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recover,” but he seemed fine when the Lincoln boys, Willie and Tad, roamed over to his headquarters the day after their father was rebuffed. They returned with news that McClellan had been out for a brisk ride in the subfreezing cold.
    After his unsuccessful attempt to meet with his general in chief, Lincoln delivered his advice on paper. “You better go before the Congressional Committee the earliest moment your health will permit—to-day if possible,” Lincoln counseled McClellan. Still, the general didn’t budge.
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    About this time, an alarming dispatch arrived in Washington from Charles Francis Adams, the American minister in London. Adams warned that the British government would face a wave of pro-Confederate opinion when Parliament convened in January. For months, there had been no official forum outside the British cabinet in which to debate the idea of European intervention. But when the House of Lords met, the matter was likely to be at the top of the agenda, and Adams feared the pressures that would be unleashed. “Nothing but very marked evidences of progress towards success will restrain for any length of time the hostile tendencies” in elite British opinion, Adams warned.
    But how and where could Lincoln demonstrate marked evidences of progress? The president pored over the varnished maps that hung on his office wall. Nicolay and Hay, who spent uncounted hours with Lincoln in his office, reported that “no general in the army studied his maps … with half the industry” of the president. And few men could get more from a map than he, a former flatboat pilot, surveyor, and title attorney.
    Visitors to the White House often came away with stories of Lincoln’s animated lectures on aspects of the war, delivered while his long, bony fingers traced lines on those maps. The charts showed an immense Confederate territory: the eleven seceded states covered three quarters of a million square miles and stretched from the Potomac to the Rio Grande, from the southern tip of Florida to the northern border of Tennessee. (In addition, Confederate armies were deployed northward into “neutral” Kentucky.) Secretary of State Seward, Lincoln’s frequent companion at the maps, lamented that even sophisticated people underestimated the sheer scope of the Union’s task. They failed “to apprehend that the insurrection has disclosed itself over an area of vast extent, and that military operations, to be successful, must be on a scale hitherto practically unknown in the art of war.”
    But to a man who could read them, the maps suggested how the enormous project might be tackled. Like a slab of marble, the South was veined with lines along which it could be pierced and split. These features fell into three types. The first were the mountains of the Appalachian range, a political fault line separating the eastern Confederacy from the west. Because the terrain was unsuitable for plantation agriculture, the settlers in these mountains had no economic interest in slavery, nor did they relish the idea of living in a new nation run by plantation aristocrats. This explained Lincoln’s urgent desire to reach east Tennessee, and do for Unionists there what McClellan had done for the mountain Unionists of western Virginia. “My distress is that our friends in East Tennessee are being hanged and driven to despair, and even now I fear, are thinking of taking rebel arms for the sake of personal protection,” he explained.
    The rough dirt roads of the South were of little use as invasion routes: a team of mules could haul a wagon only so far before the animals would eat more than the wagon could hold, and long supply lines over poor roads through hostile territory have always been an invitation to military disaster. Railroads, however, offered a second way of piercing the Confederacy. Unfortunately for the Union, relatively few rail lines had been built from north to south, and those that existed were highly