To smoke the general out, Lincoln employed an unusual expedient: on January 27, he issued “President’s General War Order No. 1,” commanding all land and naval forces to begin moving against the enemy on February 22. (Privately, Stanton explained that “the Government was on the verge of bankruptcy, and at the rate of expenditure, the armies must move or the Government perish.”) As Hay observed, this order marked a turning point: Lincoln “wrote it without any consultation and read it to the Cabinet, not for their sanction but for their information. From that time he influenced actively the operations of the Campaign. He stopped going to McClellan’s and sent for the general to come to him. Everything grew busy and animated after this order.” When the order was publicly released in March, the Cincinnati Gazette called it “the stroke that cut the cords which kept our great armies tied up in a state of inactivity.” On January 31, Lincoln followed up with “President’s Special War Order No. 1,” directing the Army of the Potomac to attack Confederate supply lines at Manassas, a strategy he had proposed to McClellan several weeks earlier. The New York Tribune optimistically predicted that Lincoln as de facto commander-in-chief of the army, along with the “prodigiously energetic” Stanton, “will now lift this war out of mud and delay, and carry it to victory.”
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃
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