A. Lincoln

by Ronald C. White, Jr.

  Lincoln always followed up a personal conversation with a letter that usually combined both commendation and questions. On May 7, 1863, the president expressed his confidence in Hooker but encouraged him to plan to move forward. “Have you already in your mind a plan wholly or partially formed?” Lincoln let Hooker know he wanted to stay involved, but he expressed his wish in a winsome self-deprecation. “If you have, prossecute it without interference from me. If you have not, please inform me, so that I, incompetent as I may be, can try [to] assist in the formation of some plan for the Army.”

  LINCOLN WAS RESTLESS to hear any news about Grant and Vicksburg. Having heard nothing at the telegraph office, and with no news from war correspondents in the Northern newspapers, on May 11, 1863, he telegraphed General John A. Dix at Fortress Monroe, Virginia, “Do the Richmond papers have anything about Grand Gulf or Vicksburg?”

  On May 19, 1863, unbeknownst to Lincoln, Grant attacked Confederate general John Pemberton’s garrison at Vicksburg. At 2 p.m. Pemberton ordered three volleys fired from each piece of artillery high atop the bluffs. Union forces advanced but, met by an overwhelming barrage of cannon and bullets, fell back.

  Three days later, on May 22, 1863, Grant’s men mounted a second attack, applying the force of two hundred pieces of artillery plus one hundred guns from Admiral Porter’s ironclads, only to be repulsed again. The Union forces sustained almost four thousand casualties in these two days of fighting. Grant, though stymied, knew he was not to be stopped. He prepared to lay siege to Vicksburg. Grant wrote Halleck on May 24, “The fall of Vicksburg, and the capture of most of the garrison, can only be a question of time.”

  Meanwhile, time was passing slowly for Lincoln in Washington. More oppressive than the onset of warm, humid weather was the sense of despair about Union armies east and west. Finally, word of Grant’s advance on Vicksburg began filtering into the capital. Lincoln, who was learning not to make predictions, could not contain his jubilation upon hearing the news that Grant was now investing the Southern Gibraltar. On May 26, 1863, the president replied to a letter from Chicago congressman Isaac Arnold, “Whether Gen. Grant shall or shall not consummate the capture of Vicksburg, his campaign from the beginning of this month to the twenty second day of it, is one of the most brilliant in the world.” Lincoln, despite his many misgivings about Grant’s strategy, was eager to salute him for his efforts.

  WHILE JOSEPH HOOKER STRUGGLED with his own plan, Robert E. Lee was sure of his next move. He determined that he could not remain below the Rappahannock River in Virginia and wait for the Army of the Potomac to attack him yet a third time. Lee regularly scanned Northern newspapers. Heartened by victories at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, he became convinced that the way forward against a larger and better-equipped foe was to move north again in another daring military move that might convince the North that they could not win. Lee had come to believe that the more the Confederacy was successful on the battlefield, the greater the chance for anti-Lincoln forces to be successful at the ballot box in the elections of 1863 and 1864. On April 19, 1863, Lee wrote his wife, Mary Anna, “I do not think our enemies are so confident of success as they used to be. … If successful this year, next fall there will be a great change in public opinion at the North. The Republicans will be destroyed & I think the friends of peace will become so strong that the next administration will go in on that basis.” Lee, always realistic about the odds his smaller armies faced, believed the road to a third morale-crushing victory lay in another invasion of the North.

  However, the whole South had heard the story of their greatest loss at Chancellorsville. On the evening of May 2, 1863, just before 9:30 p.m., Stonewall Jackson, with a few of his officers, rode beyond Confederate lines to try to gain information about Union positions. As he and his party rode back toward their lines, in the darkness they were mistaken for Union cavalry and fired upon. Three bullets struck Jackson. Initially there was hope that he would recover, but he died on Sunday, May 10. His death took away Lee’s right-hand man and severely tested the South’s belief that God was on their side.

  Three days later, Lincoln read in the Washington Chronicle an appreciative editorial on Jackson. That same day, Lincoln wrote editor John W. Forney, “I wish to lose no time in thanking you for the excellent and manly article in the Chronicle on ‘Stonewall Jackson.’ ” Lincoln’s respect for a Christian gentleman and soldier knew no borders.

