During most of the war, the question of how to win the war naturally superseded that of how to win the peace. Yet political leaders, most prominently the president, increasingly recognized that winning the war and winning the peace were inseparable. Reconstruction was the term for winning the peace. Just what reconstruction meant and how it would be implemented were disputed. Lincoln continually sought to forge a coalition among three fiercely opposed factions. Liberal or Radical Republicans championed reunification along with immediate abolition and racial equality. Conservative Republicans favored reunification, future abolition, and racial inequality. War Democrats favored reunification and opposed abolition for the slave states and racial equality in the free states.53
And after a policy was hammered out, what then? If it took years to win a military victory, it might well take decades or even generations to transform millions of hearts and minds from defending to abhorring slavery. Just how would that be done?
To answer this question, Lincoln carefully followed developments in the occupied rebel territories to determine what worked and what failed.54 He then formulated a blueprint for reconstruction that he presented to Congress on December 8, 1863. The United States would welcome back into the Union any state in which 10 percent of the number of those qualified to vote in 1860 signed loyalty oaths and agreed to submit to the federal government and abolish slavery. Pardons would be denied only to high-ranking rebel officials, officers who resigned from the U.S. army to fight for the rebel cause, and those who abused black soldiers and their white officers. With that formula, he hoped to swiftly entice Louisiana back into the United States as a model for other rebel states.55
Typically, this proposal was blasted by Radical Republicans for not going far enough and by Peace Democrats for going too far. Liberals insisted that not only should slavery be abolished but blacks should enjoy equal rights with whites. Conservatives condemned any notion of granting blacks equal rights. Both attacked the 10 percent voter threshold level as undemocratic.
As usual Lincoln was many moves ahead of everyone else. Liberals and conservatives alike were blind to the reality that over the long term the 10 percent threshold would result in far more progressive governments than if the 50 percent threshold suggested as an alternative prevailed. Lincoln reckoned that at least one of ten men in each rebel state must be secretly loyal to the United States and represent the most liberal minds. Encouraging them to come forward under the protection of the American army would bring each state’s most progressive men to power and thus accelerate the liberal democratic revolutions that Lincoln hoped to instigate. This in turn would encourage conservatives to proclaim loyalty to the United States, if only to block or dilute progressive reforms. The result would eventually be the restoration of democracy, but on a broad and liberal rather than narrow, conservative, elitist foundation.
Benjamin Wade and Henry Davis sponsored a reconstruction bill that raised the statehood threshold to 50 percent of registered voters in 1860, who had to sign a loyalty oath. Obviously this standard would take much longer to reach and those who declared allegiance to the United States would be of far more questionable loyalty than at Lincoln’s 10 percent level. The Wade-Davis Bill passed by seventy-three to fifty-nine in the House and by eighteen to fourteen in the Senate on July 2, 1864.
Lincoln pocket vetoed the bill. When asked why, he explained that the bill would overturn reconstruction governments in Louisiana, Tennessee, and Arkansas that were formed by 10 percent of the electorate. He hinted that he might sign a bill that exempted those states from the 50 percent rule.56
This act provoked the wrath of the bill’s Radical authors. On August 5 the New York Tribune published their Wade-Davis Manifesto, which condemned the president for vetoing their bill. Although the president remained publicly mute to their protest, he privately expressed his sorrow: “To be wounded in the house of one’s friends is perhaps the most grievous affliction that can befall a man.”57
Meanwhile the war voraciously devoured ever more blood and treasure, with the Union suffering as many pyrrhic victories and outright defeats as decisive triumphs. After Sigel’s rout at New Market in May, Grant replaced him with Gen. David Hunter as the Shenandoah Valley’s army commander. While Hunter was a more skilled general, he was ultimately no more successful. His orders were the same as those of his predecessor. He was to march his fifteen-thousand-man army up the valley, cross the Blue Ridge Mountains to Charlottesville, then head south and capture Lynchburg, thus severing that rail link with Richmond. Like Sigel, he lacked enough troops to accomplish this mission. Rebel raider John Mosby and his men ranged across Hunter’s lengthening supply line, attacking isolated wagon trains and garrisons. Although Hunter had to hive off more troops to protect his supply line, he did reach Lynchburg’s outskirts on June 17. Facing him in entrenchments surrounding the town was Gen. Jubal Early with ten thousand troops. Short of men and munitions, Hunter chose to withdraw.
