Two Miserable Presidents

by Steve Sheinkin

  Gettysburg: July 3

  Up in Gettysburg, Robert E. Lee stepped out of his tent a little after three in the morning on July 3. He was already dressed for battle. For the past two days he had been more impatient and restless then anyone had ever seen him.

  Lee found his “Old War Horse,” General James Longstreet, and told him the plan. They would launch 15,000 soldiers right at the center of the Union army line.

  Longstreet didn’t like it. “I have been a soldier all my life,” he said. “I think I can safely say there never was a body of fifteen thousand men who could make that attack successfully.”

  But Lee’s mind was made up. His army had come so far, fought so hard—all in search of one massive victory that would win the war. Now Lee saw that victory within reach, and he couldn’t resist going for it. “The enemy is there,” he said, pointing across the battlefield, “and I am going to strike him.”

  The sun climbed and the temperature soared into the nineties, with high humidity. One soldier from Tennessee called it “the hottest day I think I ever saw.”

  It was about to get a lot hotter.

  Pickett Leads the Charge

  Leading the center of Lee’s attack was General George Pickett—which explains how this came to be known as “Pickett’s Charge.” Pickett was known in the army as a fun-loving guy who put perfume on the curls at the end of his long black hair. But today he was deadly serious:

  George Pickett

  “Up, men, and to your posts! Don’t forget today that you are from old Virginia!”

  The men set out at a steady march across the mile-wide open field separating them from the Union army. “Advance slowly,” Confederate officers told their men. “No cheering, no firing.”

  On the other side of the field, Union soldiers saw what looked like a walking forest of gray uniforms and guns and battle flags—all moving right at them. “No man who looked on the scene can ever forget it,” the Union soldier Jesse Young said. It was terrifying, but it was also exciting. Union soldiers knew they had the advantage. They were on a low hill, lying behind stone walls and mounds of dirt. All they had to do was wait until the enemy was within range and then start blasting.

  “Steady, boys,” Union officers cautioned. “Hold your position, don’t fire until the word is given, keep cool, lie low till order is given to fire, make ready, take good aim.”

  One Northern soldier realized he hadn’t eaten anything all day. Then he decided he was glad, since his empty stomach allowed him to lie flatter on the ground.

  “Come on, Johnny! Keep coming!” Union soldiers shouted.

  They did keep coming—and then the Union rifles and cannons opened fire. “Arms, heads, blankets, guns, and knapsacks were tossed into the clear air,” a Union officer later said.

  “At every step some poor fellow would fall, and his pitiful cry would come to my ear,” remembered John James, a Virginia soldier. And still the Confederate charge continued.

  Some of the attackers fought their way up to the Union’s stone walls, but they were quickly blasted back. The attack was shattered. More than half of the soldiers who set out on Pickett’s Charge did not return. (Pickett survived, though he never forgave Lee for sending him on the doomed charge.)

  General Lee watched survivors staggering back toward the Confederate lines. He rode back and forth, trying to encourage his men. “It’s all my fault,” he told them. “All this has been my fault. It is I that have lost this fight, and you must help me out of it the best you can.”

  Union soldiers, meanwhile, watched Lee’s soldiers retreat—something they had not seen much of so far. This was a cause for celebration. “Some cried, others shook hands,” one Union soldier remembered, “and all joined in the best cheer we could get up.”

  The Second-Biggest Fourth of July

  The next day, July 4, 1863, has to rank as the second most important Fourth of July in U.S. history. (July 4, 1776—the day Congress approved the Declaration of Independence—is still number one.) Two things made July 4, 1863, huge. First, General Lee faced the harsh truth that he had been beaten at Gettysburg, that his invasion of the North had failed. And, in a pounding rainstorm, Lee’s battered army began the long retreat back to Virginia.

  Second, after suffering through a forty-seven-day siege, the Confederate army at Vicksburg finally surrendered to General Grant. “We are now in the darkest hour of our political existence,” moaned Jefferson Davis. When Abraham Lincoln heard the news, he leaped from his chair and threw his long arm around the secretary of the navy, Gideon Welles, and shouted:

  “I cannot, in words, tell you my joy over this result. It is great, Mr. Welles, it is great!”