  Lee began his next march north on June 3, 1863. For several days, the Northern intelligence service, the Bureau of Military Information, struggled to discern his intentions. What was his objective? Baltimore? Philadelphia? Harrisburg? Anxious crowds gathered at the Willard Hotel hoping for some credible information.

  On the morning of June 5, 1863, Hooker sent a telegram to Lincoln proposing a response. As Lee moved north, Hooker wanted “to pitch into his rear.” Lincoln, seeing more clearly than Hooker, believed Lee was “tempting” Hooker and saw this offensive as an opening. After first stating his objection in military language, Lincoln employed a colorful analogy to make his point. “I would not take any risk of being entangled upon the river, like an ox jumped half over a fence, and liable to be torn by dogs, front and rear, without a fair chance to gore one way or kick the other.”

  Hooker, not convinced that Lee intended to take his whole army on a raid into Maryland or Pennsylvania, presented a plan to Lincoln and Halleck on June 10, 1863. He believed he could strike a mortal blow by crossing the Rappahannock at Fredericksburg and marching directly to Richmond, which he believed was defended by only 1,500 men.

  Lincoln replied within ninety minutes. “I would not go South of the Rappahannock upon Lee’s moving North of It.” Furthermore, “If you had Richmond invested to-day, you would not be able to take it in twenty days; meanwhile, your communications, and with them, your army, would be ruined.” The president told Hooker what he had told McClellan and Burnside. “I think Lee’s Army, and not Richmond, is your true objective point.” He then offered military advice. “If he comes towards the Upper Potomac, follow on his flank, and on the inside track, shortening your lines, while he lengthens his. Fight him when opportunity affords. If he stays where he is, fret him, and fret him.” With his growing sense of military strategy, Lincoln was out-generaling one of his leading generals.

  As Lee’s divisions moved north down the Shenandoah Valley, Jeb Stuart’s cavalry guarded the passes and gaps of the Blue Ridge to screen these movements from federal eyes. Hooker had been instructed by Lincoln and Halleck to keep the bulk of his army between Lee and Washington in order to protect the capital from any sudden Confederate incursion. Lee skillfully had his division commanders move their troops at different times and in different directions.

  Lincoln, listening to the chatter at the telegraph office, understood that Lee’s line of march must be strung out over many miles. Accordingly, on June 14, 1863, he wrote to Hooker, “If the head of Lee’s army is at Martinsburg and the tail of it on the Plank road between Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, the animal must be very slim somewhere. Could you not break him?”

  That same Sunday, Gideon Welles wrote in his diary, “Scary rumors abroad of army operations and a threatened movement of Lee upon Pennsylvania.” In the evening, Welles found Lincoln and Halleck at the War Department. The president told Welles “he was feeling very bad.” Welles volunteered that if Lee was moving, this could be an opportunity for Hooker to “take advantage and sever his forces.” Lincoln agreed, replying that “our folks … showed no evidence that they ever availed themselves of any advantage.”

  The next day, June 15, 1863, Lincoln learned that the Union garrison at Winchester, Virginia, had fallen to Confederate general Richard Ewell’s troops. He also received reports that the advance units of Lee’s army were beginning to cross the Potomac into Maryland and Pennsylvania.

  Growing more upset with Hooker, on June 16, 1863, Lincoln told him that his strategy “looks like defensive merely, and seems to abandon the fair chan
ce now presented of breaking the enemy’s long and necessarily thin line.” In Lincoln’s third communication of the day to Hooker, the president, exasperated, placed Hooker under Halleck’s direct command.

  This break was the beginning of the end for Hooker. Lincoln made a mistake at the outset in allowing him to go around Halleck and report directly to the president. In the next ten days, Hooker quarreled with Halleck, especially over Hooker’s request to have the troops guarding Harpers Ferry transferred to his command. The break was painful. On June 26, 1863, Welles confided in his diary that “the President in a single remark to-day betrayed doubts about Hooker, to whom he is quite partial.”

