A. Lincoln

by Ronald C. White, Jr.

  Hooker lost the initiative. He later suggested that he intended to fight a defensive war and let the enemy attack him. Attack they did. On May 2, 1863, Jackson smashed the Union right flank.

  In the late morning of May 3, 1863, just as a careworn Hooker leaned forward to receive a report, a twelve-pound shot fired by Confederate artillery hit a pillar on the south side of the Chancellor house veranda, splitting it in two. One of the beams struck Hooker on his head and side. For some time—a debate would ensue about how much time—the commander of the Army of the Potomac was out of action. By the middle of the day, the center of Hooker’s line was pushed back.

  Lincoln, pacing back and forth from the White House to the War Department, telegraphed Butterfield:

  “Where is General Hooker? Where is Sedgwick? Where is Stoneman?”

  On May 4, 1863, the left side of Hooker’s forces was forced back across the river. Early in the afternoon, Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles met Lincoln at the War Department. The president told him “he had a feverish anxiety to get some facts.” At 3:10 p.m. Lincoln telegraphed Hooker, “We have news here that the enemy has reoccupied heights above Fredericksburg. Is that so?” Hooker replied, “I am informed that is so, but attach no importance to it.” Hooker was by now in almost total denial of what was happening.

  On May 6, 1863, Hooker ordered the remaining troops to recross to the north side of the Rappahannock in a heavy rainstorm. The battle was lost. At Chancellorsville, the Union army had had all the advantages on its side—numbers of troops, horses, guns, supplies, telegraph wires, even balloons. The Union had far superior numbers, but once again, even after Lincoln had given him the strongest mandate, Hooker did not put into battle all of his men—he held out his reserves. The Union suffered a terrible loss at Chancellorsville—more than seventeen thousand casualties. Lee won perhaps his greatest victory, but it came at a huge cost: thirteen thousand Confederate casualties, a higher percentage of casualties than the Union forces.

  When Lincoln received word at 3 p.m. that Hooker’s troops were retreating across the Rappahannock River, he was overcome. Noah Brooks, who was with the president, said his complexion, usually “sallow,” turned “ashen in hue.” The correspondent for the Sacramento Daily Union said he had never seen the president “so broken, so dispirited, and so ghostlike. … Clasping his hands behind his back, he walked up and down the room, saying, ‘My God! my God! What will the country say! What will the country say!’ ”

  Frenchman Thomas Le Mere, who worked for Mathew Brady, told Lincoln there was “considerable call” for a full-length photograph of the president. Lincoln stood for it at Brady’s Washington studio on April 17, 1863.

  23

  You Say You Will Not Fight to Free Negroes May 1863–September 1863

  PEACE DOES NOT APPEAR SO DISTANT AS IT DID. I HOPE IT WILL COME SOON, AND COME TO STAY; AND SO COME AS TO BE WORTH THE KEEPING IN ALL FUTURE TIME.

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  Speech to the Springfield rally, September 3, 1863

  URING HIS FIRST TWO YEARS AS PRESIDENT, LINCOLN TURNED DOWN all invitations to speak outside Washington. He believed he could not spare the time away; as he expanded his role as commander in chief, he wanted to stay close to the White House and the War Department in order to communicate with his generals and monitor the ebb and flow of military battles.

  He broke his silence in 1863 in response to a deafening volley of criticism. The contest for public opinion escalated in May as rallies were organized in Detroit, Indianapolis, New York, and other Northern cities to protest Lincoln’s handling of the arrest and trial of Vallandigham. Copperheads led the way, but conservative Democrats, who did not approve of the actions of the Ohio congressman, saw this episode as an opportunity to attack an administration weakened by defeats at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. On May 19, 1863, Erastus Corning, wealthy iron manufacturer, railroad owner, and conservative Democratic politician, forwarded to Lincoln the “Albany Resolves,” ten resolutions from a boisterous public meeting in Albany, New York, on May 16. The resolutions called upon the president to “be true to the Constitution” and “maintain the rights of States and the liberties of the citizen.”

