A. Lincoln

by Ronald C. White, Jr.

  McClernand took advantage of his friendship with Lincoln to go outside normal military channels and communicate with him directly. Lincoln, always wishing to see the best qualities in people, was slow to perceive McClernand’s shadowy side. Not so, General Grant. “Unconditional Surrender” Grant saw what Lincoln did not see: At Forts Henry and Donelson, McClernand acted without orders and not only claimed far more for himself and his troops than results warranted, but downplayed the actions of fellow officers.

  McClernand came to Washington in late September 1862, to lobby the president and members of his cabinet for an independent command of a new force of Midwestern volunteers, many of them democrats, to open up the Mississippi River. He made a favorable impression on Chase, but when the treasury secretary asked the president his opinion of McClernand, Lincoln replied that “he thought him brave and capable, but too desirous to be independent of every body else.” Lincoln’s comment notwithstanding, the president’s largess toward his independent-minded Illinois friend would become Grant’s management headache on the Mississippi in the months ahead.

  In early May, Grant made his own plans. Instead of marching back to Port Hudson, or moving directly on Vicksburg, he struck out northeast into the Mississippi countryside. After four dreary months of camping in the mud by the Mississippi River, the Army of the Tennessee, with thirty thousand men, left its supply line on the river behind and, determined to live off the land, simply disappeared. Lincoln, anxious for any news, read Grant’s spare telegram to Halleck, “You may not hear from me for several days.” Grant pressed ahead on an authority based in his own experience.

  In the days ahead, Grant marched his men 130 miles, captured Jackson, the capital of Mississippi, and waged five battles against surprised opponents. The Confederate forces, in total, were actually as large as Grant’s army, but he was determined to fight their different divisions separately and never let them combine.

  Elihu Washburne, Lincoln’s friend and the congressman for Grant’s district in northwestern Illinois, was traveling with Grant and wrote the president. Washburne and Lincoln had enjoyed many laughs together back in Illinois. The congressman closed with comments sure to bring a smile to the president. “I am afraid Grant will have to be reproved for want to style. On this whole move of five days he had neither a horse nor an orderly or servant, a blanket or overcoat or clean shirt, or even a sword. His entire baggage consists of a tooth brush.”

  “THE PRESIDENT TELLS ME that he now fears ‘the fire in the rear’—meaning the Democracy, especially in the Northwest—more than our military chances.” So wrote Senator Charles Sumner to Francis Lieber, German-born professor of law at Columbia College in New York on January 17, 1863. Antiwar protest surged in the winter and spring of 1863, nowhere more than in Lincoln’s Midwest. Two years after the start of the war, “Peace Democrats,” or “Copperheads,” lashed out at the Emancipation Proclamation, which, they said, would produce “nigger equality.” Republicans coined the name “Copperheads” in the summer of 1861 when an anonymous writer to the Cincinnati Commercial likened the peace faction of the Democratic Party to the snake in Genesis 3:14: “Upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life.” Copperheads were poisonous snakes, but like many labels that begin as terms of derision, the disparaged soon wore the term as a badge of honor. They cut the Goddess of Liberty from the head of pennies—“Copperheads”—and wore them in the lapels of their coats. Their efforts were no small sideshow, as has often been suggested, but rather a relentless push by well-organized forces that gathered momentum in 1863. They sought to gain control of all states in the Midwest. Lincoln, knowing well the sentiments from which the Copperheads sprung, took the movement seriously.

  This cartoon from the February 28, 1863, issue of Harper’s Weekly depicts three Copperheads advancing on Columbia, who bears a sword and a shield inscribed “Union.”

  Lincoln’s comment to Sumner was surely a response to a speech in Congress by Congressman Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio three days earlier. Born in New Lisbon, Ohio, the handsome son of a Presbyterian minister, the self-assured Vallandigham was first elected to the Ohio state legislature in 1845, just months after his twenty-fifth birthday. Elected to Congress in 1858, he became a vigorous states’ rights advocate in the tradition of Andrew Jackson. Often caricatured as a wacko, Vallandigham, a conservative Democrat, was actually an effective spokesman for the interests of concerned citizens, especially farmers and immigrants, in the Midwest.

