In 1862, the Soldiers’ Home became a summer retreat for the Lincoln family. Here Lincoln found space and time for mental refreshment as well as for entertaining close friends.
After Willie’s death, Mary especially enjoyed getting away from busy Washington. Benjamin B. French, commissioner of public buildings, visited the White House on Monday, June 16, 1862, just as Mary was getting ready to depart for the Soldiers’ Home. French wrote in his diary, “She seemed to be in excellent spirits, and delighted at getting out of the city.” One reason she surely was delighted was that the retreat provided more of an opportunity to be alone with her husband and Tad. Robert joined them from Harvard at the end of June. Mary and Abraham read to each other, and, whenever she could, she encouraged him to accompany her on late-afternoon carriage rides. In July, in a letter to a friend, she wrote, “We are truly delighted, with this retreat, the drives & walks around here are delightful, & each day, brings its visitors. Then, too, our boy Robert, is with us.”
As a daily commuter, Lincoln rose early in the summer months and was on his way into Washington well before 8 a.m. One of the soldiers who was responsible for escorting the president, Captain David Derickson, reported that he would arrive at the cottage many days about 6:30 a.m. to find Lincoln “reading the Bible or some work on the art of war.” Although he would accomplish presidential work at the Soldiers’ Home, Lincoln also welcomed private time for reading and reflection in this retreat setting. While on duty at the White House, Lincoln regaled visitors with stories and humor, but when off duty at the Soldiers’ Home he much preferred, guests recalled, to read from Shakespeare and several of his other favorite poets. In the company of his secretary John Hay, a graduate of Brown College who had a literary flair, Lincoln would read for hours from Macbeth or Hamlet or Richard II. In Springfield, Hay had heard Lincoln read the outburst of despair in the third act of Richard II; he heard it again at the White House, and now at the Soldiers’ Home.
For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison ’d by their wives: some sleeping kill’d;
All murder’d:
Lincoln seemed drawn to those plays of Shakespeare that spoke of an England split apart by civil war and of men driven by overwhelming ambition. The president’s young assistant reported that Lincoln “read Shakespeare more than all other writers together.”
AT THE END OF JUNE 1862, at a time of great Northern discouragement, Lincoln asked his secretary of state to sound out confidentially the state governors about the need to call up more troops. Worried that such a call might produce a panic across the North, Lincoln nonetheless told Seward of his resolve. “I expect to maintain this contest until successful, or till I die, or am conquered, or my term expires or Congress or the country forsakes me.” On July 1, a few days before the nation celebrated its eighty-sixth birthday, Lincoln issued a call for another three hundred thousand three-year volunteers.
Quaker abolitionist James Sloan Gibbons, a businessman who was one of the lead supporters of the National Anti-Slavery Standard, wrote a poem that was published anonymously in the New York Evening Post on July 16, 1862. The poem struck a chord with the public. No less than eight composers quickly set it to music. By the early fall the poem was being sung by choruses at Union rallies and by the public in town squares. The song expressed the Union’s heart in music.
We are coming, Father Abraham, 300,000 more,
From Mississippi’s winding stream and from New England’s shore.
We leave our plows and workshops, our wives and children dear,
With hearts too full for utterance, with but a silent tear.
We dare not look behind us but steadfastly before.
We are coming, Father Abraham, 300,000 more!
CHORUS: We are coming, we are coming our Union to restore, We are coming, Father Abraham, 300,000 more!
The poem elicited such a popular response because it voiced what everyone was saying. The last stanza begins, “You have called us and we’re coming.” The growing esteem of the Union soldiers and sailors for their commander in chief was spreading to citizens around the country.
Through the years, people had affixed nicknames to Lincoln in admiration. The earliest moniker, “Honest Abe,” stuck because it captured the essential character of Lincoln in his midtwenties. Lincoln had endured the constant harangue that he was the “Black Republican” in his debates with Stephen Douglas, and again in the presidential campaign of 1860. This latest name, “Father Abraham,” was a signpost that by the middle of 1862, appreciation for Lincoln had moved beyond an admiration reserved for an American president to an unusual affection bestowed upon a loving father figure by his grateful citizens.