Early hounded Hunter’s retreat all the way back to the Shenandoah Valley, then down it. As Hunter withdrew to Winchester, Early veered east, crossed the Potomac River on July 6, routed a Union force at a Monocracy River ford on July 9, and approached Fort Stevens, which defended Washington’s northwest side, on July 11. Lincoln took his duty as commander in chief literally when he rode out to Fort Stevens. Atop the parapet, he peered curiously at the rebels as bullets whizzed past such a conspicuous target. This so appalled Oliver Wendell Holmes, then a captain and decades later a Supreme Court justice, that he reputedly yelled to Lincoln, “Get down, you fool!” The president obeyed.58
Early finally withdrew his army, but not before his men looted and burned scores of surrounding houses, including that of Postmaster General Montgomery Blair.59 He then led his men across Maryland, along the way levying ransoms of $20,000 on Hagerstown and $200,000 on Frederick. On July 30 he and his footsore men reached Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, which he ordered burned on July 30 after its leading citizens were unable to pay a ransom of $100,000 in gold or $500,000 in greenbacks. He justified the devastation and robbery as retaliation for similar acts committed by the Yankees. By early August his army was back in the Shenandoah Valley.
Among the reasons why Union armies suffered repeated and humiliating defeats in the Shenandoah Valley and surrounding regions was that no one general commanded all the others. After three years of war, Lincoln finally established unity of command on July 31 by combining all forces in the region into the Middle Military Division. Even better, he acted on Grant’s advice to name Gen. Philip Sheridan to head the Army of the Shenandoah.60
Meanwhile Lincoln sought to stifle the ever-escalating cycle of vengeful destruction. He asked Grant to ask General Lee “for a mutual discontinuance of house-burning and other destruction of private property.”61 Although Lee was sympathetic, he declined a formal agreement. This prompted Grant to order Sheridan to wage total war: “Eat out Virginia clear and clean . . . so that crows flying over it . . . will have to carry their provender with them.”62
Sheridan launched his thirty-seven thousand troops at Early’s fifteen thousand outside of Winchester on September 19 and routed them. Early rallied his troops twenty miles south at Fisher Hill, where Sheridan again scattered them on September 22. Early withdrew his army’s remnants far up the valley to the gap leading over to Charlottesville and there slowly replenished his ranks and supplies. Sheridan dispersed his brigades through the Shenandoah Valley to systematically destroy what was Virginia’s breadbasket.
Early, having received reinforcements, advanced down the valley and launched a surprise attack on Sheridan’s army at Cedar Creek on October 19. Sheridan himself was fifteen miles north at Winchester, where he heard the distant thunder of cannon firing. He immediately mounted his horse and galloped to his men. After capturing thirteen hundred Federals and eighteen cannons and routing the rest of Sheridan’s army, the famished rebels scattered through the Union camp to devour its provisions. Sheridan rallied his retreating regiments and le
d them back toward Cedar Creek. He launched a counterattack in late afternoon that pulverized Early’s army, taking one thousand prisoners and twenty-three cannons and retaking the eighteen cannons earlier lost.
The last rebel invasion of Missouri opened in early September 1864, when Gen. Sterling Price led twelve thousand troops into the state. After capturing Springfield, his army headed toward St. Louis. About halfway between these cities were one thousand Federals manning a fort at Pilot Knob. Rather than bypass this stronghold, Price ordered an attack. Union rifles and cannons firing grapeshot and canister killed or wounded more than fifteen hundred rebels. With his force sharply diminished, Price gave up his dream of capturing St. Louis and instead veered northwest toward Jefferson City. The Union had turned that town into a stronghold ringed by five forts. This time Price prudently sidestepped and pushed on toward Kansas City. Along the way his ranks swelled with recruits and bushwhacker bands led by “Bloody Bill” Anderson and William Quantrill, with Jesse and Frank James among the murderous followers. Gen. Samuel Curtis commanded the twenty thousand Union troops defending Kansas City. The armies fought at Westport, a half-dozen miles south of the city, on October 23. The Federals repulsed a Confederate attack, then counterattacked and routed them. Pursued relentlessly by Union forces, Price and his thirty-five hundred remaining troops did not reach relative safety until they crossed to the Arkansas River’s south bank on December 15.