  After Republicans had gerrymandered the forty-two-year-old Vallandigham out of a fourth term in Congress in the fall of 1862, he returned to Washington for the final session of the Thirty-seventh Congress determined to make his voice heard before he left office. He had campaigned on the slogan “The Constitution as it is, the Union as it was,” stressing that the “arbitrary government” of Lincoln, with its record of unlawful arrests and the Emancipation Proclamation, was changing the Union forever. Vallandigham believed the Confederacy could not be defeated, and that the nation should go forward as it had in the past, with a mixed political system that allowed for slavery. When he listened to the reading of Lincoln’s annual message on December 1, 1862, the words that especially piqued him were, “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. … As our case is new, we must think anew.”

  On January 14, 1863, as Vallandigham left his seat and moved to the center of the opposition benches to speak, congressmen laid aside their newspapers and put down their pens. He began by reproaching the Republicans, not the Southern fire-eaters, for the crisis that had erupted into war. He argued that despite the repudiation of Republicans in the fall elections, especially in the Midwest, Lincoln did not withdraw his Emancipation Proclamation, which, he claimed, was a strategy to divert attention from the president’s own failures.

  Vallandigham asked: What was the result of twenty months of war? His answer: “Defeat, debt, taxation, sepulchers, these are your trophies.” Claiming to speak for the greater Midwest, he thundered, “The people of the West demand peace, and they begin to suspect that New England [by which he meant abolitionism] is in the way.” Since the war had failed, it was time to give peace a chance. He proposed pulling Northern troops from the South and opening negotiations for an armistice. He concluded, “Let time do his office—drying tears, dispelling sorrows, mellowing passions, and making herb and grass and tree grow again upon the hundred battlefields of this terrible war.” Vallandigham, dubbed the apostle of peace, spoke for more than one hour while the packed gallery, including many uniformed soldiers, sat mesmerized.

  Peace as well as War Democrats shared an apprehension about the quickly moving developments in the Midwest. John A. McClernand wrote the president on February 14, 1863, “The Peace Party means, as I predicted long since, not only a separation from the New England States, but reunion of the Middle and Northwestern States with the revolted States.” Many War Democrats, initially supportive of the war, were becoming increasingly critical of Lincoln because of their disagreement with the Emancipation Proclamation and the continuing price of the war. McClernand put Lincoln on notice. “Unless the war shall be brought to a close before the expiration of your Administration, or decisive victories gained, this scheme, in whole or a part, will find authoritative sanction.”

  Clement L. Vallandigham, former Ohio congressman, became the symbol of the fire in the rear.” Lincoln did not underestimate the power the Copperhead, or Peace Democrat, movement had in the Midwest.

  Back in Lincoln’s Illinois, the bitter fruits of the Democratic victories in 1862 were ripened in the state legislative agenda of 1863. The legislature passed resolutions criticizing the federal administration and calling for an armistice to end the war. A bill to stop the immigration of African-Americans was put on the docket for a vote. Finally, to stop further motions, Republican governor Richard Yates arbitrarily ended the session of the legislature, the first time this had ever happened in Illinois.

  As wi
nter gave way to spring, the Copperheads, incited by the March 3, 1863, passage of the Conscription Act, the first federal military draft, which stipulated that every male citizen between the ages of twenty and forty-five would be obligated to serve for three years or until the end of the war, moved from words to deeds. Protesters swiftly denounced the draft as unconstitutional. Recruiting officers were murdered. Young men were encouraged to desert. Violence sometimes erupted when Union army officers tried to round up deserters. African-Americans were attacked when Copperheads promoted the fear that the Emancipation Proclamation would produce an unwanted influx of blacks from South to North.

  When Congress adjourned in March, Vallandigham returned home to a hero’s welcome in Dayton, Ohio. In the same month, the new commander of the Department of the Ohio, General Ambrose Burnside, arrived at his headquarters at Cincinnati. Each man had recently endured failures; each man came to Ohio determined to make his mark.

