Abraham Lincoln

by Thomas Keneally

  As summer came on, Grant attempted to outflank Richmond by capturing Petersburg, to the south of the capital. But Lee arrived in time to interpose his army, and prepared for it an elaborate trench system that ultimately ran from the Appomatox River—where it became close neighbor to the trenches shielding Richmond and its railroads—to a point on Hatcher’s Run, more than twenty miles to the southwest. This long trench line has been seen by most commentators as a prefiguring of the twentieth century’s trench warfare. Lincoln knew that Grant would dig in and hang on ruthlessly; Grant could be depended on to “chew and choke, as much as possible.” But the siege of Petersburg was not good for the army—deaths and maimings were daily realities in the long attrition of Petersburg. When Robert returned home that summer, having graduated from Harvard and wanting to join the army, his mother embargoed his enlistment and his father supported her. Eventually he would arrange a place for Robert on Grant’s staff.

  In late June the president was presented with a chance to remove Chase from the cabinet. He had opposed one of Secretary Chase’s Treasury appointments—it was to have been of a Chase partisan—and Chase offered his resignation. Lincoln accepted it. Old Roger Taney, the chief justice who had engineered the Dred Scott decision, having died, Lincoln would ultimately appoint Chase to the Supreme Court. It would prove a wise appointment, since Chase could be depended on to uphold the constitutionality of the administration’s reforms.

  Arguments over the justice of Chase’s virtual firing from the cabinet and over Reconstruction, how the South should be treated postwar, divided Republicans in the House in a season lean in military victories but plentiful in long casualty lists. And as another blow to Lincoln’s reelection, a mobile Confederate force led by Jubal Early came up the Shenandoah, captured Harpers Ferry, and crossed the Potomac to attack Washington and Baltimore. Early cut the telegraph lines out of Washington and pushed to within two miles of the Soldiers’ Home. Lincoln drove out to Fort Stevens and stood on the parapet watching Union soldiers move across the countryside, driving Early’s Confederates out of the fields and orchards. Snipers were firing at the parapet, and a soldier dropped beside the president.

  Though Early was driven back, it was one of the issues Lincoln would raise with Grant on a visit to Fort Monroe. How had the fellow been permitted to get so close to the capital? Grant appointed a cavalry general named Phil Sheridan to the Shenandoah Valley to pursue and defeat Early’s army, a task to which Sheridan would attend with great flair and thoroughness.

  The sinister likelihood was that the Democratic candidate for the presidency would be McClellan—a man who had reasons to dislike Lincoln, opposed emancipation, and was willing to come to terms with Jefferson Davis. But, as the summer came to a close, there were sudden glories: Atlanta fell to Sherman, and Sheridan thrashed Jubal Early in three successive battles in the valley.

  It was credible now, as it had not been a few weeks before, that the war was going to end. The fall of Atlanta had undercut McClellan. So did the splendid speeches Lincoln gave to regiments returning from the front on leave after long campaigning. Not altogether ungrudgingly the North prepared to reelect Father Abraham. General Sheridan helped by thrashing Early yet again at Cedar Creek on October 19.

  On the day of the election, a stillness came to the White House. Few petitioners appeared. Lincoln himself had a quiet day with Hay and the journalist Noah Brooks, chatting in his “shop,” the presidential office. He was by no means certain, and dearly wished he could be. At last the sun went down, and at seven that night Lincoln went with his young men, Hay and Noah Brooks, to the War Department to receive the returns. The day had been gloomy, the night dim. No stars glittered with electric hope. The first returns, from Philadelphia and Baltimore, looked good, and Lincoln sent a messenger across to the White House to tell Mary it was justifiable to hope. Later in the night, as good returns from Indiana came in, Lincoln dished out a supper of fried oysters to his friends. By the small hours it had become apparent that he had won. He went to see Mary, then to his own bedroom. Ward Hill Lamon, the Illinois lawyer and old friend whom Lincoln considered a fusspot over security, wrapped himself in a blanket and, well supplied with pistols and Bowie knives—without bothering to tell Lincoln he was doing so—slept outside the presidential door. Lamon was convinced that Lincoln’s reelection made him more of a mark than ever, while Lincoln himself was notorious for taking his security lightly.

  The next day showed that he had beaten McClellan by half a million popular votes, and won the electoral college by 212 to 21. A massive majority of the soldiers had voted for him—a filial compliment. Yet a number of people commented that after the election, Lincoln seemed even more worn out and aged than before. If one looks at the early 1864 portrait of Lincoln by Mathew Brady, and compares it with the one made by Alexander Gardiner in early 1865, one sees a process of acute aging—on top of the ravages that had already appeared—that is not entirely a matter of light or graininess. Fatigue was chronic with him. Depicted in the South as a bloody Moloch of a man, he seemed in reality to carry the marks of his soldiers’ deaths on his angular, inconsolable face. Though there is some argument about who wrote the famous letter to Mrs. Bixby in November 1864—whether it was really Lincoln or his secretary Hay—and though there is even some dispute that Mrs. Bixby lost all five sons in the Union army (she certainly lost enough), the letter is itself a confession of the heinous impact of the war on Union families. “I have been shown in the files of the War Department,” runs that letter, which seems to stand for the whole conflict’s losses, “a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts, that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle.” The letter goes on to speak of “so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom.”