  Lincoln could easily have been defensive at the tone of the protests but as a political leader, he realized they presented an opportunity for him to make his case, not simply to a local group of New York Democrats, but to a national audience. He replied to Corning on May 28, 1863, that he intended to “make a respectful response.”

  By the early summer of 1863, Lincoln began to take considerable care in drafting his “public letters.” Although he worked hard in the last days of May on his response to Erastus Corning, he told Congressman James F. Wilson of Iowa that when he started to write the letter, “I had it nearly all in there,” pointing to the drawer in his desk, “but it was in disconnected thoughts, which I had jotted down from time to time on separate scraps of paper.” Lincoln was referring to the notes to himself he had been writing for decades. He told Wilson it was by this method that “I saved my best thoughts on the subject.” He added, “Such things often come in a kind of intuitive way more clearly than if one were to sit down and deliberately reason them out.”

  A measure of Lincoln’s seriousness was that he took the unusual step of bringing his letter to a cabinet meeting on June 5, 1863. Lincoln read it in its entirety, which, at more than 3,800 words, would have taken at least twenty-five minutes. Navy Secretary Gideon Welles wrote in his diary, “It has vigor and ability and with some corrections will be a strong paper.” One week later, on June 12, Lincoln mailed the letter to Corning, sending it at the same time to Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, which published it on June 15.

  Lincoln began his letter not with confrontation but with commendation. He lauded those who met in Albany for “doing their part to maintain our common government and country.” He described their intention as “eminently patriotic.” He sought to stand with them in their commitment to the Union. “My own purpose is the same.” Lincoln sounded like he was back in Illinois putting the arguments of the opposing lawyer in their own words. He emphasized their common purpose at the very moment when his opponents were seeking to incite division. He lowered his voice even as his opponents were raising theirs. He finally joined the fray when he said, “The meeting and myself have a common object, and can have no difference, except in the means or measures for effecting that object.”

  The “except” was the transition to the purpose of the letter. The “means” became the occasion for Lincoln’s disquisition on the meaning and proper interpretation of the Constitution. The supplicants “assert and argue, that certain military arrests and proceedings following them for which I am ultimately responsible, are unconstitutional. I think they are not.”

  Lincoln, in this public letter, did not allow his opponents to set the agenda. Although he had addressed the question of civil liberties in his message to Congress in July 1861, Lincoln now used Corning’s complaints to put the issue into a much larger context. He started with what he declared were the real origins of the war. “The insurgents had been preparing for it more than thirty years, while the government had taken no steps to resist them.” The South, he argued, had set out on “an unrestricted effort to destroy Union, constitution, and law,” whereas the government was “restrained by the same constitution and law, from arresting their progress.”

  Once the war started, everyone, including the South, knew that there must be detentions to thwart the actions of “a most efficient corps of spies, informers, suppliers, and aiders and abettors.” They fully understood, Lincoln said, that habeas corpus would be suspended, and then his opponents would set up a “clamor” of protests. Lincoln’s only apology, ironically, was that “thoroughly imbued with a reverence for the guaranteed rights of individuals, I was slow to adopt strong measures.”

  At this point, Lincoln made a telling comment on the judicial system. He argued that the courts worked well in peacetime for cases involv
ing individuals, but in “a clear, flagrant, and gigantic case of Rebellion,” the ordinary courts were often “incompetent” to deal with whole classes or groups of individuals. By way of example, he said it was common knowledge in the first days after his inauguration that many leading officers, including Robert E. Lee, Joseph E. Johnston, and John B. Magruder, were about to defect from their military obligations to the Union. In hindsight, Lincoln said, they could have been arrested as traitors. If this had been done, “the insurgent cause would be much weaker.” Lincoln declared, “I think the time not unlikely to come when I shall be blamed for having made too few arrests rather than too many.”

