Lincoln certainly was supporting Grant all the way through the battles in 1864. He had found a general whose drive for victory matched his own.
But some of that general’s actions were surely vulnerable to criticism. Grant, a hero in March, when he had been named general in chief, in the spring of 1864 began to be called a “butcher,” by among others Mary Lincoln.*65 Grant admitted that Cold Harbor had been a profound mistake. He would write in his memoirs: “I have always regretted that the last assault at Cold Harbor was ever made…no advantage whatever was gained to compensate for the heavy loss we sustained.”
After the carnage at Cold Harbor Grant and Lee had a sad exchange about tending the wounded and collecting the dead on the bloody battlefield. While the bodies of the dead and dying and suffering lay on the blood-soaked field, the two West Point gentlemen sent polite notes back and forth about the possibility of a truce. They could not get it arranged until “forty-eight hours after [the correspondence] commenced…In the meantime all but two of the wounded had died.”
Despite such grisly occurrences and severe losses, Lincoln supported Grant and urged him on. On June 15, after Grant sent Halleck a telegram about his movement from Cold Harbor, slipping his army across the James River, Lincoln wired Grant:
Have just read your despatch of 1 p.m. yesterday. I begin to see it. You will succeed. God bless you all. A. LINCOLN
Grant laid siege to Lee in Petersburg in mid-June. At the end of July there came the catastrophe of the Crater—an attempt to dig underneath the Confederate lines that literally exploded in the Union army’s faces. “The effort was a tremendous failure. It cost us about four thousand men…all due to inefficiency on the part of the corps commanders and the incompetency of the division commander.”
On August 3 Lincoln saw Grant’s dispatch to Halleck:
I want Sheridan put in command of all the troops in the field, with instructions to put himself South of the enemy, and follow him to the death. Wherever the enemy goes, let our troops go also.
Lincoln wired Grant:
This, I think, is exactly right, as to how our forces should move…I repeat to you it will neither be done nor attempted unless you watch it every day, and hour, and force it.
And on August 17, having seen a wire from Grant to Halleck explaining that state militias, not his troops, should be called upon for duties in other places, because his troops should do what they were doing, Lincoln famously wired:
I have seen your despatch expressing your unwillingness to break your hold where you are. Neither am I willing. Hold on with a bull-dog gripe, and chew & choke, as much as possible.
Did Lincoln also support the deeds of William Tecumseh Sherman, a man said by a North Carolina official, as recently as 1994, to have been “more evil than Ivan the Terrible or Genghis Khan”? Yes, fundamentally, he did. His relationship to Sherman was different from his relationship to Grant, but when he comprehended what Sherman was doing on his march through the Deep South, he endorsed it.
When he brought Grant east, made him general in chief, and met him for the first time, the two men hit it off. They were leaders who could discern the essential and keep a steady eye on it, and they respected that in each other. Sherman, on the other hand, had had some brief and (for Sherman at least) unsatisfactory encounters with Lincoln, and there was much less communication between them.
As Sherman became a commander in the West, he presented difficulties for Lincoln in his fierce contempt for the press, and particularly in his resistance to using black troops. History always produces ironies, and it is certainly one of them that the reelection of the man who would be celebrated as the Great Emancipator would depend heavily upon a victory—the taking of Atlanta in September 1864—won by a commander who surely deserves the twentieth-century epithet “racist.”
Sherman marched eight hundred miles to Savannah and through the Carolinas without any supply lines, feeding sixty thousand soldiers from October to April. The amount of food and fodder, and the number of animals taken, were immense.*66
Foraging—troops living off the land—was by no means new either to European armies or to the Union armies (or to the Confederate). Having his army march light and live off the land, cut off from a communication link, was an essential element of Grant’s successful Vicksburg campaign.
Soldiers on both sides had often stolen food, but on these marches Sherman explicitly legalized foraging and the officers organized it. Small foraging units made their way ahead of the army into the dangerous setting of enemy country to bring food back. En route they had encounters with the natives that range across the spectrum of human conduct from kindness to murder, providing each side with stories forever.
Sherman’s army created much destruction wherever it went, including deliberate destruction. The strategic purpose was to show the Southern people that their government was hollow and could not protect them and they should give up, but another motive, particularly in South Carolina, was the kind of sheer revenge their commander in chief disavowed.
Joseph T. Glatthaar’s careful account—written on the basis of many, many letters and diaries and accounts by Sherman’s soldiers—shows that part of this vengeful element came from the fact that these veterans of three or four years of war and of many battles had been kept away from homes, wives, children, jobs; had seen their comrades killed; and had seen the war go on far longer than anyone had expected. After Jubal Early burned down Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, in July, Union soldiers would cite that event as justification for their own acts of destruction. But the indictment of Sherman’s army was much broader than any specific incident. Sherman’s soldiers, like Sherman himself, blamed the Confederacy for starting and then for continuing the war. Their reasons for burning the South Carolina capital, Columbia, are disputed: perhaps the departing rebels lit fires; perhaps the fires were accidental; certainly whiskey played a role. But Sherman had announced his intention not to be tender about public buildings, and a number of other South Carolina towns were torched by the Union army.
