Rise to Greatness

by David Von Drehle

  The first day of 1863 did not mark the end of the war, or even the beginning of the end. That would come later in the year, when Grant drove the Rebels out of Vicksburg and Chattanooga on his way to replacing Halleck as general in chief. But the close of 1862—to borrow from Winston Churchill—brought the nation to the end of the beginning. And like the Shakespearean dramas that spoke so powerfully to the genius of Abraham Lincoln, the events of the final scenes were fated by the decisions, actions, omissions, flukes, failures, and successes of the early drama. When that fateful year began, a shattered land looked backward at a dream that seemed forever lost. When a new year arrived, the way forward was perceptible, an upward climb into a challenging but brilliant future.

  NOTES

  The sheer volume of material, both primary and secondary, related to Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War is so vast that dropping into the subject as a writer is like falling into the sea. As one who has tried to extricate the story of a single stormy year, I’ve emerged from this inexhaustible reservoir with a deep respect for those who have provided a comprehensive account of either Lincoln’s life or the war that remade our nation.

  The sources of this work begin with the broad overview of the Civil War rendered in the justly admired general histories by such writers as James McPherson, Bruce Catton, Shelby Foote, Allan Nevins, and the team of Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones, as well as in the invaluable trove collected by the magazine The Century and published as Battles and Leaders of the Civil War.

  I also undertook early in my research to apprehend the evanescent character of Abraham Lincoln. Like many contemporary readers, I was prodded to renew my exploration of this endlessly complex man by David Herbert Donald’s 1995 biography, titled Lincoln. Indeed, that book planted the seed of this one: after reading the chapters covering 1862, I found myself thinking, “My God, how did he survive that year?” I profited from reading full-dress biographies as diverse as those of William Herndon and Jesse Weik, Albert Beveridge, Carl Sandburg, James G. Randall, Benjamin P. Thomas, William Lee Miller, Richard Carwardine, and Michael Burlingame.

  The monumental work of John Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, straddles these two categories: it is both a political history of the Civil War and an intellectual biography of President Lincoln. Lincoln never got the chance to write his memoirs, but Nicolay and Hay arguably give us the block of marble from which that treasure would have been carved.

  Against this general background, I set out to tell the story of 1862 as much as possible from Lincoln’s point of view. But how was I to recover that perspective? I found myself thinking of the old encyclopedia on my parents’ bookshelf, which illustrated the human anatomy with a set of clear acetate pages, one printed with the skeleton, the next with the circulatory system, another with the nervous system, and yet another with the digestive system. Layer by layer, they added up to the whole picture. My source material likewise accumulated in layers, beginning with the words actually written, dictated, or signed by Lincoln, as found in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, especially the pages in Volumes 5 and 6, which cover 1862.

  The richness and authority of this material creates a problem, however, for a writer trying to follow Lincoln through the year, because the written record is strongest when Lincoln was dealing with problems from a distance. Exchanges through the mail and over the telegraph were likely to be preserved, but Lincoln’s countless face-to-face meetings in Washington and elsewhere are lost to time, except where someone paused to write them down. Even then, we are at the mercy of the recorder’s memory and veracity.

  To address these gaps in the historical record, I collated the material in the Collected Works with a timeline of known events in Lincoln’s life and major events of the war. This was drawn from Earl Schenck Miers’s Lincoln Day by Day, Vol. 3, and from The Civil War Day by Day: An Almanac, 1861–1865, by E. B. Long with Barbara Long. The eminent Lincoln authority Paul Angle once wrote that the Miers collection is “to Lincoln study what the steel frame of a skyscraper is to the finished structure.” That is certainly apt in this case.

  My next layer of source material was the voluminous correspondence between Secretary of State William H. Seward and American envoys in London, Paris, St. Petersburg, and Madrid. This underexamined material tells us a great deal about Lincoln’s evolving military and political thinking, even though the dispatches went out over Seward’s signature. Seward consulted extensively with Lincoln in preparing major dispatches, and he read most of these documents to Lincoln before sending them. The amount of time Lincoln spent with Seward was a bone of contention for the rest of the cabinet; for us, it is suggestive of the importance Lincoln placed on foreign policy and the contents of these diplomatic messages.