  Confirmed in the presidency, he prepared his December message to the new Congress. In it he showed some residual desire for colonization—in his praise for progress in Liberia, a republic which “may be expected to derive new vigor from American influence, improved by the rapid disappearance of slavery in the United States.” After all, for most of his adult life, he and other antislavery people had seen colonization as the answer to the desired gradual liberation of slaves, without having an impact on the American labor market. The leading abolitionists, by contrast, were offended by colonization, considered that it avoided the issue of whether a slave could become an American citizen, and saw the eventual day when the slaves would be freed as the day they would appropriately enter into full participation in the American polity. Although, as late as autumn 1864, Lincoln sent one-legged General Sickles on an expedition to Colombia, to see if it might prove appropriate for the colonization of former slaves, it had become apparent by now that colonization would be partial and long-term at best.

  Lincoln held out the hope that the opening of the ports of Norfolk, Fernandina, and Pensacola would undermine the attractiveness of blockade-running. But the main order of business was the proposed Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery throughout the United States. It had been passed by the Senate, but failed to get the requisite two-thirds in the House of Representatives. He urged the next Congress to pass the measure (as indeed it would).

  He had more reason for joy at Christmas than he had had in previous years. General Sherman sent him a Christmas Day telegram: “I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah.” Lincoln did not desire further sacrifices of men, but he did hope the war might not end before the Thirteenth Amendment was in place. The continuing bitter struggles and artillery duels in front of Petersburg ended any chance of that.

  Now that the Thirteenth Amendment was passed, and the Confederacy so battered, Lincoln let the patriarch of the Blair family of Missouri, Francis, father of his recently dismissed postmaster general, go south to negotiate with Jefferson Davis. Blair brought back a letter from Davis declaring that the Confederacy was interested in any conversation that would lead to peace between the two countries. Lincoln could n
ot swallow the “two countries” idea, but he gave three Confederate peace commissioners passage through the Petersburg lines to meet with him and Seward aboard the River Queen, the presidential steamer, anchored near Fort Monroe. Lincoln told the three commissioners that his conditions for peace were that the Rebel army lay down its arms, accept the Emancipation Proclamation, and submit to the authority of the Federal government. He was willing to permit gradual emancipation, to take place in five years’ time with “fair indemnity”—that is, fair compensation. It was a remarkable accommodation for him to make, and some would doubt whether he really made it. But on his return to Washington, he called his cabinet into session and told them about this offer. He was willing to pay the slaveholding states four hundred million dollars in government bonds if by April 1 “all resistance to national authority shall be abandoned and cease.” The other half of the money would be paid once the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified by the returned, formerly seceded states. The cabinet all opposed the idea, and so Lincoln abandoned it. The terms were unlikely to have been accepted by the Confederate administration anyhow, since the rationale of the Rebellion was to seek to validate the “peculiar institution” as an unassailable right.

  Abraham Lincoln prepared for his second inaugural address with characteristic care. As the day approached, many rumors reached Lamon and the detective chief, Pinkerton, that the president would be kidnapped and/or assassinated. “I know I’m in danger,” Lincoln confided to Seward, aware that nothing could stop a sniper at the ceremony, “but I’m not going to worry about it.” “Assassination,” said Seward, “is not an American practice or habit, and one so vicious and desperate cannot be engrafted into our political system.” Stanton ordered a company of Pennsylvania troops to camp on the White House lawn, but Lincoln was impatient about the soldiers appointed to protect his person. He specialized in trying to slip away from this protective screen on his evening walks, and there was a story that once he tried to urge his coachman to see if he could outpace a cavalry escort.

  The day of the inauguration was March-grim. The platform stood on the east front of the Capitol, and to it came the reelected president to take his oath, administered by Chief Justice Chase. Here, too, he gave his extremely short inauguration speech, whose opening was deceptively plain and had a sadder-but-wiser quality:

  At this second appearing to take the oath of the presidential office, there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then a statement, somewhat in detail, of a course to be pursued, seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years, during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phrase of the great contest which still absorbs the attention, and engrosses the energies of the nation, little that is new could be presented.

  Four years before, “all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. . . . Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than see it perish.”

  Though emancipation had exalted the war to the level of a moral crusade, the reelected president referred to slavery in only the most dispassionate terms:

  One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. . . . Neither party expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration, which it had already attained . . . each looked for an easier triumph, and the result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged.

  Everyone, he said, hoped for peace. “Yet, if God wills that it [the war] continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and till every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword . . . so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’ ”

  And then came the resonating paragraph that gave the speech its claim to remembrance, and addressed the spirit in which Reconstruction was to be undertaken: “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds. . . .”

