Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2

by Michael Burlingame

  Among the Union dead was General James S. Wadsworth, a wealthy New Yorker who had run unsuccessfully for governor in 1862. His death shook Lincoln badly. Hay noted in his diary: “I have not known the President so affected by a personal loss since the death of [Edward D.] Baker.” Lincoln praised the general highly: “no man has given himself up to the war with such self sacrificing patriotism as Genl. Wadsworth. He went into the service not wishing or expecting great success or distinction in his military career & profoundly indifferent to popular applause, actuated only by a sense of duty which he neither evaded nor sought to evade.”18

  Dismayed by the losses, Lincoln looked as solemn and anxious as if a beloved family member had died. He nonetheless took heart from the fact that Grant was in charge and predicted that the general “will not fail us now; he says he will fight it out on that line, and this is now the hope of our country.”19 On May 15, Nicolay reported that the “President is cheerful and hopeful—not unduly elated, but seeming confident; and now as ever watching every report and indication, with quiet, unwavering interest.”20

  Lincoln also derived some consolation from his conviction “that every great battle, even if it is a drawn one, is a defeat to the rebels in its necessary consequences. A battle in which thirty thousand men a side were put hors du combat, killed, wounded and missing, but in which neither party could claim a victory, would, nevertheless, drive Lee back to the Lynchburg line, and place Richmond almost at our mercy.”21

  The Bogus Proclamation

  On May 18, Lincoln was startled to read in the New York World and the Journal of Commerce a bogus presidential proclamation calling for 400,000 more volunteers and designating May 26 as a day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer occasioned by “the situation in Virginia, the disaster at Red River, the delay at Charleston, and the general state of the country.”22 Such language profoundly disheartened a public anxiously awaiting word of Grant’s progress. Panic spread throughout the North as the story radiated nationwide via wire services. That day Lincoln told a journalist that the announcement “was a fabrication” and “that he had decided to call for 300,000 in July, not before.”23 He may have suspected that the document he had drafted the previous night to that effect had been leaked. An eyewitness recalled that the publication of the fake proclamation “angered Lincoln more than almost any other occurrence of the war period.”24 Not only did it threaten to depress Northern spirits, but it also indicated that the administration might be harboring a disloyal mole. That the two newspapers running the forgery were bitter critics of the administration may have predisposed Lincoln to think treason had been committed. Because the editors of those journals had plenty of reason to doubt the genuineness of the bulletin, or at least to make inquiries before publishing it, Lincoln’s anger was understandable.

  To combat the dire effects of the bogus proclamation, Lincoln had Seward draft a clarification announcing that the “paper is an absolute forgery. No proclamation of that kind or any other has been made or proposed to be made by the President, or issued or proposed to be issued by the State Department or any Department of the Government.” When Seward recommended that the two newspapers be suppressed, Lincoln agreed and through Stanton ordered General John A. Dix to suspend the papers’ publication and arrest their editors. It was the first and only time that Lincoln initiated such action. Over his signature a harshly worded telegram was sent to Dix, instructing him “to arrest and imprison in any fort or military prison in your command, the editors, proprietors and publishers of the aforesaid newspapers. … You will also take possession by military force, of the printing establishments of the ‘New York World,’ and ‘Journal of Commerce,’ and hold the same until further order, and prevent any further publication therefrom.”25

  Those remarkable orders were carried out promptly but rescinded two days later when it became clear that the newspapers had been duped by a forger, Joseph Howard, Jr., city editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, who hoped to reap profits in the highly speculative gold market. (Howard was the journalist who in February 1861 had falsely reported that Lincoln slunk into Washington wearing a scotch cap.) Stanton wired Dix that while the president thought “the editors, proprietors, and publishers of The World and Journal of Commerce are responsible for what appears in their papers injurious to the public service, and have no right to shield themselves behind a plea of ignorance or want of criminal intent,” he nevertheless “is not disposed to visit them with vindictive punishment; and hoping that they will exercise more caution and regard for the public welfare in [the] future, he authorizes you to restore them to their respective establishments.”26 Meanwhile, Stanton had ordered the apprehension of other journalists as well as some telegraphers, who were also released when the full story became known. Howard was jailed for three months, winning a reprieve only after his former employer, Henry Ward Beecher, appealed in person to Lincoln. The president later remarked “that no other man but Henry Ward Beecher could have induced him to be guilty of pardoning Joe Howard” and that “he had done nothing during the war which had pained him so much.”27