The record of evils committed in other wars, as well as the anticipations of Southern spokesmen, requires us to observe that in this war rape was not used as a systematic instrument of war, and apparently there were very few undisciplined individual instances either. Glatthaar reports that although one cannot know the precise number of rapes committed by Sherman’s soldiers, only two rather dubious instances are reported in the diaries (in which soldiers frequently report something done by other soldiers of which they disapprove). And as Sherman biographer Michael Fellman observes, Sherman’s men were often in a situation in which they could do pretty much whatever they wanted. Neely quotes an observer who wrote during the First World War: “Events…have made the vandalism of Sherman seem like discipline and order. The injury done by him seldom affected anything but property. There was no systematic cruelty in the treatment of noncombatants, and to the eternal glory of American soldiers be it recorded that insult and abuse toward women were practically unknown during the Civil War.”
Once Sherman left Atlanta for the sea, he cut all communication. Nevertheless, when the general took Savannah, Lincoln sent him, on December 26, 1864, a characteristic letter:
Many, many thanks for your Christmas-gift—the capture of Savannah.
When you were about leaving Atlanta for the Atlantic coast, I was anxious, if not fearful; but feeling that you were the better judge, and remembering that “nothing risked, nothing gained” I did not interfere. Now, the undertaking being a success, the honor is all yours…it brings those who sat in darkness, to see a great light. But what next? I suppose it will be safer if I leave Gen. Grant and yourself to decide.
Please make my grateful acknowledgments to your whole army, officers and men. Yours very truly A. LINCOLN.
In a letter to Grant on November 6, Sherman, describing the devastating effect on Southern morale of marching a well-appointed army right through the South, wrote this defining sentence: “This may not be war, but
rather statesmanship.” And it actually was “statesmanship,” although not many Confederates would be likely to use that word for it. Grant’s bloody attrition of Lee’s army was a military strategy to bring the rebels to submit by the brutal directness of destroying their army. But now Sherman was employing an indirect strategy to compel submission, by destroying resources that could supply the army and—much more—by acting on the mind of the Southern people.
Sherman held that in Georgia his strategy had had its desired effect: “I know that this recent movement of mine through Georgia has had a wonderful effect in this respect. Thousands who had been deceived by their lying papers into the belief that we were being whipped all the time, realized the truth, and have no appetite for a repetition of the same experience.”
CIVILIZED BELLIGERENTS
LINCOLN WAS UNUSUAL among leaders of great wars, including other leaders and generals in his own war, in resolutely pressing for the “directed severity” of a hard war like that of Grant and Sherman, and at the same time disavowing malice toward the enemy or any desire for revenge.
If Lincoln was urging his generals to attack, if he supported “directed severity,” and if in addition there were dubious episodes in the conduct of the armies for which he held ultimate responsibility, how then did he contribute to restraint in the conduct of the war?
First of all, by some explicit acts and statements. As we have seen, when Frémont out in Missouri in 1861 proposed a program of retaliatory execution of Confederate soldiers, Lincoln countermanded his order. He explained the practical reason, which presumably reinforced the moral reason: “[S]hould you shoot a man, according to the proclamation, the Confederates would very certainly shoot our best man in their hands in retaliation; and so, man for man, indefinitely.”
Under intense pressure from the Confederate practice of reenslaving or summarily executing captured black soldiers in the Union army, Lincoln would issue an order of retaliation that required the corresponding execution of Confederate prisoners. But in the event he did not carry it out. He then would tell Frederick Douglass why, after all, he could not: killing an innocent soldier for other soldiers’ deeds was not only wrong but would lead to a cycle of retaliation.
In his letter to James Conkling, Lincoln presented explicitly his own little nugget about the conduct of the war: “Civilized belligerents do all in their power to help themselves, or hurt the enemy, except a few things regarded as barbarous or cruel. Among the exceptions are the massacre of vanquished foes, and non-combatants, male and female.”
Much of the moral restraint in the conduct of war on both sides came not from orders but from the habits and moral shaping of free men: as civilized belligerents, they were not (usually) going to indulge in murder, genocide, rape, torture, assassination (killing pickets), or massacre. The reason was not that their superiors told them not to but because these “thinking bayonets” had been morally shaped before their service in armies. Much of the restraint of the “civilized belligerents” was simply taken for granted. Lincoln, also a thinking bayonet, reflected and encouraged that civilized self-limitation.