  Vallandigham, not one to sit on the sidelines, set about making speeches and announced his plans to run for governor. Burnside, incapable of understanding the disaffection in Ohio and not recognizing the partisan editorial viewpoint in Murat Halstead’s attacks on Peace Democrats in the Cincinnati Commercial, decided to stamp out tyranny by force. On April 13, 1863, Burnside issued General Order Number Thirty-eight, a military edict aimed at persons who “uttered one word against the government of the United States.” Anyone guilty of “acts for the benefit of the enemies of our country” could be liable to execution. Burnside assured Ohio Republicans that he had the power to decide what treason was and what the suitable punishment would be.

  Vallandigham saw immediately that Burnside’s overreaching offered an opportunity to test the limits of dissent. He became determined to bait Burnside. The commander of the Department of the Ohio proved more than willing to take that bait.

  On May 1, 1863, with Vallandigham scheduled to speak at a Democratic rally in Mount Vernon, Ohio, Burnside dispatched two staff members to observe and take notes. A friend of Vallandigham tipped him off to Burnside’s intentions. Vallandigham began his speech by pointing to the American flags, with their thirty-four stars, that surrounded the speakers’ stands. He told the crowd the flag with all the states would still be united if it were not for Republican treachery. Looking right at one of Burnside’s note-taking agents, he said that his right to speak came from a document—the Constitution—that was higher than General Order Number Thirty-eight, which he derided as “a bane usurpation of arbitrary power.” “Valiant Val” concluded by saying that the remedy for all “the evils” was the ballot box, by which they could throw “King Lincoln” from his throne.

  Burnside heard the applause for Vallandigham in Cincinnati and decided to act. He dispatched Captain Charles G. Hutton and a posse of sixty-seven men to Dayton. They arrived at 323 First Street at 2 a.m. When Vallandigham refused to come out of his house, Hutton’s men attacked the front door with bars and axes.

  Union troops transported Vallandigham to Burnside’s headquarters in Cincinnati, where a military court tried him. While in custody, Vallandigham wrote an address, “To the Democracy of Ohio,” which was smuggled out of his confinement and published in newspapers across the country. “I am here in a military bastile for no other offense than my political opinions.” Vallandigham, denied a writ of habeas corpus, was sentenced to confinement in a military prison for the rest of the war.

  The two main players in this Ohio melodrama appeared, at first glance, to be Vallandigham and Burnside, but the national audience understood that the lead actor was President Lincoln. All eyes watched to see what action he would take.

  Lincoln recognized that both actors, Vallandigham and Burnside, had overplayed their roles. He brought the issue to a cabinet meeting on May 19, 1863, where Welles noted that the arrest was “an error on the part of Burnside.” Burnside learned of the cabinet’s deliberations and telegraphed Lincoln that he understood his actions were “a source of Embarrassment,” and offered to resign his command. Lincoln replied the same day that “being done, all were for seeing you through with it.”

  Lincoln’s generous letter still did not answer the question of what to do. The president did not want to make Vallandigham a martyr, which would happen if he served in a military prison to the end of the war, but he also did not want to publicly reprimand Burnside. The president came up with his own resolution: Release Vallandigham, remove him from the Midwest, where he was becoming a folk hero, and banish him to the Confederacy. Burnside transferred Vallandigham as a prisoner to William Rosecrans’s Army of the Cumberland at Murfreesboro, Tennessee. On the morning of May 25, 1863, an Alabama cavalry officer on the Shelbyville Turnpike was surely surprised to be met by Union officers under a flag of truce presenting Clement L. Vallandigham.

  BY THE MIDDLE OF APRIL, Joseph Hooker and the Army of the Potomac were finally ready to move. Fighting Joe’s army of 133,868 outnumbered Lee’s army of 60,892 by more than two to one. On April 12, 1863, Hooker sent Daniel Butterfield, his chief of staff, to the White House to deliver to Lincoln his battle plan, complete with maps. Lincoln wanted to be included. Hooker, on the other hand, was terribly afraid that no one could keep a secret, so that he did not inform his senior commanders of his final plans until the last moment. On April 13, he told his infantry commanders to have their men ready in two days with eight days’ rations and 140 rounds of ammunition. On April 14, George Stoneman, with more than 10,000 cavalry, was ready to make the first strike, intending to cross the Rappahannock, move around Lee’s left flank, and head for Culpeper Courthouse and Gordonsville, tearing up the railroads and communication lines along the way, with the goal of cutting off Lee’s supply line southeast to Richmond. Fighting Joe Hooker’s orders were “fight, fight, fight.”

