He raised George B. McClellan to command the army, notwithstanding the circumstance that McClellan, as vice-president of the Illinois Central Railway, had once deeply wounded him by declining to pay his lawyer’s bill; and that, in 1858, while the Illinois Central refused Lincoln the most common courtesy, McClellan was accompanying his rival, Douglas, in a private car and special train.
It was not chivalry, but patriotism, that inspired Lincoln to put these two Democrats in control of the armed forces of the nation. His own feelings were nothing; the fate of the Union was everything. Stanton had been an honest and masterful member of Buchanan’s Cabinet. McClellan had made a glorious answer to the Bull Run defeat by driving the Confederate troops out of West Virginia.
The life of the nation was more important than party lines. Besides, Stanton and McClellan had the confidence of the Democrats, and it was essential, not only that the whole North should be held together, but that the loyal Democrats in the wavering border States should feel that there was no sectional or party prejudice in the government.
Stanton tried to bully Lincoln and called him “the original gorilla,” and McClellan treated him with disdainful indifference. Neither could exhaust his patience. He mastered his lion-headed Secretary of War by gentle persistence. He endured McClellan’s months of inactivity after the Army of the Potomac had grown into a fighting force of nearly a hundred and seventy thousand magnificently trained men, and when the government was being openly sneered at for its hesitation to give battle.
Great-hearted, patient Lincoln! He even consented to sit uncomplainingly in the waiting room of McClellan’s residence while the arrogant young general talked to others.
“I will hold McClellan’s stirrup if he will only bring success,” he said.
But, in the end, he wrote the orders which forced McClellan’s army against Richmond; and when Frémont, in the West, ignored the President’s orders to fight, Lincoln promptly removed him from command.
To the newly assembled Congress he said:
“This is essentially a people’s contest. On the side of the Union it is a struggle for maintaining in the world that form and substance of government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders.... It is now for them [the people] to demonstrate to the world that those who can fairly carry an election can also suppress a rebellion; that ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors of bullets; and that when ballots have fairly and constitutionally decided, there can be no successful appeal back to bullets; that there can be no successful appeal except to ballots themselves at succeeding elections.”
To one of the many committees that went to the White House to complain that the war was not being pressed rapidly enough, he suggested a question and answer that were repeated all over the country.