  When Lincoln turned to the case of Ohio Peace Democrat Clement Vallandigham, he argued that the resolutions from Albany had it all wrong. The former Ohio congressman “was not arrested because he was damaging the political prospects of the administration, or the personal interests of the commanding general; but because he was damaging the army, upon the existence, and vigor of which, the life of the nation depends.” It was his attack on the military that gave the military “constitutional jurisdiction to lay hands on him.” Lincoln even offered to review the case if it could be shown that Vallandigham “was not damaging the military power of this country.” He knew his opponents had no such proof.

  Lincolns letter to Erastus Corning, the first of a number of public letters published in newspapers across the country in 1863, allowed Lincoln to communicate his views on the meaning of the Civil War to a wider public.

  To embody his logic, Lincoln offered one of his favorite literary devices—a dramatic contrast: “Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wiley agitator who induces him to desert?” One of Lincoln’s great agonies in the war was signing off on an execution order as the punishment for desertion. Lincoln brought into sharp focus not simply the sympathetic picture of the “soldier boy,” but a portrait of a Copperhead fomenting such desertions. Lincoln’s term “wiley agitator” stuck with the public. “I think that in such a case, to silence the agitator, and save the boy, is not only constitutional, but withal, a great mercy.” Lincoln’s opponents had been arguing for justice for Vallandigham; he inverted their argument by putting the focus on the real victims, young soldiers, and calling for the Christian virtue that was higher than justice—mercy. This empathic figure immediately became the “sound bite” of his public letter.

  At this point, Lincoln pasted a scrap of paper to his draft, wanting to use an argument that probably had been sitting as a note in his desk drawer for some time. He invoked Democratic president Andrew Jackson in order to make his case against his Democratic critics. Lincoln grew into political manhood in steadfast opposition to Jackson. He may have chuckled as he brought into his letter an episode that followed Jackson’s victory over the British at New Orleans in 1815. Lincoln recounted how, after the battle was over, the hero of New Orleans “maintained martial, or military law” by making a number of crucial arrests.

  Lincoln understood that his critics were foisting upon the public the notion that the president was changing the understanding of the Constitution and the rule of law in American society. He was at pains to disabuse them of the notion that “throughout the indefinite peaceful future” the American people will lose the basic freedoms enumerated in the Bill of Rights. Lincoln would not admit this danger because he was not able to believe “that a man could contract so strong an appetite for emetics during temporary illness, as to persist in feeding upon them through the remainder of his healthful life.” Where were the government printer, John D. Defrees, and the National Intelligencer literary editor, James C. Welling, who both had tried to talk Lincoln out of indelicate language in previous communications? One of the marks of Lincoln’s communication skills was his ability to combine in the same speech or public letter various styles of language and analogies that helped him appeal to a wide audience.

  Lincoln wrote his letter to Corning at a time of rapidly diminishing confidence in himself and his administration. He knew he needed to calm the fears of the nation. Even though he thought the letter to be one of his best efforts, he must have been surprised by the responses to it. John W. Forney, editor of the Washington Chronicle, wrote, “God be praised the right word has at last been spoken by the right man, at the right time, and from the right place. It will thrill the whole land.” It was “timely, wise, one of your best State Papers,” was the response of New York senator Edwin D. Morgan. Roscoe Conkling, born in Albany, one of the founders of the Republican Party in New York who had been defeated for reelection to Congress in the fall of 1862, wrote to thank Lincoln for a letter that “covered all essential ground in few words, and in a temper as felicitous and timely, as could be.” Secretaries Nicolay and Hay recalled, “There are few of the President’s state papers which produced a stronger impression upon the public mind.”

  Wanting this letter to be read by as wide an audience as possible, Lincoln had John Nicolay send it to leading Republicans. Francis Lieber, law professor at Columbia, and president of the recently formed Loyal Publication Society of New York, wrote Lincoln telling him that he was planning to print an initial installment of ten thousand copies. “The Publication Society will do it with great pleasure.” At least five hundred thousand copies of the public letter to Corning were read by upward of ten million people. The letter served to damp down, for the moment, the pervasive despair and fear across the North. Most important, it lifted Lincoln’s standing among members of his own Republican Party. Comfortable with pen and ink, and perhaps surprised by the results of the letter, Lincoln learned an important lesson about public communication that he would apply again and again in the coming months.