  The next evening, Lincoln, Stanton, and Halleck, agreeing that Hooker was no longer the man to face Lee, selected General George Gordon Meade to replace him. A native of Pennsylvania, Meade “would fight well on his own dunghill,” Lincoln remarked. The next day, June 28, 1863, Lincoln pulled from his pocket a resignation letter from Hooker that he had accepted and told his cabinet he had “observed in Hooker the same failings that were witnessed in McClellan after the battle of Antietam—a want of alacrity to obey, and a greedy call for more troops which could not, and ought not to be taken from other points.” He announced that the new commander would be Meade.

  Even before informing the cabinet, Stanton and Lincoln had dispatched Colonel James A. Hardie to Pennsylvania with orders for Meade. Clad in civilian clothes, Hardie persuaded Meade’s staff members to let him enter the general’s tent at three o’clock in the morning. Waking Meade, Hardie’s first words to him were that he had come from the War Department to bring him trouble. Startled out of his sleep, hearing this ill-timed humor, Meade later wrote his wife that his first thought was that Hooker had sent this man to arrest him.

  George Meade was born in 1815 in Cadiz, Spain, where his father was an agent for the navy. Young George, tall and slender, graduated from West Point in 1835. At the outbreak of the Civil War, he was appointed brigadier general of the Pennsylvania Reserves. He fought under McClellan on the Virginia peninsula campaign in 1862 and was seriously wounded at Glendale when a musket ball hit him above his hip and just missed his spine. An additional bullet struck his arm, but Meade had stayed on his horse and persisted in commanding his troops until his loss of blood forced him to retire from the field.

  After recuperating in a Philadelphia hospital, Meade led his Pennsylvania troops at South Mountain and Antietam. As a corps commander at Chancellorsville, he was dismayed by Hooker’s defensive tactics, but he led his own troops with great skill. In the aftermath of the battle, when Hooker’s leading generals believed their leader had lost his nerve in battle, the talk in the officers’ tents was that they wanted Meade to replace Hooker as commander of the Army of the Potomac, but he had refused to be part of any uprising.

  Lincoln appointed George Meade to succeed Joseph Hooker as commander of the Army of the Potomac at the end of June 1863.

  Lincoln dealt differently with this new commander. Perhaps learning a lesson after trying to offer fatherly advice to Burnside and Hooker, he let his intentions be communicated through Halleck. Meade, at age forty-seven, was in no danger of being mistaken for a prima donna. Competent, if colorless, he gained the nickname “the Old Snapping Turtle” because he was short-tempered, especially with civilians and newspapermen. Unlike Hooker at Chancellorsville, Meade always led from the front.

  AS ROBERT E. LEE invaded Pennsylvania, Lincoln stepped up his monitoring of the telegraph traffic. But he did not simply receive information; he constantly asked for updates. On June 24, 1863, he wired General Darius N. Couch, in command of the Department of the Susquehanna, “Have you any reports of the enemy moving into Pennsylvania?” On the day that Meade assumed command, he asked Couch, “What news now? What are the enemy firing at four miles from your works?”

  Although Lincoln’s steady stream of telegrams might sound like he was pushing a panic button along with everyone else in Washington, his true beliefs were revealed in an exchange of letters with Governor Joel Parker of New Jersey. Parker wrote on June 29, 1863, “The people of New Jersey are apprehensive.” The governor insisted on telling the president what to do. McClellan should be reinstated as commander of the Army of the Potomac and “the enemy should be driven from Pennsylvania.” Lincoln responded on the day before the commencement of the battle at Gettysburg with the exact opposite opinion. “I really think the attitude of the enemies’ army in Pennsylvania, presents us the best opportunity we have had since the war began.” Lincoln, almost alone, saw Lee’s invasion not as a dire tragedy, but as an opportunity. The president was also fully aware that he was placing Meade in command of a recently twice-beaten army whose morale, from fighting for so long in Virginia, was fragile. His basic concern was that Meade’s Army of the Potomac needed to fulfill two functions at once: protect Washington and Baltimore and strike at Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia as they entered Pennsylvania.