  Abraham Lincoln

  The Confederates surrendered Port Hudson a few days later, giving the Union control of the entire Mississippi River. Now, for the first time, Lincoln believed the end of the war was in sight. “Peace does not appear so distant as it did,” he said. General Meade just had to chase down Lee’s badly wounded army and capture it—and that would be the end of the Confederate States of America.

  But when did things ever go right for Abraham Lincoln?

  Can Anyone Win This War?

  Was the South ready to quit fighting after those painful losses at Gettysburg and Vicksburg? Not even close. Southern spirit was still strong—as you can see from these questions in a math textbook used by Southern students during the war:

  1. A Confederate soldier captured eight Yankees each day for nine days. How many Yankees did he capture in all?

  2. If one Confederate soldier can whip seven Yankees, how many Confederate soldiers can whip forty-nine Yankees?

  No, the South was nowhere near ready to give up.

  They’re Getting Away!

  Today we think of the Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg as the major turning point of the Civil War. After these battles the South would never again be strong enough to invade the North. But in July of 1863, Abraham Lincoln had no way of knowing this. In July of 1863, these Union victories were just another reason for Lincoln to get depressed.

  You’ll recall that the Union army under General George Meade had just beaten Robert E. Lee’s army at Gettysburg. Now Lee’s army—what was left of it—was limping home like a wounded animal. If Lee could get safely back to Virginia, his army would have time to rest and recover. But if Meade attacked right away, he might be able to crush Lee once and for all.

  Meade was cautious by nature, though. Plus, his army was still exhausted from the three-day Gettysburg fight. Lincoln urged Meade to get on with the attack. But this only annoyed Meade; it didn’t make him move. (Meade was so easily annoyed that soldiers called him “Old Snapping Turtle.”)

  Lincoln spent the next few days looking over maps, pacing impatiently, longing for news. Finally, on July 12, Meade declared that he was nearly ready to attack. Too late—the next night, Lee’s army escaped across the Potomac River into Virginia. Lincoln was sick with disappointment. “We had them in our grasp.” he said. “We had only to stretch forth our hands and they were ours. And nothing I could say or do could make the army move.”

  Now there was no end in sight. Just the thought of how much work lay ahead made Lincoln drop his head onto his desk and shut his eyes. “I’m a tired man,” he groaned. “Sometimes I’m the tiredest man on earth.”

  We’ve All Got Troubles

  Robert E. Lee’s soldiers might disagree. In their rush to escape from Gettysburg, they marched night and day through sticky mud and nonstop rain. “For ninety-six hours we were almost constantly on our feet,” one soldier remembered. “There was no time to cook rations and the boys went on about two biscuits and no meat a day.”

  “The whole of the army was dozing while marching,” another soldier said.

  And those were the lucky ones. The unlucky ones were the wounded, who were loaded into wagons that bounced and rattled over rough roads. The wounded men suffered unbearable pain as their blood-soaked clothes dried, hardened, and poked int
o their open wounds. Horrible cries were heard coming from these wagons.

  “Will no one have mercy and kill me?” shouted one wounded soldier.

  Another yelled: “Stop! Oh! For God’s sake, stop just for one minute; take me out and leave me to die on the roadside!”

  General Lee himself was exhausted, sick, and desperately in need of some time off. Once back in Virginia, he actually wrote to Jefferson Davis suggesting that Davis find a new commander for the army. “I sensibly feel the growing failure of my bodily strength,” Lee told Davis. “I cannot even accomplish what I myself desire. How can I fulfill the expectations of others?”

  Davis refused to even consider this request. “Our country could not bear to lose you,” Davis wrote to Lee. “Take all possible care of yourself.”

  But who was going to take care of Davis? The war was going badly, and the never-ending stress was making his headaches worse—causing explosions of pain in his face and blinding his left eye. Southern newspapers and members of Congress blamed Davis for everything that was going wrong. (And they were pretty cruel too: one Southern leader called Davis “miserable, stupid” and “one-eyed.”)

