Oval Office Oddities

by Bill Fawcett

  Lee met him at Fredericksburg on December 13, 1862, with the Army of Northern Virginia entrenched on an elevation called Marye’s Heights south of the Rappahannock River. Sending his men across the river under withering Rebel fire, Burnside ordered no less than fourteen frontal assaults against the strong enemy position without making a significant attempt at a flanking maneuver. At the end of the day he had more than twelve thousand five hundred casualties, and not a single acre of gained ground to show for the courageous but futile efforts of his brave men.

  Faced with a virtual revolt among the Union corps commanders, Lincoln finally accepted Burnside’s resignation from army command in January of 1863. As his replacement, he appointed General Joseph “Fighting Joe” Hooker, a general who had displayed the initiative and aggressiveness so lacking in the high command of the army. (Hooker’s corps had made the first assault at Antietam, fighting Stonewall Jackson’s corps to a standstill; McClellan squandered the opportunity gained by failing to send more of his large corps forward in a timely fashion.)

  Hooker’s appointment was greeted with relief by the men and officers of the Army of the Potomac, and during the spring of 1863 he succeeded in filling out depleted units, training recruits, and reprovisioning his vast force to go on the offensive. He created an elaborate and imaginative plan to surround Lee’s army (which remained at Fredericksburg), employing a large force of cavalry, mapping out a flanking march that did, in fact, catch the Rebels by surprise.

  Then, everything started to go wrong. Robert E. Lee was never one to sit still while an opponent gained a march; instead, he decamped, splitting his army once, and then again, giving the appearance that he was running circles around Hooker. When the Union forces finally gained a chance to launch a crushing attack against a part of the Army of Northern Virginia, Hooker seemed to lose his nerve. He failed to press the advantage, and instead took up a defensive position at Chancellorsville, Virginia. Audaciously, Lee detached Stonewall Jackson’s corps to launch a flank attack that crushed much of Hooker’s army, and sent the rest of it fleeing northward.

  Much as had happened with Burnside, the army’s corps commanders were appalled at the general’s failings, one of them—General Crouch—going so far as to refuse to serve under Hooker any longer. Lincoln was sick and tired of the game of musical chairs that seemed to be going on regarding his major army command, so he did not remove Hooker immediately. But when Lee commenced his second invasion of the north in June of 1863, Lincoln’s patience reached an end. A sulking Hooker offered his resignation over a minor matter and, to his surprise, the president immediately accepted it.

  Lincoln’s first choice as Hooker’s replacement was I Corps commander General John Reynolds, but Reynolds declined the offer. As a result, the new leader of the army was another corps commander, George Meade. He was not expecting the promotion, and in fact, when a messenger arrived to inform him of his new job, he assumed that he was going to be arrested for his insubordinate remarks about Hooker. Instead, Meade assumed command of the Army of the Potomac at the end of June, and three days later oversaw the army as it participated in the greatest battle ever fought on American soil.

  Gettysburg remains one of the important battles of our history. It represented the turning point of the Civil War, marking the farthest extent of Confederate advance. Afterward, Lee would be forever on the strategic defensive. The two armies were at full strength, and the three days of fighting resulted in more casualties than any American battle until the Battle of the Bulge in 1944–45. However, it cannot be said to be a battle that Meade, or Lee, planned.

  It began as an almost accidental encounter between a division of Confederate infantry and another of Union cavalry. Both sides reinforced, and by the end of the first day the Union army had suffered terrible casualties to two corps but had seized and held the key high ground to the east and southeast of the town. For the next two days these strong positions would be held against a series of frenzied attacks, culminating in the great massed attack forever known as Pickett’s Charge (though Pickett’s was only one of three divisions attacking).

  By the end of the battle, the Army of Northern Virginia had been badly mauled. While the clash had been a meeting engagement, Meade had displayed considerable skill in positioning his troops in strong defensive positions. With uncharacteristically poor decision making, Lee had exhausted his army in assaults against these positions. It was a defeat from which the Confederates would never recover.

  On July 4, the day after Gettysburg, General Grant’s army finally won the Battle of Vicksburg in the Western Theater after a long siege. The fall of Vicksburg gave the Union command of the Mississippi River all the way from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico, and effectively cut the Confederacy in two by isolating Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas from the other rebelling states

  In following Lee southward as the Confederates withdrew, Meade was not able to pursue as aggressively as Lincoln wished, and missed a chance to annihilate the Army of Northern Virginia when it was trapped against the raging Potomac after a period of heavy rain. Lee’s army survived, and the war would continue for more than one and a half bloody years.

  On October 16, 1863, President Lincoln promoted Grant to command of all Union armies. While Meade technically remained in command of the Army of the Potomac, Grant would remain with the army for the rest of the war, effectively serving as army commander. In the West, General Sherman took over theater command, and would close in on Atlanta and then make his infamous march to the sea. In Virginia many bloody battles remained: at Spotsylvania, the Wilderness, the brutal killing ground that was Cold Harbor, and finally a ten-month siege at Petersburg and Richmond. But Grant was as tenacious as a bulldog, and kept the pressure on Lee, attacking when the Rebel army halted, aggressively pursuing when it moved. He would keep the pressure on the main army of the Confederacy all the way to Appomattox Courthouse, where at last he accepted Lee’s surrender.

