A. Lincoln

by Ronald C. White, Jr.

  As a young adult, Lincoln had reacted against his father’s Baptist tradition with its low tolerance for questions and doubts. As president, he was drawn to Gurley’s learned preaching with its steady punctuation of questions. Lincoln’s Illinois friend Leonard Swett said of Lincoln, “The whole world to him was a question of cause and effect.”

  One of Lincoln’s requirements for choosing a minister and a church was politics, or the lack thereof. In consulting Montgomery Blair, who may have recommended New York Avenue, Lincoln is reported to have said, “I wish to find a church whose clergyman holds himself aloof from politics.” When asked about Gurley and his sermons, Lincoln is said to have replied, “I like Gurley. He don’t preach politics. I get enough of that through the week.”

  Many times Lincoln heard Gurley preach sermons that were both intellectual and theological. Over and over again, Gurley highlighted God’s loving providence in the world. Gurley’s chief mentor at Princeton Seminary, Professor Charles Hodge, taught that the recognition of the personality of God was the key to the distinction between providence and fatalism. In his three-volume Systematic Theology, Hodge said of providence that “an infinitely wise, good, and powerful God is everywhere present, controlling all events great and small, necessary, and free, in a way perfectly consistent with the nature of his creatures and his own infinite excellence.” In Christian theology, according to Hodge, God’s divine power is able to embrace human freedom and responsibility.

  A fellow minister described Gurley’s ministry as “Calvinism presented in his beautiful examples and spirit and preaching.” In Gurley’s Calvinist emphasis on providence, he acknowledged, as Lincoln would increasingly do, elements of ambiguity and mystery. The Presbyterian minister called attention to the potential logical contradiction of free agency and God’s governance. By the use of various metaphors, he heightened, not lessened, this paradox. “Man devises; the Lord directs.” Or “man proposes; God disposes.” And, “man’s agency, and God’s overruling sovereignty.” This theme of human agency and God’s sovereignty, Gurley said, was the best way to understand “the probable fruits and consequences of the terrible struggle in which the nation has been engaged.”

  The president was present on August 6, 1863, when Gurley preached a sermon in response to Lincoln’s recent call for a national day of public humiliation, prayer, and fasting. Gurley’s sermon, “Man Projects and God Results,” was based on a text from Proverbs 16:9: “A man’s heart deviseth his way; but the Lord directs his steps.”

  “Man is a rational, a free, and, therefore an accountable moral agent,” Gurley preached, adding, “while this is true, it is also true that God governs the world.” Gurley went on to affirm, “He accomplishes His fixed and eternal purposes through the instrumentality of free, and accountable, and even wicked agents.” That these themes in Gurley’s preaching struck a responsive chord in Lincoln would become clear in the coming months.

  IN LINCOLN’S NEWFOUND WILLINGNESS to speak outside Washington, he welcomed the invitation to address a sanitary fair in Baltimore on April 18, 1864. The Sanitary Commission had become a chief organization aiding soldiers, and Lincoln decided to lend his presidential hand in raising money for it. The memory of passing through Baltimore in disguise on his way to Washington in February 1861 remained one of the lowest moments in his life. He told the crowd he accepted the invitation because “the world moves,” and he came to Baltimore to mark the moving. He reminded his audience that at the beginning of the war three years ago, Union “soldiers could not so much as pass through Baltimore.”

  In his speech, Lincoln offered compelling remarks on the meaning of liberty. “The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are in want of one.” Lincoln believed in clear definitions. “We all declare for Liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing.” Lincoln explained: “With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleased with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor.” Lincoln underlined the tragic truth that these two “incompatable things” were called by the same name—liberty.”

  He drove his point home with a metaphor whose meaning no one could miss. “The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially if the sheep was a black one.”

  As Lincoln came to the end of his speech he abruptly changed his tone. “A painful rumor, true I fear, has reached us of the massacre, by rebel forces, at Fort Pillow,” a fort high above the Mississippi River forty miles north of Memphis.