  The next layer comprised diaries, letters, and other firsthand records left by individuals in direct contact with Lincoln, as well as others whose actions, though remote, had significant impact on Lincoln in 1862. These include the diaries and letters of John Hay, John Nicolay, Salmon P. Chase, Edward Bates, Gideon Welles, Orville Hickman Browning, John Dahlgren, Benjamin French, and Horatio Taft; the letters of George McClellan, William T. Sherman, Ulysses Grant, Charles Sumner, Mary Todd Lincoln, Thomas Ewing, Sr., Thomas Ewing, Jr., Gustavus Vasa Fox, and Rebecca Pomroy; the extensive correspondence addressed to Lincoln and preserved in the Lincoln papers; the journalism of Noah Brooks, William Russell, Edward Dicey, and others; and William P. Fessenden’s detailed memorandum of the cabinet crisis of December 1862.

  Next came a layer of material drawn from the memoirs of figures close to Lincoln or vital to the events of the year, including Ulysses Grant, William T. Sherman, Jefferson Davis, George McClellan, Francis B. Carpenter, Elizabeth Keckly (Keckley), Julia Taft Bayne, David Homer Bates, Winfield Scott, Henry Adams, William O. Stoddard, and Gideon Welles.

  I also made extensive use of the Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln, compiled by the great Lincoln scholar Don E. Fehrenbacher and his wife, Virginia Fehrenbacher. Though all of the material in the Fehrenbacher book is available in other firsthand and purportedly firsthand accounts, I have frequently cited Recollected Words in my endnotes because doing so allows interested readers to find a number of my sources conveniently in one place and also to read the Fehrenbachers’ astute judgments concerning the reliability of various quotations.

  I have made sparing use, as indicated in the notes, of the United States War Department’s The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. This enormous archive is, of course, the mother lode for military historians of the Civil War. But my purpose has not been to write a military history; I turned to these records primarily to illuminate corners where I found confusion or disagreement among historians on some point.

  Finally, beyond these primary sources I relied on a last layer of highly credible secondary sources devoted to particular facets of Lincoln and aspects of the war. These are reflected in the Notes and in the Bibliography.

  Certain sources are so frequently cited in the endnotes that I have adopted the following conventions for dealing with them (full citations are found in the bibliography):

  Bates diary: The Diary of Edward Bates, 1859–1866.

  Browning diary: The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, Vol. 1, 1850–1864.

  Chase diary and Chase to…: Inside Lincoln’s Cabinet: The Civil War Diaries of Salmon P. Chase.

  CW: The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln.

  Dahlgren diary: published in Madeleine Vinton Dahlgren, Memoir of John A. Dahlgren, Rear-Admiral United States Navy, especially pp. 348–88.

  French diary: Benjamin Brown French, Witness to the Young Republic: A Yankee’s Journal, 1828–1870.

  Grant to…: The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, Vols. 4–7.

  Hay diary: Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay.

  Mary Lincoln to…: Mary Todd Lincoln: Her Life and Letters.

  McClellan to…: The Civil War Pap
ers of George B. McClellan: Selected Correspondence, 1860–1865.

  Nicolay diary and Nicolay to…: With Lincoln in the White House: Letters, Memoranda, and Other Writings of John G. Nicolay, 1860–1865.

  RW: Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln.

  Seward to … and … to Seward: United States Department of State: Message of the President of the United States to the Two Houses of Congress at the Commencement of the Third Session of the Thirty-Seventh Congress.

  Sherman to…: Sherman’s Civil War: Selected Correspondence of William T. Sherman, 1860–1865.

  Sumner to…: The Selected Letters of Charles Sumner, Vol. 2.

  Taft diary: Washington During the Civil War: The Diary of Horatio Nelson Taft, 1861–1865.

  Welles diary: Diary of Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy Under Lincoln and Johnson, Vol. 1, 1861–March 30, 1864. (This idiosyncratic work is partly in the form of undated essays and partly in the form of dated entries. Where I have drawn from dated entries, I cite by date; otherwise by page number.)

