The slow and/or the old
Don’t be like Mac.
A couple weeks after relieving the dilatory George McClellan from command of the Army of the Potomac, President Lincoln advises Nathaniel Banks to stop requisitioning supplies, stop procrastinating, and get his Army of the Gulf sailing toward New Orleans.
From THE PAPERS AND WRITINGS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN at Project Gutenberg:
DELAYING TACTICS OF GENERALS
TO GENERAL N. P. BANKS.
EXECUTIVE MANSION, WASHINGTON, November 22, 1862.
MY DEAR GENERAL BANKS:—Early last week you left me in high hope with your assurance that you would be off with your expedition at the end of that week, or early in this. It is now the end of this, and I have just been overwhelmed and confounded with the sight of a requisition made by you which, I am assured, cannot be filled and got off within an hour short of two months. I enclose you a copy of the requisition, in some hope that it is not genuine—that you have never seen it. My dear General, this expanding and piling up of impedimenta has been, so far, almost our ruin, and will be our final ruin if it is not abandoned. If you had the articles of this requisition upon the wharf, with the necessary animals to make them of any use, and forage for the animals, you could not get vessels together in two weeks to carry the whole, to say nothing of your twenty thousand men; and, having the vessels, you could not put the cargoes aboard in two weeks more. And, after all, where you are going you have no use for them. When you parted with me you had no such ideas in your mind. I know you had not, or you could not have expected to be off so soon as you said. You must get back to something like the plan you had then, or your expedition is a failure before you start. You must be off before Congress meets. You would be better off anywhere, and especially where you are going, for not having a thousand wagons doing nothing but hauling forage to feed the animals that draw them, and taking at least two thousand men to care for the wagons and animals, who otherwise might be two thousand good soldiers. Now, dear General, do not think this is an ill-natured letter; it is the very reverse. The simple publication of this requisition would ruin you.
Very truly your friend,
A. LINCOLN.
Toward the end the president seems to be appealing to the political nature of his political general. General Banks not have beat the opening of Congress, but he did have some ships heading south by early December. James M. McPherson says Banks was sent to the Gulf “fresh from defeats by Stonewall Jackson in Virginia” [1]. In the December 6, 1862 issue of Harper’s Weekly (at Son of the South) a biography of Banks attributes his defeat to Jackson to being outnumbered and has high hopes for his work in New Orleans:
General Banks has now been appointed to the command of a Great Southern Expedition, part of which has already sailed. That he will be heard from in a manner which will rejoice the Northern heart no one who knows his lucky star can doubt.
lucky star
- [1]Battle Cry of Freedom,New York: Ballantine Books, 1989. Print.p.624↩