  Everyone in his audience had recently learned about the massacre. Early on the morning of April 14, 1864, Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest attacked Fort Pillow. Forrest was a guerrilla fighter revered in the South. Possessing no military education, he despised the West Point doctrine that called for holding one-third of one’s forces in reserve. He achieved a reputation as the master of cavalry, using horses for lightning attacks by which his outnumbered troops could suddenly gain the advantage. To General William Sherman he was “that devil Forrest,” who should be “hunted down and killed if it costs 10,000 lives and bankrupts the [national] treasury.” Union major Lionel F. Booth had defended the fort with 580 troops, 292 of whom were African-American.

  What followed became the subject of controversy, not just for weeks, but for years. The surviving Union soldiers reported that as the defenders of the fort were overwhelmed, the soldiers threw up their hands to surrender. They charged that the Confederate troops, disregarding the clear signs of surrender, proceeded to massacre the black soldiers. General Forrest’s own report to his superior, General Leonidas Polk, stated, “The river was dyed red with the blood of the slaughtered for 200 yards.”

  In Baltimore Lincoln announced plans for a congressional investigation. He concluded his speech forcefully. “It will be a matter of grave consideration in what exact course to apply the retribution; but in the supported case, it must come.” Lincoln, who up to this point in the war had downplayed all cries for revenge, plainly was caught up in the escalating talk of retribution.

  On April 22, 1864, the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War began public hearings. In a highly charged atmosphere, their report mixed fact-finding and propaganda. The cries to execute Confederate prisoners in eye-for-eye reprisals grew.

  On May 3, 1864, Lincoln asked his cabinet “to give me in writing your opinion as to what course the government should take in this case.” He received long and quite different replies. Seward, Chase, Stan-ton, and Welles argued that Confederate troops equal in number to the Union troops massacred should be held as hostages and killed if the Confederate government admitted the massacre. Bate and John P. Usher, who had succeeded Caleb Smith as secretary of the interior, advocated no retaliation against innocent hostages, but argued execution of the offenders if apprehended.

  There is no record of Lincoln’s opinion in response to the recommendations of the members of his cabinet. He rarely had a heart for revenge and may have simply allowed the discussion of retaliation for Fort Pillow to be overtaken by more pressing events on the battlefield demanding his attention in the spring of 1864.

  MEANWHILE, LINCOLN’S NEW COMMANDER, Ulysses S. Grant, pressed ahead. Grant had told his best friend, General William Sherman, that he feared if he came to Washington he would get stuck behind a desk, so he established his headquarters in the field at Culpeper Court House in Virginia. What a contrast to George McClellan’s command from his opulent rented Washington home. Lincoln met with Grant three times at the White House in March and April and anticipated accepting Grant’s invitation for a fourth meeting at Grant’s Virginia headquarters in April, but the president was unable to keep that date.

  Grant’s plan for the 1864 spring offensive directed his senior commander
s to move simultaneously on five fronts. In the past, Confederate generals, although almost always outnumbered, had shifted their interior lines to meet the often disjointed attacks of the Union forces. In the East, Grant ordered General George Meade’s Army of the Potomac to cross the Rapidan River in northern Virginia and attack Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia without letting up. General Franz Sigel would drive his army south up the Shenandoah Valley and apply pressure on Richmond from the west, while General Benjamin Butler, coming up from Fort Monroe at the tip of the Virginia peninsula, would push toward Richmond from the south. In the West, Grant directed William Tecumseh Sherman, his successor as leader of the armies of the Cumberland, Ohio, and Tennessee, now one hundred thousand strong, to slice southeast through Georgia to capture Atlanta, a valuable railroad center. In a secondary move, Nathaniel Banks would overcome Mobile, Alabama, and push north to unite with Sherman.

  Grant told Meade, “Lee’s army will be your objective point. … Wherever Lee goes, there you will go also.” He instructed Sherman “to move against Johnston’s army, to break it up.” Lincoln backed Grant’s plan. Finally, Lincoln had found a commander who believed with him that opposing armies, not Richmond or Atlanta, should be the real focus of the Union armies.