  As the battle was about to begin, Lincoln was filled with anxiety. He spent long hours at the telegraph office in the War Department. On April 14, 1863, he telegraphed Hooker, “Would like to have a letter from you as soon as convenient.” Lincoln became increasingly frustrated with the incomplete information he was receiving.

  General Stoneman, so impressive in parading his cavalry before Lincoln on April 6, 1863, now moved unexplainably slowly. Before he could cross the Rappahannock, the rains came. At 11 p.m. Hooker wrote to Lincoln, but was not clear about the progress of his cavalry. Hooker did not like to send the president bad news.

  On the morning of April 15, 1863, Hooker telegraphed Lincoln, assuring him that Stoneman would cross the Rappahannock, and “if he should meet with no unusual delay, he will strike the Aquia and Richmond Rail Road on the night of the second day.”

  Lincoln was not assured. He replied that Hooker’s last letters gave him “considerable uneasiness.” Lincoln, by now a veteran commander in chief, understood a great deal about tactics and terrain. He wrote, “He has now been out three days without hindrance from the enemy, and yet he is not twenty five miles from where he started.” The president was not fooled. “To reach his point, he still has sixty to go; another river, the Rapidan, to cross, and will be hindered by the enemy.” Lincoln concluded, “I greatly fear it is another failure already.” He closed, “Write me often. I am very anxious.”

  Weather was always the wild card. The best military plans, long before scientific methods of weather prediction, could be derailed by the sudden appearance of rain that could continue for who knew how long.

  Because the Civil War shone a bright light on the inability to predict the weather, many weather “experts” began appearing in Washington. On the morning of April 25, 1863, Lincoln was visited by Francis L. Capen, who described himself as “A Certified Practical Meteorologist & Expert in Computing the Changes in Weather.” He wanted Lincoln to recommend him for a job. Three days later, Lincoln wrote to the War Department. “It seems to me Mr. Capen knows nothing about the weather, in advance. He told me three days ago it would not rain till the 30th of April or 1st of May. It is raining now & has been for ten hours. I can not spare any more time to Mr
. Capen.”

  The weather forced Hooker to modify his strategy. Still concerned about secrecy, he sent a message to Lincoln on April 27, 1863, saying, “I fully appreciate the anxiety weighing upon your mind, and hasten to relieve you from so much of it as lies in my power.” Hooker told Lincoln he intended to feint a crossing at Fredericksburg, while sending his main force thirty miles north to confront Lee’s forces. His ultimate goal was to trap a retreating Lee between two wings of his infantry and Stoneman’s cavalry. He would keep more than twenty thousand troops in reserve, able to move to the most urgent battle line.

  Lincoln, receiving little communication, remained fretful. At 3:30 p.m. on the same day, he telegraphed Hooker one sentence: “How does it look now?” Hooker replied at 5 p.m. “I am not sufficiently advanced to give an opinion. We are busy. Will tell you all as soon as I can, and have it satisfactory.”

  Hooker’s grand plan began with promise. On April 29, 1863, two infantry corps crossed the Rappahannock below Fredericksburg while five infantry corps marched upriver, crossed the Rappahannock, and moved eastward toward Fredericksburg and Robert E. Lee.

  Lee was initially unsure about how to respond to the larger Union forces. He decided to adopt a risky strategy of dividing his outnumbered army and then dividing it again. He audaciously sent Stonewall Jackson to block Hooker’s left flank. Because Stoneman’s cavalry was in his rear, Jeb Stuart’s Confederate cavalry “owned” the spaces between the dueling armies, which Lee now used for reconnaissance between his different units.

  On May 1, 1863, a bright and breezy morning, Hooker’s seventy thousand troops encountered Lee’s twenty-five thousand troops along the Orange Turnpike and Orange Plank Road just east of the hamlet of Chancellorsville, little more than a brick farmhouse occupied by the ten members of the Chancellor family. Suddenly, for reasons never fully explained, Hooker stopped, wavered, and ordered his troops to fall back and take up defensive positions around Chancellorsville.