But then in the midst of the war the Lincoln administration issued the famous General Order No. 100, “Lieber’s Code,” the first such code of conduct for armies in the Western world, an influence on such codes ever since and around the world.*67 Five thousand copies of this code of conduct were distributed to the armies, by Halleck’s order. Lieber was a strong supporter of the Union, and critics of his code say his category of “military necessity” was large enough to drive a truckload of evils through; nevertheless it did provide a written, official, and widely circulated condemnation of many kinds of misconduct and atrocity. One example has, alas, not lost its pertinence: “Military necessity does not admit of cruelty—that is, the infliction of suffering for the sake of suffering or for revenge, nor of maiming or wounding except in flight, nor of torture to extort confessions.” Halleck was more directly responsible than Lincoln for the development of the code by Lieber, but Lincoln did issue and endorse it.
AN UNMALICIOUS WARRIOR
WE MAY SURELY INFER, however, that Lincoln’s influence on the conduct of the Union armies went beyond the implicit and explicit restraints on particular forbidden acts and included also, and most importantly, the moral implications, the human implications, of his own conduct and his own interpretation of the war, of the enemy, and of the war’s meaning.
Although he was resolute and persistent in pressing the war to subdue the rebels’ will—more so than many of his generals appeared to be—and although he did widen the war to that purpose in 1862 and continued to support what Sherman would call the “hard hand of war” (including Grant’s bloody engagements in 1864 and Sherman’s destructive marches), Lincoln nevertheless did not allow that “directed severity” to spill over into hatred, self-righteousness, or the desire for vengeance.
He gave uniquely eloquent expression to the underlying moral meaning of the war without turning it into a moralistic melodrama. Even as he widened the war, he did not deal in blame. He gave carefully stated reasons—not slogans—justifying his actions, displaying respect for the humanity of the enemy, for his own side, and for the society of mutual deliberation that was being protected and reborn. He explicitly avoided malice and hatred.
Lincoln in fact was a quite unusual war leader, mostly in what he did not say. He led one side in a bloody war not by arousing the aggressive tribalism, the assertive collective will, that war leaders often summon and that war publics often display, but by rather reasoning and eloquence. He gave careful arguments for his position, implying that he and his followers and their adversaries—their “dissatisfied countrymen”—were all part of a universal community of human reason. From his First Inaugural Address and his July 4 Message to Congress, through his great public letters to Corning and Conkling, through the succinct eloquence of his remarks at the Gettysburg cemetery, to the unique profundity of his Second Inaugural, and also in passages of his annual messages and in a stream of letters and papers, he gave reasoned arguments for the preservation of the United States of America. His arguments had to do not only with the continued existence of this one nation-state but also with the moral significance of that continuation to the history of the world.
He did not demean or demonize the enemy, as war leaders generally do. From that first post-Sumter Sunday afternoon in April 1861, when he dissented from the dismissive remarks others were making in his office about the South, through to the generosity of the Second Inaugural, he did not deal in disdain or contempt for the adversary.
Much of his distinction on this point, in other words, would rest in what he did not say, which another in his place would have said. One might compare his successor, Andrew Johnson, who dealt with the war as it was ending and erred successively in two directions. In the early stages of his presidency, he was fiercely unforgiving. Grant would write in his memoirs:
Mr. Johnson’s course towards the South did engender bitterness of feeling. His denunciations of treason and his ever-ready remark, “Treason is a crime and must be made odious,” was repeated to all those men of the South…He uttered his denunciations with great vehemence, and as they were accompanied with no assurances of safety, many Southerners were driven to a point almost beyond endurance.
One cannot find any equivalent vehemence in Lincoln’s words.
Jefferson Davis’s utterances, of which the passage quoted at the start of this chapter is a sample, were more characteristic of the condemnatory vehemence of leaders in the violent passions of war. Davis spoke of Lincoln as, among other things, “an ignorant usurper” and a despot; described the Union action as “barbarous,” waging a war “for the gratification of the lust of power and of aggrandizement, for your conquest and your subjugation, with a malignant ferocity and with a disregard and a contempt of the usages of civilization, entirely unequalled in history.” And much more.*68 Perhaps Davis had as his excuse for rhetorical bombardment the political proble
m of squelching any yearnings of his constituency to return to the Union—but Lincoln also had political problems maintaining support for a long and terrible war. Lincoln did not choose to demean the adversary as a means to this end. The word “barbarism” and its cognates, which figure large in the rhetoric of both sides of the Civil War—Charles Sumner used it in the title of a famous address—appear only once in all the words that Lincoln wrote as president, and that once in the quite specific context of the order of retaliation for the enslaving or shooting of captured black Union soldiers.
He did not deal in blame. In the midst of the hard decisions of the summer of 1862, as we have seen, when he was explaining that he would not surrender the game while leaving any available card unplayed, he was also writing that he was a patient man and was always willing to forgive on the Christian terms of repentance. At the same time that he was making plain that he was not going to fight only with elder-stalk squirts charged with rose water, he was also saying that what he dealt with was too vast for malice.
Perhaps the most interesting comparison would be with the moralist-warrior William Tecumseh Sherman. Suppose Sherman had been president during the Civil War—imagine what the presidential utterances then would have been.
President Lincoln- The Duty of a Statesman Page 46