  THE STRIKE CAME SOONER than Meade or Lee or even Lincoln expected. On the morning of June 30, 1863, John Buford, one of the best intelligence men in the Union army, rode into Gettysburg, a market town and county seat of 2,400 residents 75 miles north of Washington, 115 miles west of Philadelphia, and only 8 miles across the Maryland border. Brigadier General Buford rode at the head of 2,950 men in two divisions of the Eighth Illinois Cavalry. At 12:20 p.m. he wrote General Alfred Pleasanton, “I entered this place to-day at 11 a.m. Found everybody in a terrible state of excitement on account of the enemy’s advance upon this place.” Buford, carefully reconnoitering the countryside, deployed his horse soldiers in ever-wider arcs of defensive pickets seven miles long around the town.

  On the morning of July 1, 1863, with a “blood red sunrise” in the east, A. P. Hill, one of Lee’s senior commanders, sent one of his divisions led by Major General Henry Heth down the Chambersburg Pike toward Gettysburg, where information said there was a supply of shoes. As his men approached this hub town, where twelve roads converged, the two armies simultaneously spied each other. At 7:30 a.m., Lieutenant Marcellus E. Jones of the Eighth Illinois Cavalry borrowed his sergeant’s carbine, steadied it on a fence rail, and fired the first shot of what would become the largest battle ever fought in the Western Hemisphere.

  Both sides had stumbled into what the military textbooks called a “meeting engagement.” Neither side was prepared to fight at this place at this time; the approaching battle was “unintended;” neither side held an obvious advantage. General Meade, on only the fourth day of his command, would discover that 165,000 soldiers would soon converge on a town of 2,400.

  The engagement, like a spontaneous three-act play, grew as more and more actors converged on Gettysburg. Meade, perched on “Old Baldy,” his hat pulled low over his face, was by nature a cautious general, and once engaged, fought mostly from a defensive posture. Lee, who had invaded the North to pull the Union troops away from Washington and to relieve the pressure upon Virginia, wanted to fight in Pennsylvania at a time and a place of his own choosing. He did not choose Gettysburg.

  Seventy-five miles away, Washington watched and waited. Lincoln now believed a battle was looming. He did not attend the regularly scheduled cabinet meeting on June 30, 1863, but camped out at the War Department with Stanton and Halleck.

  Early on the morning of July 2, 1863, Lincoln read the incoming dispatches from General Meade. The Confederate attacks were uncoordinated and disjointed, whereas the Union leaders acted with initiative and self-assurance. Yet there was no clear outcome of the battles on this second day of fighting.

  With Lincoln busy at the War Department, word came that Mary Lincoln, while being driven in her carriage from the Soldiers’ Home to the White House, had been involved in an accident. The driver’s seat became detached from the carriage, frightening the horses; Mary was tossed from the coach and hit her head on a rock. Although injured, Mary would make a full recovery.

  On the morning of July 3, 1863, as preparations in Washington for the Independence Day
celebration were in full swing, the battle at Gettysburg turned. Lee, against the counsel of his most trusted generals, decided to attack the center of the Union line. The plan was to overwhelm the Union artillery with Confederate cannon followed by a charge of 13,000 soldiers—ever after known as “Pickett’s charge.” The advance led to a crushing defeat, with approximately 6,600 Confederate casualties and half again that number taken prisoner. Meade, with the advantage shifted to his side, did not counterattack. An evening rain helped end three of the most deadly days in the war.

  On July 3, 1863, at Gettysburg, Mathew Brady photographed the dead of the First Minnesota near the Peach Orchard.

  On July 4, 1863, Meade’s headquarters issued a congratulatory declaration to the army. He did not write it but must have approved it. “Our task is not yet accomplished, and the commanding general looks to the army for greater efforts to drive from our soil every vestige of the presence of the invader.” Lincoln surely winced when he read Meade’s declaration. Once again, a Union commander revealed that he did not understand that his task was to destroy the army, not drive it from Union soil, where it could only restore itself once again.

  —

  BY THE END OF MAY 1863, Lincoln believed that the fall of Vicksburg was just a matter of time. Grant, having suffered more than 3,000 casualties in his initial assaults, and with an overwhelming advantage in manpower, decided to settle into a siege. Confederate general John Pemberton pleaded for relief, but with Sherman guarding the Union rear with six divisions, no relief would be forthcoming.