  He did not take time to detail any victories, for he knew they were written in blood in the souls of the people. Nor did he let Vice President Johnson address them, since Johnson, although he was not an alcoholic, had nonetheless drunk too much whiskey as treatment for a bout of typhoid. Walt Whitman saw Lincoln at the White House reception afterward, and said that he looked disconsolate, as if he would rather be anywhere else. Whitman wrote of “a deep latent sadness in the expression.”

  Lincoln suffered a collapse from overwork and the “hypo” in mid-March, and was plagued by dreams. On March 14, overtaken by chills and exhaustion, he had to invite the cabinet to his bedside for a meeting. But the news from the front encouraged him. When better, he was pleased to go on the River Queen down Chesapeake Bay and into the James River to City Point, perhaps ten miles from the front lines at Petersburg. Tad and Mary accompanied him. On their first morning at City Point, Lincoln and Tad in company walked up the bluffs behind the port and looked at the immensity of army warehouses and shipping on either side of the James, toward Richmond to the north, toward Petersburg to the south. This was the logistical immensity his endurance had created.

  Robert, now a captain on Grant’s staff, arrived to have breakfast with his father, and told him that Lee had tried to break out that morning, at Fort Stedman, just a few miles down the railway line, and had been repulsed. Lincoln set out with Robert on a military train, and saw fallen Confederate and Union soldiers promiscuously entangled in the meadows and scrub, and immense lines of wounded beside the line.

  The next day Lincoln was to review Gen. Edward Ord’s Army of the James, and to be accompanied on horseback by Mrs. Ord, reputedly a beautiful woman. When Mary arrived during the review, Lincoln and Mrs. Ord rode to greet her, but Mary gave the general’s wife a ferocious tongue-lashing in front of all for flirtatiously presuming to ride in the position reserved for the president’s wife, and refused to be appeased by Lincoln’s pleading, “Mother, please.” It was the second time Mary had staged an embarrassing public display of chagrin in front of the army—a year before, the wife of a German officer, the petite Princess Agnes Salm-Salm, had publicly kissed Lincoln in Hooker’s camp on the Rappahannock, and this had led to a tiff that went on into the night, and that officers overheard from the Lincolns’ tent.

  In any case, after the Ord embarrassment Mary retired to the River Queen, and she would ultimately return to Washington early.

  Toward the end of March, Sherman, victor of Atlanta and prophet of total war, cigar in mouth and cravat tied in a way more typical of a poet than of a general, came up to City Point to see Lincoln and Grant. Sherman’s army was in North Carolina now, ready to drive northward. But Grant hoped to destroy Lee while Lincoln was still at City Point.

  16

  THE CONCLUSIVE MOVEMENT of the Civil War began on the night of March 29, when Grant outflanked the Confederate lines around Petersburg by attacking a village to the west named Five Oaks. Out of a climactic battle on April 1, a war correspondent arrived at the River Queen with Confederate battle flags. Lincoln followed the struggle on maps aboard the River Queen, but made occasional visits to the trenches as well. On the morning of April 3 came the news that Lee had evacuated Petersburg during the night.

  Lincoln took Tad into Petersburg, where they met General Grant, and Lincoln pumped his hand in gratitude. When they returned to the ship at City Point, Lincoln received the message that Richmond too had been abando
ned by the enemy. Again Lincoln and Tad and their escort set out, on the gunboat Malvern, up the James to the Confederate capital. It was a ruined city that Lincoln, landing on its docks, inherited—the Confederates had fired it. On coming ashore Lincoln was surrounded by black men and women calling his name, shouting God’s blessings on him and singing of glory. It was a curious moment. Lincoln, who had bedeviled this city for so many years, was guarded by a mere dozen sailors, and the remaining white citizens, who had not fled to Danville but who abominated him, watched from behind their solemn curtains as a black crowd danced around him in the ravaged and hungry streets. A cavalry escort came and took him to military headquarters—Jefferson Davis’s executive mansion, from which Davis had fled. Lincoln walked around the empty rooms and asked for a glass of water. As he sat in Jefferson Davis’s chair, he was cheered by the headquarters company.

  Lincoln’s secretary of state, William Seward, had been injured in a carriage accident and had withdrawn to his house on Lafayette Square. He was appalled, like the rest of the cabinet, when he discovered that Lincoln intended to let the Rebel Virginia legislature reconvene to manage the civil side of Virginia’s reconstruction. Seward and the rest of the cabinet began to dissuade Lincoln, telling him they would not countenance the idea of unrepentant Rebel legislators being permitted to continue governing with the consent of the Federal government.

  In the meantime Mary returned to City Point, in company with Lizzie Keckley, and the Lincolns visited Richmond again. When the River Queen returned to Washington from Richmond late on April 9, Stanton brought the president a telegram from Grant: GENERAL LEE SURRENDERED THE ARMY OF NORTHERN VIRGINIA THIS MORNING.