  At the end of April, as the military campaign was about to begin, Lincoln wrote Grant, “Not expecting to see you again before the Spring campaign opens.” The president expressed “entire satisfaction with what you have done up to this time.” He added, “You are vigilant and self-reliant; and pleased with this, I wish not to obtrude any constraints or restraints upon you.” Lincoln had waited a long time to be able to declare such confidence in his commanding general. At the beginning of the war, Lincoln had expressed deference to his commanding generals because he recognized what he did not know. Now, after three years during which he taught himself a great deal about military strategy, he gladly expressed a new kind of deference, not because he did not know or have an opinion, but because of his implicit trust in Grant.

  IN THE EARLY MORNING HOURS of May 4, 1864, the Army of the Potomac broke their winter camp and crossed the Rapidan River seventeen miles west of Fredericksburg in northern Virginia. The politicians and the public believed that with Grant now in charge, the war would be over by the fall of 1864. Indeed, the Army of the Potomac was confident, well clothed, and equipped with ample ammunition. Days before, Robert E. Lee had withdrawn his army from the Rapidan, ill-clad, ill-equipped, but also confident in themselves and their ability to fight on their home ground, and in their leader. If Grant and Meade’s tactics were to press forward at all times, Lee’s tactic now was to defend and delay. He hoped to defeat an enemy at least twice his size by exacting such losses that the Northern public and politicians would finally come to believe victory was not worth the cost.

  Lee pulled his forces back from the Rapidan River into “the Wilderness,” twelve miles wide and six miles deep, a part of the area where the battle of Chancellorsville had been fought a year before. He chose this dense forest of second-growth scrub oak and dwarf pines, interlaced by streams and roads and trails, so that Union superiority in numbers could be neutralized, and Union artillery rendered practically useless. On May 5 and 6, 1864, firefights erupted in the thick undergrowth, often setting it on fire, as both sides gave no quarter in this forbidding landscape.

  As Lincoln huddled with Secretary Stanton at the War Department, reports came in from the Wilderness of two days of terrible, confusing fighting. Lee’s forces, although outnumbered two to one, believed they won a victory in the Wilderness, but Grant did not consider the battles a defeat. He did not retreat north of the Rapidan as Joe Hooker had done a year earlier after the battle of Chancellorsville. Both sides paid dearly in the battle of the Wilderness as the Union suffered eighteen thousand casualties and the Confederates close to eleven thousand.

  In the midst of the battle of the Wilderness a young cub reporter for the New York Tribune arrived at the White House with a message from General Grant for the president: “There will be no turning back.” Lincoln put his long arm around the young man and “pressed a kiss on his cheek.”

  The next day, Schuyler Colfax, Speaker of the House of Representatives, called on Lincoln. “I saw [Lincoln] walk up and down the Executive Chamber, his long arms behind his back, his dark features contracted still more with gloom.” As they met, “I thought his face the saddest one I had ever seen.” Yet Lincoln “quickly recovered” when the conversation turned to General Grant. “Hope beamed on his face.”

  Grant was now determined to stay on the offensive. He moved his army around Lee’s right flank and pushed south toward Richmond. Lincoln told John Hay, “I believe that if any other General had been at the Head of that army it would have been on this side of the Rapidan.” Lincoln summed up his confidence in Grant: “It is the dogged pertinacity of Grant that wins.”

  At Spotsylvania Court House, twelve miles to the southeast of the Wilderness, Union forces ran into a fierce Southern defense: a complex system of breastworks, trenches, and artillery emplacements that allowed the outnumbered Confederates to engage in a strong defensive fight. As the battle was about to begin, Elihu Washburne, the congressman from Grant’s home district who sometimes traveled with the general, decided to return to Washington. Washburne asked Grant if he could take a message to Lincoln and Stanton. The general, realizing he was in a much tougher fight than he had imagined, did not want to paint too positive a picture, which could be misinterpreted by a public hungry for news of victories. Chomping on his cigar, he wrote, “I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.”