  Democrats pointed to these arrests as proof positive that Lincoln behaved tyrannically. Manton Marble, editor of the World, scolded the president: “For the purpose of gratifying an ignoble partisan resentment, you have struck down the rights of the press, you have violated personal liberty, subjected property to unjust seizure, ostentatiously placed force above law … and thus, and by attempting to crush the organs of free discussion, have striven to make free elections impossible, and break down all the safeguards of representative government.”28 Compounding the impression of the administration’s arbitrariness was the arrest of Samuel Medary, editor of the ferociously anti-administration Columbus, Ohio, Crisis. Provost marshals, acting on a grand jury indictment for the crime of “conspiracy against the Union,” apprehended him two days after the New York papers were shut down. The charges were eventually dropped, but meanwhile Democrats had more evidence of an assault on freedom of the press. The Iowa Courier protested that it “has always been a mania with Lincoln to arrest American citizens without warrant and to suppress American papers without authority.”29

  Some Republicans thought the administration had overreacted to Howard’s hoax. Gideon Welles, who believed that the “hasty, rash, inconsiderate, and wrong” steps “cannot be defended,” blamed Seward and to a lesser extent Stanton.30 The action does indeed bear the hallmarks of Stanton’s impetuous, punitive nature.

  Frustration: The Offensive Stalls

  As promised, Grant did fight it out all summer, constantly driving southward and battling Lee almost nonstop for six weeks. After the battle of the Wilderness, the next collision took place at Spotsylvania Courthouse between May 8 and 20. On May 18, when it seemed as if Grant had the upper hand, Lincoln told a caller that at the time “my wife had her first baby, the doctor from time to time, reported to me that everything was going on as well as could be expected under the circumstances. That satisfied me he was doing his best, but still I felt anxious to hear the first squall. It came at last, and I felt mightily relieved. I feel very much so about our army operations at this moment.”31 But again the news turned bad, for Lee inflicted severe losses before falling back to Hanover Junction, where fighting raged from May 23 to 27, and then to Cold Harbor for more bloody work yet (June 1–12). The Army of the Potomac finally came to a halt after a pitched battle at Petersburg (June 15–18), 20 miles south of Richmond. Lee’s skillful maneuvering had kept Grant at bay, saving the Confederate capital and inflicting 65,000 casualties. That total represented 60 percent of the Army of the Potomac’s entire losses over the three previous years.

  Grant had little to show for the immense sacrifice of blood and treasure. He was bogged down at Petersburg, which he besieged with no imminent prospect of victory. Meanwhile, Sigel had been repulsed in the Shenandoah Valley, Butler was helplessly bottled up on the Peninsula, and Sherman was making disappointingly slow progress in his campaign against Atlanta. In Jun
e, Sherman unsuccessfully assaulted Confederates at Kennesaw Mountain and sustained heavy losses. The grand strategy that had seemed so promising in the spring had stalled.

  As these developments unfolded, Lincoln occasionally found respite by attending the theater. “People may think strange of it,” he remarked to Schuyler Colfax, “but I must have some relief from this terrible anxiety, or it will kill me.”32