IN THE SUMMER quiet at the Soldiers’ Home, Lincoln brooded about slavery. Though personally he had long been opposed to slavery, as president he felt that in his oath he was constrained by the Constitution not to interfere with it where it already existed. He understood that taking this principled position had put him at odds with many leaders of his own party.
Lincoln’s viewpoint on slavery was not so different from those of his critics, whose passion against slavery he admired. As he had told Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner at the end of 1861, timing was everything. Since signing the original Confiscation Act, he had tried to shift the burden of responsibility from the federal government to the states in a plan of compensated emancipation. He had high hopes for his trial plan in Delaware, but it was not going anywhere. Turning back to the ideas of his mentor, Henry Clay, he had advanced the idea of colonization as a solution to the problem of strife between whites and blacks. Colonization was a plan to settle African-Americans outside the United States. He floated this idea in his December 1861 annual message to Congress, with little response.
In early March 1862, Lincoln sent to Congress a bill providing for a federal-state emancipation plan similar to his Delaware plan. In order to soothe fears of white Northerners, he again coupled emancipation with colonization. Whereas in his annual message he had assured Congress that he would not resort to any “radical” or “revolutionary” measures, this time he warned them that if compensated emancipation did not work, he would be free to use means “such as seem indispensable, or may obviously promise great efficiency towards ending the struggle.” This message created an uproar, but Sumner and Greeley praised it. Henry J. Raymond, editor of the New York Times, wrote Lincoln to complain that the plan would cost too much. The president replied that the cost of fighting the war for seven to eight days would pay entirely the price of emancipating the slaves in the four border states. On March 10, he met with border state representatives at the White House who, to his discouragement, almost to a person opposed his plan.
On April 16, 1862, Lincoln signed into law a bill abolishing slavery in Washington, D.C. The bill compensated owners and made plans to send slaves, if they so wished, to either Haiti or Liberia. On June 9, he signed a bill outlawing slavery in all the federal territories. This bill effectively reversed the ruling in the Dred Scott decision of 1857.
On July 12, 1862, two days after Lincoln returned from seeing McClellan at Harrison’s Landing, Congress passed a second confiscation bill. This bill dealt with a problem that plagued field commanders occupying Southern territory. As troops advanced, slaves sought refuge in Union camps, and federal commanders were confused over their obligations to the refugees. Some freed the slaves, others sent them back to their masters for lack of means to care for them. The Confiscation Act of 1862 declared that all slaves taking refuge behind Union lines were captives of war who were to be set free.
On the same day, Lincoln met, once again, with representatives of the border states. He told them that they must forget their retreat into earlier, quieter times, and face up to “the unprecedentedly stern facts of our case.” If they re
jected his plan for compensated emancipation, the war would kill off slavery “by mere friction and abrasion,” and they would not get a dollar for their slaves. Did not they see that his plan was the best option for them?
They did not. The plan would cost too much. It would only further fan the flames of rebellion.
Lincoln returned to the Soldiers’ Home to continue work on a document he had been readying in recent days, perhaps weeks. He had tried his best to move people toward compensated emancipation with colonization. Now he was prepared for a much bolder move.
ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON, July 13, 1862, Lincoln invited Seward and Welles to ride with him to the funeral of Secretary of War Stanton’s infant child, James, not quite nine months old. Both his guests were startled when Lincoln informed them that he was thinking of emancipating the slaves. Welles wrote in his diary, “He dwelt earnestly on the gravity, importance, and delicacy of the movement, and said he had given it much thought.” Lincoln had come to the conclusion “that we must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued.”