The president had not only a war but an election to win.63 Indeed, the two were inseparable. The Republicans held what they called their National Union convention at Baltimore on June 7 and 8. Lincoln did not attend. He won on the first ballot with 506 of 528 votes cast, with 22 of the dissidents going to Grant. But having made their point, the dissidents threw their votes to Lincoln in a show of unanimity. Lincoln sent word of his grateful acceptance. He tapped Andrew Johnson to replace Hannibal Hamlin as his vice president. This choice made perfect political sense at the time but would have disastrous consequences that no one could have then foreseen. As Tennessee’s governor, Johnson very effectively implemented Lincoln’s reconstruction plan. After becoming president, Johnson would swiftly transform himself from a moderate progressive into a reactionary conservative.
The votes for Grant deeply embarrassed and angered him. When he first learned that some Republicans favored him over the president, Grant declared, “They can’t compel me to do that!” and insisted that it was “as important for the cause that [Lincoln] should be elected as that the army should be successful in the field.”64 Grant was a loyal soldier, not a politician. Yet one day he would take the presidential oath.
Despite the seeming unanimity at the convention, the Republican Party was split. John Frémont broke away to run as the hastily formed Radical Democracy Party’s candidate. Then, on August 28, twenty-five prominent liberal Republicans met in the home of New York mayor George Opdyke. Among them were Senators Benjamin Wade and Henry Davis, Massachusetts governor John Andrew, and Horace Greeley, Parke Gordon, Theodore Tilton, and George Wilkes, the respective editors of the Tribune, Evening Post, Independent, and Spirit of the Times. They debated whether they should break with the Republican Party and call their own convention to nominate a candidate for president, with Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase their favorite.
The Democrats did not convene until August 30. Shortly after gathering at Chicago, they enthusiastically chose George McClellan as their presidential candidate and George Peddleton of Ohio, who was closely aligned with the Copperhead Clement Vallandigham, as his running mate. McClellan promised that if elected he would immediately call an armistice and negotiate for reunion without emancipation. The Democrats colored this message with vicious racism and fear-mongering that smeared Republicans as championing equality and miscegenation between blacks and whites.
Lincoln was deeply pessimistic about the upcoming election. “You think I don’t know I am going to be beaten?” he admitted.65 On August 23 he gathered his cabinet and asked them to sign, sight unseen, what he would later reveal as an explosive statement: “This morning . . . it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President elect as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he cannot possibly save it afterwards.”66 He likely asked for this blind signing from fear that if the text leaked to the press, the revelation of Lincoln’s defeatism might be another reason to vote against him. Then again, this dire warning of the results of voting for McClellan might spur some fence-sitters to Lincoln’s side. In the end, the incident provides insights into Lincoln’s complex, seething mind.
From this nadir, Lincoln’s reelection prospects enjoyed a series of significant boosts. The first came on September 3, when Gen. William Sherman telegraphed Lincoln that his army had captured Atlanta. Then, on September 22, Senator Zachariah Chandler of Michigan talked Frémont into abandoning his presidential bid in exchange for a promise to find him a new field command. Finally, Lincoln pacified Chase by offering to name him the Supreme Court’s chief justice after Roger Taney died on October 12; Chase gratefully accepted.
When the votes were tallied on November 8, Lincoln won by a landslide, taking twenty-three states and 212 electoral votes to McClellan’s four states and 21 electoral votes and 2,203,831 to 1,797,019 votes. Perhaps the most gratifying aspect of those results to Lincoln was that he won the votes of 119,754 soldiers, or 78 percent of the total, while McClellan got only 34,291.67 The Republican Party won just as decisively, outnumbering Democrats by 149 to 42 in the House and by 42 to 10 in the Senate. Tragically, Lincoln would have little time to make the most of that overwhelming political power.68
12
With Malice toward None
With malice toward none; with charity toward all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds . . . to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting speech among ourselves and with all nations.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Thank God that I lived to see this. It seems to me that I have been dreaming a horrid dream for four years, and now the nightmare is gone.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
We are all Americans.