  On July 18, to help fill the army’s depleted ranks, Lincoln called for 500,000 men. When Ohio Republicans urged him to rescind the call lest it defeat the party in the autumn, he asked: “What is the Presidency worth to me if I have no country?”33 Logically he argued that “[w]e must either have men, or the war must stop; I shall issue the call, and if the old ship goes down, it will be with the colors flying. So whether they come by draft, or volunteering, the nation needs soldiers. These she must have, or else she dies, and then comes anarchy, and the frightful ruin of a dismembered country, or its final surrender to the slave power, against which it now struggles, and calls every freeman to the rescue. Peace! In this struggle that which comes by the sword will be the more lasting, and worthy as a legacy to posterity.”34 On another occasion, he said: “We must lose nothing even if I am defeated.” He wanted the people to realize that if they reelected him, it “will mean that the rebellion is to be crushed by force of arms.”35 In response, Democrats howled that “[t]ens of thousands of white men must bite the dust to allay the Negro mania of the president.”36

  The administration began implementing the draft in mid-September. The new call implied that the war might end within a year, for it stipulated that draftees would serve for only twelve months, whereas volunteers would serve for three years. Democrats’ attempts to make conscription a significant issue in the campaign fizzled.

  Lincoln had been encouraged when Grant crossed the James River in mid-June. “I begin to see it,” he wired the general. “You will succeed. God bless you all.”37 The following day, taking his cue from Grant, Lincoln with iron determination told a Philadelphia audience that the North “accepted this war for an object, a worthy object, and the war will end when that object is attained. Under God, I hope it never will until that time. [Great cheering.] Speaking of the present campaign, General Grant is reported to have said, I am going through on this line if it takes all summer. [Cheers.] This war has taken three years; it was begun or accepted upon the line of restoring the national authority over the whole national domain, and for the American people, as far as my knowledge enables me to speak, I say we are going through on this line if it takes three years more. [Cheers.]”38

  To help drive home the point that the war might not end quickly, Lincoln solicited the aid of the press. He solemnly told Noah Brooks, “I wish, when you write or speak to people, you would do all you can to correct the impression that the war in Virginia will end right off and victoriously. To me the most trying thing of all this war is that the people are too sanguine; they expect too much at once. I declare to you, sir, that we are to-day farther ahead than I thought, one year and a half ago, that we should be; and yet there are plenty of people who believe that the war is about to be substantially closed. As God is my judge, I shall be satisfied if we are over with the fight in Virginia within a year. I hope we shall be ‘happily disappointed,’ as the saying is; but I am afraid not—I am afraid not.”39

  When Lee fended off a nearly successful assault on Petersburg, the president became alarmed, and on June 21 made a two-day visit to the Army of the Potomac. “I just thought I would jump aboard a boat and come down and see you,” he told Grant, modestly adding: “I don’t expect I can do any good, and in fact I’m afraid I may do harm, but I’d put myself under your orders and if you find me doing anything wrong just send me right away.”40 When Grant asked after his health, the president observed that he was suffering from the aftereffects of seasickness. To a staff member who offered some champagne as a cure, Lincoln replied: “No, my friend; I have seen too many fellows seasick ashore from drinking that very stuff.” One of the general’s aides, Colonel Horace Porter, thought the president resembled a “boss undertaker” in his black suit.

  After inspecting some units, Lincoln took Grant’s suggestion that he “ride on and see the colored troops, who behaved so handsomely in [William F.] Smith’s attack on the works in front of Petersburg last week.” The president expressed keen interest in doing so, for he had not formally reviewed any United States Colored Troops. He was delighted by reports of their gallantry, which vindicated his controversial policy of enlisting blacks. “I think, general,” he told Grant, “we can say of the black boys what a country fellow who was an old-time abolitionist in Illinois said when he went to a theater in Chicago and saw Forrest playing Othello. He was not very well up in Shakespere, and didn’t know that the tragedian was a white man who had blacked up for the purpose. After the play was over the folks who had invited him to go to the show wanted to know what he thought of the actors, and he said: ‘Waal, layin’ aside all sectional prejudices and any partiality I may have for the race, darned ef I don’t think the nigger held his own with any on ’em.’ ” Reflecting on the decision to allow blacks to serve in the army, Lincoln added: “I was opposed on nearly every side when I first favored the raising of colored regiments; but they have proved their efficiency, and I am glad they have kept pace with the white troops in the recent assaults.”41