  The letter did not, however, put an end to dissent. On June 25, 1863, Lincoln received a delegation from Ohio who came to protest the treatment of Vallandigham. They were coming fresh from a June 11 state Democratic convention where they had nominated Vallandigham, in absentia, for governor. David Tod, the present Republican governor of Ohio, had written Lincoln on June 14, “Allow me to express the hope that you will treat the Vallandigham Committee about to call on you with the contempt they richly merit.” Tod did not know Lincoln.

  The lobbying group arrived with the advantage of having read the Corning letter. They were more strident in their criticisms of Lincoln than their New York co-belligerents. Cabinet secretaries Chase and Stanton, both Ohioans, having witnessed the positive reactions to Lincoln’s public letter to Corning, advised the president not to reply to the committee in person, but to tell them he would write a public letter.

  Lincoln, buoyed up by the response to the Corning letter, was much more forceful in his letter to Matthew Birchard and the Ohio delegation. He challenged their misrepresentations of his previous comments on the subject. He disputed their “phraseology calculated to represent me as struggling for an arbitrary personal prerogative.” As for Vallandigham, Lincoln went further than he had in the Corning letter, charging that the acts against the military were “due to him personally, in a greater degree than to any other one man.” In his conclusion, Lincoln offered to return Vallandigham to Ohio, provided each member of the delegation would sign a pledge “to do all he can to have the officers, soldiers, and seamen of the army and navy, while engaged in the effort to suppress the rebellion, paid, fed, clad, and otherwise well provided and supported.”

  The delegation would not accept this responsibility. They replied on July 1, 1863, that to do so would be at the “sacrifice of their dignity and self-respect.” They offered a defensive response to a president who was now on the offensive. In this second public letter, Lincoln again forcefully enunciated his principles, which began to win the day with Unionists across the North.

  IN MAY 1863, Lincoln studied the framed and rolled-up maps in his office. In the East, Joseph Hooker had been beaten at Chancellorsville. In the West, Grant was stalled, and Lincoln did not know where, near Vicksburg. The president knew that Lee’s next high-stakes gamb
le was yet to be revealed.

  By the middle of 1863, Lincoln had settled into a pattern of leadership both as commander in chief and, in effect, general in chief. Halleck may have held that title, but Lincoln had decided to ride both horses with a tight rein. As irritated as Lincoln may have been with “Old Brains’s” passivity, Halleck’s inaction created space for Lincoln’s action.

  During the next two months, two decisive battles would be fought in the war’s eastern and western theaters. In Washington, the gaunt man in the White House often worked eighteen hours a day, walking back and forth to the War Department several times daily.

  Lincoln typically downplayed his contribution. He closed a letter to Hooker by recalling the story of Jesus’s commendation of the widow who willingly gave out of her poverty an ancient coin called a mite, saying that he, although less qualified than his generals, would continue to contribute “his poor mite.”

  At each crucial moment of the war, Lincoln sought face-to-face communication with his key generals. On May 6, 1863, within only one hour of learning of the retreat of the Army of the Potomac back across the Rappahannock, Lincoln traveled to Hooker’s headquarters at Fal-mouth. To the surprise of Hooker and his senior officers, Lincoln did not come to question or to criticize. He was sympathetic to the fact that Hooker had been injured and perhaps not able to be in full command of his troops. He was distressed to hear Hooker’s criticisms of his key officers—Stoneman, Leftwich, Reynolds—blaming them for missteps in his battle plan. During Lincoln’s visit, and in subsequent meetings and letters, he learned that many of the senior officers blamed Hooker for the defeat. “I have some painful intimations that some of your corps and division commanders are not giving you their entire confidence. This would be ruinous, if true.” Lincoln was doing his own reconnaissance.