Rise to Greatness by David Von Drehle

across the pew backs to serve as infirmary floors. Soldiers were dying at a shocking rate: “Forty or fifty per day are carried off,” wrote one observer—the equivalent of a regiment wiped out every three weeks. The capital city was a cauldron of epidemics. Measles: on that New Year’s Day, in a makeshift ward not a mile from the White House, a hundred young men from a single regiment, the 11th Maine, were near death. Smallpox: “There are cases of it in almost every Street in the City,” wrote a diarist as the disease leaped from unvaccinated soldiers into the parlors of the city’s civilians. “There is said to be over 400 cases in private families.” Typhoid fever: this was McClellan’s scourge, a deadly bacterial infection spread through drinking water contaminated by human waste. No one was safe from its ravages in a city where the watershed was crowded with tens of thousands of volunteer soldiers living in unsanitary camps. Even at the White House, where drinking water poured from modern indoor plumbing, the pipes that fed the faucets drew straight from the unclean Potomac.
    The general’s sudden illness caught Lincoln and his cabinet off guard, and to make matters worse, McClellan’s chief of staff (General Randolph Marcy, who happened to be McClellan’s father-in-law) was also down with the fever. If these two men died, McClellan’s secret plans might die with them, and the extent of Lincoln’s ignorance about military preparations would become obvious not just to his cabinet and the congressional joint committee, but to the whole country. Yet here as well was an opportunity for Lincoln: with his general in chief at death’s door, he had an excuse to bypass McClellan and open direct communication with key generals at the next level in the chain of command. It was the only tool the president had, so he grabbed it.
    His first attempts were simple enough. Immediately after the New Year’s Eve cabinet meeting, Lincoln had sent telegrams to the generals commanding U.S. armies in the west. He opened his message by informing them that “General McClellan is sick.” Staff officers at the War Department could easily have delivered this news, but doing so himself let Lincoln assert his authority. He did so briskly in his next sentences, asking whether his generals were cooperating with each other. As he put it to Major General Henry W. Halleck, commanding in St. Louis, referring to Brigadier General Don C. Buell in Louisville: “Are General Buell and yourself in concert?”
    Now, working in his office on New Year’s Day, Lincoln read their extremely discouraging answers. “There is no arrangement between General Halleck and myself,” Buell reported. Halleck’s telegram concurred: “I have never received a word from General Buell. I am not ready to co-operate with him. Hope to do so in a few weeks.” No communication whatsoever: not a word, not even ready for a word, and this from the two men whose forces were charged with subduing the Confederate heartland. Halleck closed his telegram on a patronizing note. “Too much haste will ruin everything,” he cautioned the president.
    In the U.S. Army, Henry Wager Halleck—author of treatises on topics ranging from military strategy to international law; distinguished lecturer (“The Elements of Military Art and Science”) at the Lowell Institute in Boston—was known as Old Brains. However, Old Brains was completely wrong. Too much caution was far more dangerous than too much haste, for the air was going out of the Union. Lincoln took a clean sheet of his official letterhead and picked up his pen. In short order, he composed replies to the two western generals.
    One of Lincoln’s most striking talents was his ability to condense large ideas into strong, concise prose. The messages he wrote on January 1, 1862, are textbook examples. Though only a few sentences long, they distilled many months of study and consultation. “My dear General Halleck,” he