ELY PARKER
Abraham Lincoln enjoyed the powerful mandate of an overwhelming election victory for himself and his party. In his annual December address to Congress, he called on the American people to devote themselves to resolving the conflict that “can only be tried by war and decided by victory . . . on the part of those who began it.”1 News from distant fronts in late 1864 and early 1865 stirred hopes that victory might well be within grasp.
In Atlanta, Gen. William Sherman faced the dilemma of strategic consumption. Vast amounts of manpower were deployed either protecting or moving supplies to his army. Gen. John Bell Hood’s rebel army remained just beyond reach, while smaller forces raided Sherman’s supply line. Sherman eventually devised a bold and ruthless strategy to resolve that dilemma. On November 15 he ordered the city’s evacuation, then had Atlanta burned to the ground. Splitting his army in two, he sent Gen. George Thomas with 60,000 troops back to Nashville, while he led 62,000 troops southeast toward Savannah, 285 miles away. His corps marched along parallel routes with the front varying from twenty to sixty miles wide. With no significant rebel forces in his way, Sherman’s strategic object was “to make Georgia howl” and destroy the state’s capacity to supply the rebel war effort. In cutting their communications and living off the land, Sherman and his men disappeared into a void from which only wild rumors emerged. The army’s fate would remain unknown for the next month until, on December 22, Sherman famously sent word to President Lincoln that “I beg to present you, as a Christmas gift, the city of Savannah, with 150 heavy guns and 25,000 bales of cotton.”2
To this Lincoln expressed his “many, many thanks . . . to your whole army, officers, and men.” T
hen he went deeper, revealing more of himself. He admitted that he “was anxious, if not fearful” when Sherman cut loose his army from the railroad umbilical cord of supplies and telegraph lines of communications but conceded that the general “was the better judge. . . . Now the undertaking being a success, the honor is all yours. . . . But what next? I suppose it will be safer if I leave Gen. Grant and yourself to decide.”3
General Hood, meanwhile, did not pursue Sherman but instead invaded central Tennessee. Thomas had divided his army between thirty thousand troops under his own command at Nashville and thirty thousand under Gen. John Schofield at Pulaski, nearly a hundred miles south. Hood hoped to cut off and destroy Schofield’s army with his forty thousand men, then march against Thomas. Schofield withdrew but Hood caught up with him at Franklin, fifteen miles south of Nashville, and attacked on November 30. The Federal troops killed or wounded 6,252 rebels while suffering 2,326 casualties. That night Schofield withdrew his army within Nashville’s ring of defenses. Although outnumbered by almost two to one, Hood followed and opened a siege of Nashville. Learning of this disparity, Grant fired off one telegram after another to Thomas, urging him to attack. Yet for two weeks Thomas did nothing, until December 15, when he launched his army against Hood’s. The battle raged all that day and through the next. When the guns finally fell silent, Hood and his remaining 15,000 men were hurrying south, having lost 1,500 killed and 4,500 captured to Thomas’s 3,061 casualties. A vigorous commander like Grant, Sherman, or Sheridan would have ruthlessly pursued until he wiped out that entire demoralized horde depleted of provisions and munitions. But Thomas rested on his victory’s laurels and let the rebels get away.4
The blockade’s last large, gaping hole was the Cape Fear River leading to Wilmington, North Carolina. Fort Fisher guarded the Cape Fear River mouth. The expedition launched in December 1864 to capture Fort Fisher and Wilmington could not have had a more capable naval commander—Adm. David Porter—and a more inept army commander—Gen. Benjamin Butler. Butler concocted the scheme of packing an old vessel with 215 tons of gunpowder and detonating it near the fort. Neither the explosion nor the naval bombardment that followed severely damaged the fort. Butler gave up and ordered the flotilla to sail back north. Grant used this failure as an excuse to finally rid the war effort of Butler, replacing him with Gen. Alfred Terry. On January 13, 1865, as Porter’s warships bombarded the fort, Terry led eight thousand troops packed in longboats from the transports to the neck of the peninsula leading to Fort Fisher. Two days later Terry ordered a massive assault that captured the fort.
The Age of Lincoln and the Art of American Power, 1848-1876 Page 25