Lincoln, as usual, would say nothing more to anyone for more than a week as he continued to mull over his decision. He would later reflect, “Things had gone from bad to worse, until I felt that we had reached the end of our rope on the plan of operations we had been pursuing; that we had about played our last card, and must change our tactics, or lose the game!” Lincoln now decided to convene his cabinet to make his first public disclosure of his momentous decision.
CHAPTER 21
We Must Think Anew July 1862–December 1862
THE DOGMAS OF THE QUIET PAST, ARE INADEQUATE TO THE STORMY PRESENT
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Second annual message to Congress, December 1, 1862
N JULY 22, 1862, LINCOLN EMERGED FROM HIS SOLITARY BROODING AND writing at the Soldiers’ Home. “After much anxious thought,” he had come to the conclusion that it was not possible to return to the past, or even stand in the shifting sands of the present. He determined to step forward into an unknown future.
For Lincoln, using his largely undefined war powers as commander in chief to propose emancipation was contrary to much in his personal makeup. His intellectual roots were planted more in the reasonableness of the Enlightenment than in the sentiments of Romanticism. As a lawyer, he had grounded his legal briefs in precedent. In his religious pilgrimage, he had chosen to attend rational, nonpolitical Old School Presbyterian congregations over experiential, antislavery New School congregations in both Springfield and Washington. Although his heart had long been tormented by the immorality of slavery, his Enlightenment, precedent-based, Old School head had heretofore tethered him to what he believed to be the Constitution’s prohibition against eliminating slavery where it already existed in the South.
Lincoln had not set his sights on emancipation at the beginning of the war. His single goal was to save the Union. The subject of slavery was virtually absent in both his inaugural address and his special message to Congress on July 4, 1861. But now, sixteen months later, his developing ideas, the press of events, the military defeats, and his own sense of timing coalesced into a determination to redefine the war’s purpose.
On July 22, 1862, when Lincoln began to read to his cabinet a preliminary draft of a proclamation promising emancipation, he said he was not asking for their assent but informing them of his plan of action. None were prepared for his final sentence. Lincoln, “as a fit and necessary military measure,” declared that on January 1, 1863, “all persons held as slaves within any state or states, wherein the constitutional authority of the United States shall not then be practically recognized … shall then, thenceforward, and forever, be free.” The members of the cabinet sat stunned.
William Seward, who had known of Lincoln’s plan in advance, expressed his strong concern about the timing of Lincoln’s proclamation. To issue it at a time of continuing Union defeats might appear to many to be an act of desperation. Why not wait until a significant military victory would place the proclamation in a more positive light? Lincoln would say afterward, “The wisdom of the view of the Secretary of State struck me with very great force.”
LINCOLN STARTED THE SECOND SUMMER of the war dealing with a retreating army and a restless public. He had hovered over the telegraph operators on the second floor of the War Department during the anxiety of the Seven Days Battles from June 25 to July 1, 1862. He followed events in Tennessee and Kentucky, where guerrilla attacks by Confederate generals Nathan Bedford Forrest and John Hunt Morgan behind Union lines dispelled any lingering notions that widespread Unionist sentiment remained in the South. The Confederate tactics heightened anger in the North. Lincoln heard that Union soldiers were writing home about “bushwhackers,” insurgents hiding behind day jobs as farmers or shopkeepers, but harassing and killing Union bluecoats at night. Soldiers began to protest that what had begun as a “kid glove war” must now give way to a “hard war.”
The president decided the time had come to make changes in the military command. Discouraged by the inability of the armies of Irvin McDowell, Nathaniel Banks, and John C. Frémont to trap the wily Stonewall Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley, Lincoln decided to consolidate these forces under a new army led by a new commander. He appointed General John Pope of Illinois to lead a newly designated Army of Virginia on June 26, 1862. Lincoln had practiced law under Pope’s father, Judge Nathaniel Pope, a gruff man appointed by President James Monroe to be the first U.S. district judge for Illinois. John, an 1842 West Point graduate, was a large man with piercing eyes. He had served in the military escort accompanying Lincoln from Springfield to Washington in February 1861, when the two exchanged humorous stories. Pope had served under Henry Halleck in the West and had won fame for his capture of Island Number Ten, fifty miles downriver from Columbus, Kentucky, on April 7, 1862.