  Grant’s tenacity would eventually carry him on an ill-starred march to the White House itself, for he was a better soldier than he was a politician. Above all else, in Ulysses S. Grant, Abe Lincoln had finally found himself the general who would fight.

  A SPLENDID LITTLE WAR

  WILLIAM MCKINLEY REMEMBERS THE MAINE, 1898

  by Douglas Niles

  At the beginning of the nineteenth century, a wave of revolutions swept through the Spanish colonial empire until, finally, only Cuba, the Philippines, and a few small outposts such as Guam and Puerto Rico remained. By 1895, Cuba was locked in a violent struggle, the majority of the populace seeking the overthrow of the Spanish regime. Insurrections had erupted in the Philippines as well.

  Though the United States was not yet regarded as a world power, the Monroe Doctrine established that events in the Caribbean and Latin American countries were very much in America’s sphere of influence. U.S. public opinion, aided by a surge of yellow journalism, paid attention to events in Cuba, reacting angrily to reports of atrocities and brutality by the Spanish authorities. As a show of force, and to offer at least token protection to the many American interests in the island that was less than a hundred miles from the southern tip of Florida, President William F. McKinley dispatched the battleship Maine to Cuba. (Such interests included more than $50 million in lands and businesses, mostly centered in sugar and tobacco.) A powerful presence in Havana harbor, the Maine dropped anchor and stood as tangible proof of American power and American concern.

  She did, that is, until the battleship exploded and sank in February of 1898, with the loss of more than 260 U.S. Navy personnel. Though no cause could be officially determined, popular perception blamed Spain. (Later investigations determined that the ship hit an underwater mine.) Americans already sympathized with the rebels who sought to overthrow the Spanish. Public opinion was inflamed by the rivalry between William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, whose New York newspapers, the Journal and the World, were locked in savage competition. An unconfirmed but illustrative story ha
s Hearst cabling his photographer in Havana, saying, “You provide the pictures; I’ll provide the war.” As the final straw, a private letter written by the Spanish minister in the United States to a friend in Havana was stolen and published. In it, the minister labeled President McKinley “a weakling” who merely pandered to public opinion.

  Even so, McKinley was not as keen on war as the population in general, but he was carried along by forces beyond his control. The newspaper reports grew more lurid, and anger over the Maine’s loss, whatever the cause, swelled. On April 19, Congress passed a resolution declaring that Cuba should be a “free and independent state.” McKinley signed it on the next day, and Spain felt that she had no recourse other than to declare war.

  The conflict was over in ten weeks. An American fleet under Commodore Dewey steamed from Hong Kong to the Philippines and destroyed the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay without suffering a single American casualty. In the Caribbean, the main Spanish battle fleet had crossed the Atlantic to Cuba, but was bottled up in Santiago Bay until American and Cuban ground forces threatened to capture the fort. The fleet sailed and it, too, was destroyed by the guns of the United States Navy.

  The troops that landed on Cuba fought several stiff engagements, but suffered far more from malaria and yellow fever than they did from Spanish arms. Aided by the Cuban rebels, they soon overran the island and forced the Spanish to surrender. Another expeditionary force landed in the Philippines and, also aided by local rebels, soon trapped the Spanish army in the capital. In both cases, American forces ended up protecting the captured Spaniards from the vengeance-minded rebels.

  In August, a small American force landed on Puerto Rico and captured the island against virtually no resistance. When the Treaty of Paris officially ended hostilities in December of 1898, Guam and Puerto Rico were ceded by Spain to the United States. As an indirect result of the war, American annexed the Hawaiian Islands in 1898. With a string of naval bases extending from Oahu to Guam to Manila Bay, the United States Navy became a major force in the Pacific Ocean for the first time.

  Despite American pronouncements of “freedom and independence” for the people rebelling against Spain, subsequent acts served specifically to establish U.S. hegemony over both Cuba and the Philippines. American forces would be locked into an increasingly unpopular counterinsurgency in the Philippines until 1914. As for the Cuban rebels, they weren’t even invited to Paris for the peace treaty signing. The United States insisted that the new Cuban nation be specifically banned from forming alliances with other countries. Furthermore, the United States claimed a base at Guantanamo Bay that it continues to hold to this day. Cuba would remain a nation heavily controlled by the United States until the Communist revolution of 1959.

  Still during his first term, McKinley followed the Spanish-American War by displays of American power in China (against the Boxer Rebellion) and in gaining territories in Samoa. These expansions of American power were enormously popular, and McKinley was nominated unanimously for a second term. He won the election handily, but an assassin shot him to death before he served even a full year of his second term. He was the third President to fall to a fatal bullet.

  Still, his mark was indelible. The major aftereffect of the “splendid little war” was the United States’s arrival on the stage of world affairs. For the first time, America obtained overseas colonies, and projected military power against a major power in several broad theaters of war. The United States Navy, in particular, proved itself a force to be reckoned with on any ocean in the world.