  PROLOGUE

  Everyone was out: The scene in Washington, D.C., on January 1, 1862, is based primarily on entries for that date in the diaries of Edward Bates, Horatio Taft, and Orville Hickman Browning. (See Note on Sources, above.) Also, New York Times, Jan. 2, 1862. The rapid growth of the city and the army is discussed widely in the literature. A classic account is Leech, Reveille in Washington: 1860–1865; also Fergurson, Freedom Rising: Washington in the Civil War.

  everyone was welcome: The pickpocket is mentioned in the Browning diary, Jan. 1, 1862.

  It was “the greatest jam”: New York Times, Jan. 2, 1862.

  The Confederacy was in the process: Hattaway and Jones, How the North Won: A Military History of the Civil War, p. 276.

  “It is in the highest Degree likely”: Palmerston to the Foreign Office, Oct. 20, 1861, quoted in Ridley, Lord Palmerston, p. 552.

  Davis was weighing: Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, Vol. 5, pp. 153–54.

  The Treasury Department was broke: cf. http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/chart_central.php?year=1860.

  A rebel diplomat crowed: quoted in Owsley, King Cotton Diplomacy: Foreign Relations of the Confederate States of America, gp. 80.

  “If there is one division of the states”: Andrew Johnson, “Not a Southern or Any Other Confederacy,” a speech delivered in the Senate, Dec. 18, 1860, reprinted in Heidler and Heidler, eds., Encyclopedia of the American Civil War: A Political, Social, and Military History, pp. 2239–40.

  “The insurrection is largely: CW, Vol. 5, pp. 35–53.

  Southerners maintained: See, for example, the South Carolina Secession Ordinance of Dec. 24, 1860, at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp.

  Both experience and history suggested that: See, for example, Dahlgren diary, Oct. 25, 1861.

  McClellan … had toyed: McClellan to Mary Ellen McClellan, July 27, 1861.

  Frémont’s wife … had threatened: Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln, Vol. 4, pp. 414–15.

  “the power of a God”: Sumner to Francis Lieber, Sept. 17, 1861.

  “Never has there been”: ibid.

  1: NEW YEAR’S DAY

  proud of his physique: J. Rowan Herndon and Hardin Bale, quoted in Herndon’s Informants, pp. 7, 13.

  180 pounds of muscle: Carpenter, The Inner Life of Abraham Lincoln: Six Months at the White House, p. 217; RW, p. 507.

  wasting away: Johnson Brigham, quoted in Herndon’s Informants, pp. 157–58.

  sketch artist Alfred Waud: see Waud’s illustration in Harper’s Weekly 6, no. 265 (Jan. 25, 1862), pp. 56–57.

  “remarkably pensive and tender”: Carpenter, The Inner Life of Abraham Lincoln, p. 218.

  “never had a confidant”: Herndon and Weik, Abraham Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life, Vol. 2, p. 140.

  “strange, friendless”: CW, Vol. 1, p. 320. This quote is emended to read “a strange[r]” in CW, but I agree with David Herbert Donald that it is more likely that Lincoln wrote it as he meant it. Donald, “We Are Lincoln Men”: Abraham Lincoln and His Friends, p. 10.

  Bates had been struck: Bates diary, Dec. 31, 1861.

  the price tag had doubled: Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln, Vol. 6, pp. 227–30.

  “The President has lost ground amazingly”: quoted in Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Vol. 2, p. 203.

  “I think to lose Kentucky”: CW, Vol. 4, pp. 531–33.

  “poor white trash”: Wade to Zachariah Chandler, Sept. 23, 1861, quoted in Rafuse, McClellan’s War: The Failure of Moderation in the Struggle for the Union, p. 135.

  “murdering your country by inches”: quoted in Trefousse, The Radical Republicans: Lincoln’s Vanguard for Racial Justice, p. 184.

  “has not the power to command”: Bates diary, Dec. 31, 1861.

  “[He] was charmed with Mary’s wit”: Elizabeth Todd Edwards, quoted in Herndon’s Informants, p. 443.

  “so kindly, so considerate”: William O. Stoddard, quoted in Randall, Mary Lincoln: Biography of a Marriage, p. 197.