Lincoln was just getting started. On July 11, 1862, only two days after his visit with General McClellan at Harrison’s Landing, Lincoln appointed Henry W. Halleck as general in chief. Lincoln’s decision to change commanding generals was not only a rejection of McClellan as a leader, but a decision to change the political and military strategy of the war.
Henry Halleck was born in 1815 on a farm in the Mohawk Valley of New York, and ranked third in the class of 1839 at West Point. At the military academy, he studied the “art of war” through the writings of Baron Henri Jomini, a Swiss military historian. Taking a different tack from his contemporary Carl von Clausewitz, Jomini argued that Napoleon’s success grew from rational principles that stressed movement rather than total destruction. The goal became to inflict damage to the enemy with the least risk to one’s own troops.
After serving in California during the Mexican War, Halleck retired from the army in 1854. In 1855, he married Elizabeth Hamilton, granddaughter of Alexander Hamilton. When the Civil War erupted, he left California, where he had accumulated an estate worth $500,000 in quicksilver mines, for an appointment as a major general. Two years later Lincoln named him his top general.
In a war where the public wanted their generals to look like heroes, Halleck did not fit the part. He appeared much older than his forty-seven years. Standing five feet nine inches tall and one hundred ninety pounds, he was paunchy, with flabby cheeks and a double chin. He had an annoying habit of constantly scratching his elbows. Because of his dull, fishlike eyes, some said he was an opium addict. He acquired the nickname “Old Brains,” not for his prowess as a military theorist, but for his high forehead and bulging eyes.
Lincoln looked forward to a partnership with a man he had admired from a distance. He had read Halleck’s Elements of Military Art and Science as part of his early tutorial in military strategy. In Lincoln’s recent visit to West Point, retired general Scott, who had recommended Halleck over McClellan as his successor in the summer of 1861, commended him to Lincoln once again. Lincoln wrote to Halleck on July 14, 1862, “I am very anxious—almost impatient—to have you here. … When can you reach here?”
Lincoln’s decision
to appoint Henry Halleck, “Old Brains” to replace George McClellan as general in chief was about both a new leader and a new strategy.
That Lincoln felt more than anxious had become apparent to those closest to him. Orville Browning saw Lincoln frequently in June and July 1862, often at the Soldiers’ Home, where they enjoyed sitting together on the portico’s stone steps on summer evenings. On July 15, Browning visited Lincoln at the White House. When he entered the library, he observed that Lincoln “looked weary, care-worn and troubled.” They shook hands and Browning asked Lincoln how he was. “Tolerably well,” he replied. Browning, concerned, told Lincoln he “feared his health was suffering.” At that, Lincoln reached for Browning’s hand, “pressed it, and said in a very tender and touching tone—‘Browning I must die sometime.’ He looked very sad, and there was a cadence of sadness in his voice.” The two old friends parted, “both of us with tears in our eyes.”
—
LINCOLN HAD HEARD the snide remarks about Halleck’s looks and mannerisms, but he never put stock in outward appearances. When the general finally arrived on July 23, 1862, Halleck and Lincoln traveled to McClellan’s headquarters, accompanied by Montgomery Meigs and Ambrose Burnside. Lincoln wanted Halleck’s recommendation on whether to retain “Little Mac” as commander of the Army of the Potomac, and whether his battered forces should be withdrawn from the Virginia peninsula.
McClellan told Halleck that he needed more men, because he was certain that Lee’s opposing army had 200,000 soldiers. Upon their return, Meigs, whom Lincoln trusted, told the president that by his calculations Lee had only 105,000 men. (The figure was closer to 75,000.)
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