  Nonetheless, the initial reports of Grant’s successes at Spotsylvania, including the capture of three thousand prisoners, produced euphoria in the North. Yet subsequent news from Spotsylvania told of twenty consecutive hours of fighting at the Bloody Angle, the top of the U of Lee’s defensive formation, in which bodies stacked up five feet deep. Lincoln could see the cost of the battle in the streets of Washington as the wounded arrived throughout the day and night. Attorney General Edward Bates wrote in his diary on May 15, 1864, “For the last 8 or 10 days, the most terrible battles of the war have occurred in Virginia. The carnage has been unexampled.” After so much bloodshed, questions began to rise about the price of victory. Grant and Meade had suffered sixty thousand casualties in one month of fighting, almost the size of Lee’s entire army.

  The carnage increased as Grant attacked the crossroads called Cold Harbor at the beginning of June. Lee, for whom Grant had increasing respect, was turning this war into a war of attrition, and so Grant decided to mount a massive assault. On the morning of June 3, 1864, hundreds of troops pinned their names and addresses to their uniforms in a premonition of what lay ahead. In the next hours, Union soldiers charged forward and were met by a withering hail of bullets. Grant lost 7,000 men, while Lee, fighting from trenches, suffered 1,500 casualties. At the end of the day Grant stopped the attack, admitting defeat. The Union army learned that day what European armies would learn a half century later in World War I: the deadly horrors of trench warfare. General George Meade wrote to his wife, “I think Grant has had his eyes opened, and is willing to admit now that Virginia and Lee’s army is not Tennessee and Bragg’s army.”

  The public began to turn against Grant, but Lincoln did not. The president told Noah Brooks, “I wish when you write and speak to people you would do all you can to correct the impression that the war in Virginia will end right off victoriously.” He continued, “To me the most trying thing in all this war is that people are too sanguine; they expect too much at once.” Lincoln, who would not make predictions, told Brooks, “As God is my judge, I shall be satisfied if we are over with the fight in Virginia within a year.”

  EVEN WITH SALMON CHASE’S WITHDRAWAL from the Republican field for president in March, the anti-Lincoln sentiment among Republican radicals did not go away. On May 31, 1864, four hundred radicals, in what Henry Raymond of the New York Times called “t
he bolter’s convention,” gathered in Cleveland’s Chapin Hall to nominate an alternative candidate for president. Passionate speeches called for suppressing the South and confiscating all the territory under federal authority. Some speakers called for suffrage to be expanded to blacks. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other women’s rights advocates led a contingent of women to the convention. General John C. Frémont, with a deep personal animus toward Lincoln, was nominated as the presidential candidate on this third-party ticket.

  Lincoln, in the telegraph office, received the announcement of Frémont’s nomination. He asked for a Bible and fingered through the Old Testament to 1 Samuel 22:2, the story of David standing before the cave of Adullam. “And every one that was discontented, gathered themselves unto him; and he became a captain over them; and there were with him about four hundred men.”

  In the first week of June, well-wishers and office seekers came through Washington to shake the hand of the president on their way to the National Union Party convention in Baltimore. The distressing news from Cold Harbor blighted what should have been anticipation of Lincoln’s nomination, by now a foregone conclusion, for a second term. Lincoln, following nineteenth-century protocol, would not be present in Baltimore, but that did not mean he had not been working behind the scenes to help shape the convention. On June 5, 1864, John Nicolay and Simon Cameron traveled to the convention on behalf of the president. Leonard Swett, always ready to help, traveled in from Illinois. Henry J. Raymond, editor of the New York Times, who had become a chief Lincoln supporter among newspaper editors, had been writing a first history of Lincoln’s administration, a full 496 pages containing a brief biographical sketch but composed mostly of Lincoln’s letters, speeches, and proclamations, which he published on the eve of the convention.