Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
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February/March 1981 | Volume 32, Issue 2
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
February/March 1981 | Volume 32, Issue 2
In his Civil War epic John Brown’s Body , Stephen Vincent Benét says that General Halleck was “Called ‘Old Brains,’ for reasons that history/ Still tries to fathom. …” It’s just not true. Benêt knew why Halleck had that nickname. But scrupulously fair as he was to the memory of all the other officers of the war, North and South, he could not resist that swipe. He didn’t like Halleck any better than anyone else did.
During the war Halleck was known as the most unpopular man in Washington. Even U. S. Grant, who bore amazingly few grudges for a lifelong military man, went to his grave detesting him: “So far as my experience with General Halleck went,” he wrote tartly in his memoirs, “it was very much easier for him to refuse a favor than to grant one.” Gideon Welles found him absolutely maddening, was so repelled by his personality that he ascribed to him physical characteristics—“his bulging eyes, his flabby cheeks, his slack-twisted figure”—that really aren’t borne out by his photographs. The camera probably reveals him more truly for what he was: a cautious, unhappy man with too much on his plate.
Henry Wager Halleck was born in 1815 to a family of upstate New York farmers, an occupation he loathed from the start. While still very young he fled the farm in search of an education. His grandfather sent him to Union College—where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa—and he went on to graduate third in his class from West Point. Commissioned a lieutenant of engineers, Halleck spent some time working on the defenses of New York Harbor and then took a tour of the fortifications of France, which inspired him to write Elements of Military Art and Science . Published in 1846, this highly regarded book brought him a solid reputation— and his nickname.
The year of its publication, he headed West to take part in the Mexican War and, during what turned out to be a seven months’ journey, translated from the French a four-volume life of Napoleon. He was brevetted a captain for gallantry, but when the Army began to stagnate after the war, he resigned to become the head of a California law firm. It made him rich, but when the Civil War broke out he left his job to accept the post of major general in the regular army.
In November of 1861 he was sent to take command of the Department of the Missouri where the honest but feckless John Charles Frémont had helplessly been presiding over a fantastic roil of corruption and inefficiency. Halleck grimly and cooly put a stop to this but made few friends in the process; in fact, he managed to arouse the wrath of both abolitionists and slaveholders in the state.
Nothing he would do in the future would make him any more popular, but he was