  When Lincoln reached the camp of the Eighteenth Corps, hundreds of excited black troops delightedly rushed to see him, hurrahing and cheering. A journalist reported that it “was a genuine spontaneous outburst of love and affection for the man they looked upon as their deliverer from bondage.”42 They “received him most enthusiastically, grinning from ear to ear, and displaying an amount of ivory terrible to behold,” Colonel Porter wrote his wife. Fervently they shouted: “God bress Massa Linkum!” “De Lord save Fader Abraham!” “De day ob jubilee am come, shuah” as they swarmed about the president, kissing his hands and reverently touching his dust-covered suit. As he rode bare-headed with tears in his eyes, he bowed left and right. When he tried to acknowledge their plaudits, his voice was, according to Porter, “so broken by emotion that he could scarcely articulate the words of thanks and congratulation which he tried to speak to the humble and devoted men through whose ranks he rode. The scene was affecting in the extreme, and no one could have witnessed it unmoved.”43

  The next day, Lincoln visited Butler’s command and, upon observing a particularly strong set of works, remarked: “When Grant once gets possession of a place, he holds on to it as if he had inherited it.”44 As the party sailed up the James River, every vessel they passed cheered Lincoln. A nervous Gustavus Fox, recognizing that the presidential boat had come within range of Confederate guns, wondered why the enemy did not fire on such an important target. Upon returning to City Point, Lincoln had an hour’s conversation with Grant, during which the general confidently assured the president he would eventually gain possession of the Confederate capital: “You will never hear of me farther from Richmond than now, till I have taken it. I am just as sure of going into Richmond as I am of any future event. It may take a long summer day, but I will go in.”45 Lincoln replied: “I cannot pretend to advise, but I do sincerely hope that all may be accomplished with as little bloodshed as possible.”46

  Throughout his stay at Petersburg, Lincoln appeared anxious, laboring as he was under such a heavy burden of responsibility. On the way back to Washington, however, the president seemed cheerful and told Fox that he was delighted with what he had seen and heard. Gideon Welles thought his brief visit to the front had done “him good, physically, and strengthened him mentally.”47 Edward Bates believed that Lincoln was “encouraged by Grant’s persistent confidence,” but nonetheless was “perceptably, disappointed at the small measure of our success.”48

  Many others shared his disappointment, including the troops. Lincoln was blamed by some of them, including an Ohio colonel who expressed “great confidence in the integrity an
d unselfishness of the President” but regretted that he lacked “force” and “prompt efficient will” and was “controlled by circumstances instead of taking them by the forelocks and giving direction to them.” If the North were to prevail, its leader must have “power” and “will,” but Lincoln was “too kind-hearted to offend anybody” and “too unselfish and unambitious to want to magnify himself or exalt his power.” Commendable though such modesty was in theory, it was “terribly disastrous to our operations in the field.”49

  The friendship between Grant and Lincoln was growing stronger as each came to admire the strengths of the other. During the Wilderness battle, Lincoln praised Grant’s “perfect coolness and persistency of purpose.” The general, he said, “is not easily excited,—which is a great element in an officer,—and he has the grit of a bulldog! Once let him get his ‘teeth’ in, and nothing can shake him off.”50 Murat Halstead reported Lincoln saying: “Grant is the first General I have had. You know how it has been with all the rest. As soon as I put a man in command of the Army, he’d come to me with a plan of campaign and about as much as to say, ‘Now, I don’t believe I can do it, but if you say so, I’ll try it on,’ and so put the responsibility of success or failure on me. They all wanted me to be the General. Now, it isn’t so with Grant. … I am glad to find a man that can go ahead without me. … He doesn’t ask impossibilities of me.”51 By this time, Lincoln had come to insist on having a voice in the formulation of strategy but not tactics. At one point he said “[w]hatever objection may be urged as to the talents, or culture, or sobriety and military skill of Grant, or his evident stubborn[n]ess of purpose, or his alleged recklessness of means, it must be confessed that after repeated trials and failures with other Generals, he alone had the faith, the confidence and the persistence to compel success.”52