, adorned the center of Lafayette
Square. On this one day, everyone was welcome in the
halls of power, from statesmen to workingmen, from
consuls to clerks, from the Roman-nosed senator Orville
Hickman Browning to the scoundrel who picked
Browning’s pocket. It was “the greatest jam ever
witnessed on any similar occasion,” one newspaper
correspondent observed. The people of Washington, it
seemed, had somehow agreed for a few hours to forget
their desperate situation and celebrate a new beginning.
Absent the holiday exuberance, however, a cool
assessment of the country’s present circumstances would
show that the American republic was in grave danger.
The hope that secession fever would burn itself out was
being trampled in the rush to battle stations. Strategies for
reviving pro-Union sentiments in the South were stymied
by the sheer size of the breakaway Confederate States of
America, which covered an expanse larger than the entire
European territory conquered by Napoleon. A pocket of
loyalists in western Virginia had been liberated the
previous summer by Union troops marching eastward
from Ohio, but the pro-Union population of the more
remote Appalachian Mountains, in eastern Tennessee and
western North Carolina, was scarcely reachable down
long dirt roads through hostile territory. Elsewhere in
Dixie, what Union sentiment survived was scattered and
cowed. The Confederacy was in the process of
mobilizing a greater percentage of its population as
soldiers than any European power had ever achieved.
Those troops were led by some of the most experienced
military men on the North American continent, starting
with Confederate president Jefferson Davis, a West Point
graduate, combat veteran, and former U.S. secretary of
war.
The Confederacy also wielded a powerful economic
weapon: near total control of the global cotton supply, at
a time when textiles were driving the industrial revolution
and cotton was perhaps the world’s most important
commodity. The cotton embargo enforced by rebel
leaders was a gun to the heads of the British and French
governments, putting tremendous pressure on them to
support Southern independence. Pressure aside, the idea
that the Confederacy—now a powerful country in its own
right—could be tamed and forced back into the Union by
an army of raw volunteers, led by an unschooled frontier
lawyer as commander in chief, struck most European