  A POINT OF ORDER

  WOODROW WILSON AND HIS FOURTEEN POINTS

  by Douglas Niles

  Beginning in August 1914, the most savage conflict in world history (to that date) was enacted across the continent of Europe. The Central Powers, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and Bulgaria, were arrayed against the Allies: Britain, France, Russia, Serbia, Rumania, and Italy. Mass slaughter, abetted by machine guns, vast batteries of highly accurate artillery, barbed wire, and trenches, raged for months and resulted in millions of casualties for relatively minor gains in terrain.

  For two years, the war was confined to Europe and a few European colonies. Americans, many of whom were immigrants, or descendants of recent immigrants, from the combatant nations on both sides, watched the spectacle with horror, even as the U.S. government steadfastly maintained neutrality. The most highly educated man ever to hold the office of president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, strongly held to this policy of non-involvement. In fact, he won reelection to a second term in 1916 based in great part on the fact, which became a political slogan: “He kept us out of war.”

  In fact, Wilson had accomplished a great deal in his first term, and set some precedents for the twentieth century presidency that continue on today. He was the first president since John Adams, more than one hundred years earlier, to give his State of the Union address in person. (For the previous century, the chief executive had written a statement and sent it to the Capitol, where it was read into the record. Ever since Wilson, the address has been delivered as a presidential speech.) He established the Federal Reserve Act, modernizing banking in the United States, and also the Federal Trade Commission. Under his impetus, laws were enacting to protect unions and to regulate child labor.

  The major foreign policy focus during Wilson’s first term was not Europe, but Mexico. A series of revolutions south of the Rio Grande, coupled with the depredations of the bandit Pancho Villa—who crossed the border to raid New Mexico—caused Wilson to dispatch General John Pershing on a basically unsuccessful mission to corral the audacious Villa. At the same time, Wilson was acutely conscious of the moral imperatives of strength versus weakness, and steadfastly refused to resort to the kind of imperial bullying that had characterized previous administrations’ dealings with countries like Spain and Mexico. Woodrow Wilson, for example, took important steps to prepare the Philippines for eventual independence.

  But the Great War could not be ignored. The primary threat to American interests lay in the deadly activities of Germany’s submarine fleet, which took an increasingly active and brutal role in the Atlantic. When the ocean liner Lusitania was sunk in 1915, 128 Americans were among the more than one thousand fatalities. Wilson sternly warned Germany that these kinds of attacks would not be tolerated. For more than seven months, German U-boats backed away from their aggressive tactics in the face of the president’s strong statement.

  But the war was going badly for Germany, and the Kaiser’s military commanders increasingly felt that only an outright blockade of Britain would allow them any hope of victory. The submarine raiders grew more aggressive until, in January of 1917, Germany announced that her submarines would commence unrestricted submarine warfare, sinking without warning any ships engaged in commerce with England. Within weeks, several American vessels were sunk, with significant loss of life. Public opinion was further inflamed by the revelation of a German proposal to unite with Mexico, suggesting that Mexico could regain Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico by invading the United States.

  Wilson, ever stubborn and righteous as befitted his strict Presbyterian temperament, had resisted American military preparedness, holding fast to his view of the nation as truly neutral. In great part as a result of this policy, the United States was woefully unprepared for a large scale, modern war. Yet when confronted with this new aggression, he responded with alacrity, immediately ordering that American merchant ships be armed and authorized to fire on any threatening vessels. On April 2, 1917, Wilson addressed a special session of Congress, and asked for a declaration of war against Germany. The resolution passed with resounding majorities in both houses.

  Immediately the Selective Service Act was passed, calling for a draft of men between age twenty-one and thirty. Industrial production increased and, by June, General Pershing had arrived in France with the first troops of an American Expeditionary Force that would grow to more than two million men in the next sixteen months. Backed by Wilso
n, Pershing insisted that the American army function as an intact unit, instead of as a reserve of manpower for the terribly depleted armies of France and England. This determination would pay great dividends during the battles of Saint-Mihiel, the Meuse-Argonne, and other decisive clashes leading to the end of the war.

  Even as the terrible war raged through its fourth year, and American strength gradually assumed its place as the decisive balance of power, Wilson was imagining the postwar world through the prism of his powerful intellect and vision. In January, 1918, he addressed Congress with a detailed plan of Fourteen Points, labeling these the “only possible program” for peace. The first thirteen points discussed freedom of commerce, restoration of national boundaries, rights for weaker as well as strong nations, non-punitive treaties, and freedom of the seas. The fourteenth point was perhaps the most crucial: Wilson had the idea to create a League of Nations, a world body that would hopefully prevent the outbreak of another such terrible war.

  Finally, on November 11, 1918, at 11 a.m. (the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month), Germany surrendered to the military forces arrayed against her. Wilson was determined to represent America at the subsequent peace talks in Versailles. He would be the first serving President to travel to Europe, but unfortunately he went to France without representatives from the Senate or the powerful Republican Party. At the talks, his idealism clashed with the world-weary pragmatism—and desire for vengeance—of the leaders of France and England. When the Treaty of Versailles was concluded, its harsh terms against Germany had already planted the seeds that would grow into Nazism and the even more terrible specter of World War II.