  Her temper was notorious: Burlingame, “Abraham Lincoln’s Emotional Life,” pp. 11–13, http://www.lehrmaninstitute.org/lehrman/Hill-school-talk2.pdf.

  “bring him into disgrace”: RW, pp. 68–69.

  “Flub-dubs”: French diary, Dec. 14, 1861.

  “world-renowned whoremonger”: quoted in Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, Vol. 2, pp. 274–75.

  “Some very extraordinary storeys”: ibid.

  Evidently, Wikoff had persuaded: A definitive treatment of Mary Lincoln’s scandalous associations is found in Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, Vol. 2, pp. 162–84. See also Berry, House of Abraham: Lincoln and the Todds, a Family Divided by War, pp. 100–103.

  David Todd, an officer: Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, Vol. 1, p. 180.

  “A case of treasonable action”: McClellan to Cameron, Dec. 9, 1861.

  “While others are asleep”: RW, pp. 192, 201.

  “loved him like a brother”: Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, Vol. 2, p. 200.

  “I ain’t got any!”: McClellan to Mary Ellen McClellan, Nov. 21, 1861.

  She “looked remarkably well”: French diary, Nov. 24, 1861.

  “eyes of a hyena”: Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, Vol. 2, p. 282.

  “It is not proper”: Ibid.

  “a gawdy show”: Bates diary, Jan. 1, 1862.

  “The most critical point”: Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln, Vol. 5, p. 218.

  “You may stand for this”: quoted in Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative, Vol. 1, p. 157.

  His government was already annoyed: Duberman, Charles Francis Adams, 1807–1886, p. 43.

  Europe’s “aristocracy [is] bent”: Dayton to Seward, Jan. 27, 1862.

  “They [hope] for our ruin!”: quoted by Norman A. Graebner, “Northern Diplomacy and European Neutrality,” in Donald, ed., Why the North Won the Civil War, p. 57.

  more room to save face: Crook, Diplomacy During the American Civil War, pp. 84–85.

  Seward devised an artful response: See, for example, Foreman, A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War, pp. 194–96.

  “People are almost frantic”: Joseph Gillespie, quoted in Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, Vol. 2, p. 228.

  keep the foreign powers in check: Adams to Seward, Dec. 27, 1861. Even after the resolution of the Trent crisis, Adams pronounced himself “quite doubtful” about England’s future course.

  This was the explanation: CW, Vol. 5, pp. 41–42.

  Taney felt free to spurn: Simon, Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney: Slavery, Secession, and the President’s War Powers, p. 222.

  Lincoln’s powerful critiques: See, for example, Fehrenbacher, Prelude to Greatness: Lincoln in the 1850s, pp. 70–95.

  priceless propaganda victory: Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America, pp. 39, 117. This idea is the central thesis of Simon, Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney.

  “I very much doubt”: Trollope, Nor
th America, p. 172.

  “They knew almost nothing”: Williams, Lincoln and His Generals, pp. 3–6.

  none was a true warrior-general: Details of the officers’ biographies come from Heidler and Heidler, eds., Encyclopedia of the American Civil War, in the articles titled with their respective names.

  “I can do it all”: quoted in Hay diary, undated (describing the evening of Nov. 1, 1861), p. 30.

  “Draw on me”: Ibid.

  he had a low opinion: McClellan’s political philosophy, and its influence over his military strategy, is given a rich and sympathetic treatment by Ethan Rafuse in McClellan’s War.

  “By some strange operation”: McClellan to Mary Ellen McClellan, July 27, 1861.

  “letter after letter”: McClellan to Mary Ellen McClellan, Aug. 9 [10], 1861.

  a dangerous blindness: cf. Hay diary, Oct. 26 and Nov. 11, 1861.

  “The Commander-in-Chief”: quoted in Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, Vol. 2, p. 197.

  “unparalleled insolence”: Hay diary, Nov. 13, 1861.

  Lincoln took the snub: CW, Vol. 5, pp. 34–35; McClellan to Lincoln, Dec. 10, 1861.

  “It is terrible”: McClellan to Mary Ellen McClellan, circa Oct. 31, 1861.

  “his reading was laborious”: Stoddard, Inside the White House in War Times: Memoirs and Reports of Lincoln’s Secretary, pp. 184–85.