  When they weren’t insulting Davis, many members of the Confederate Congress were busy attacking each other—and I do mean attacking. During one heated debate, Senator Benjamin Hill threw an ink bottle at Senator William Yancey, ripping open Yancey’s cheek. Henry Foote was known to assault fellow members of Congress with a variety of weapons, including a pistol, a knife, and an umbrella.

  And there was more bad news for Jefferson Davis. The women of Richmond were rioting!

  Riots in the South

  The cause of the riot was simple: many families were starving. Two years of roaring battles had destroyed farms throughout the South. And there was very little money to buy imported food, because Southern farmers were unable to export their cotton to Europe. Europeans wanted to buy the cotton, but Southern ships couldn’t get it there—Union warships were blockading almost every Southern port.

  As a result, fresh food was scarce. The prices of basic items such as flour, corn, and meat were rising out of control. When a woman walked into a store in Richmond and asked the price of a barrel of flour, the merchant demanded seventy dollars. That led to this exchange:

  Woman: My God! How can I pay such prices? I have seven children; what shall I do?

  Merchant: I don’t know madam, unless you eat your children.

  The soaring cost of food sparked riots in more than a dozen Southern cities. In Atlanta, women with knives and guns entered shops and asked the price of goods they needed. If they felt the prices were unfairly high, they simply took the food home to their families.

  In Richmond, a thirty-seven-year-old mother of four named Mary Jackson led the largest of these “bread riots.” The Richmond Bread Riot began when a crowd of several hundred women surrounded Jackson, cheering her demands for fair prices. Then they followed her through the streets, smashing store windows, grabbing goods, and chanting, “Bread! Bread! Bread!”

  “Some had hatchets and axes,” one witness said. “Some clubs, some knives, and many carried bayonets in their belts.”

  When asked why she had joined the angry mob, an eighteen-year-old woman explained:

  “We are starving. We are going to the bakeries and each of us will take a loaf of bread. That is little enough for the government to give us after it has taken all our men.”

  Jefferson Davis ran out into the street, jumped onto a wagon, and told the rioters to go home. The people responded with boos and hisses. Davis pulled some coins from his pockets and threw them to the crowd. “Here is all I have,” he told them. “It is not much, but take it!” This didn’t seem to help.

  Then Davis got serious. In five minutes, he warned, soldiers would begin firing at the crowd. He pulled out his pocket watch and counted off one minute, then two, three, four … No one moved.

  Davis held up the watch and shouted:

  “My friends, you have one minute more!”

  That did it—the people went home, muttering and still hungry.

  Meanwhile, up North, a much more serious riot was about to explode.

  Riots in the North

  On the morning of July 13, 1863, Martha Perry was sitting in her New York City apartment when she was startled by a burst of noise in the street below. “I heard loud and continued cheers,” she later wrote, “and supposed it must be news of some great victory.”

  She quickly realized how wrong she was. “I flew to my window,” she said, “and saw rushing up Lexington Avenue, within a few paces of our house, a great mob of men, women and children. The men, in red working shirts, looking fairly fiendish as they brandished clubs, threw stones, and fired pistols. Many of the women had babies in their arms, and all of them were completely lawless as they swept on.”

  This was the start of the New York City Draft Riots—the biggest and most violent riots in the history of the United States.

  The trouble had begun in March 1863, when the government announced that it would begin drafting men into the Union army. This sparked anger for many reasons. Plenty of people were already sick of war and simply did not want to get shot at. Many were also furious about an incredibly bogus part of the draft law. If you were drafted, the law said, you could get out of serving by paying the government three hundred dollars. This was easy for a rich man to do, but it took the average worker about a year to earn three hundred dollars! This led to a protest cry: “A rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight!”

  There was another, uglier reason for the draft protests—racial prejudice. Since Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, people realized that the North was fighting to preserve the Union and to end slavery. Many white workers wondered, Why should we risk our lives to help African Americans? Freed slaves will just come to the North and compete with us for jobs.

  When the draft began in New York City, furious workers marched to the government office where the draft was taking place. Inside the office, a blindfolded government worker was quietly drafting soldiers by pulling names from a large spinning wheel. Outside, a mob was shouting and waving clubs and pulling up bricks and stones from the street. Then the anger erupted as the mob smashed the office windows, charged inside, and started destroying everything in sight.

  The draft riots raged out of control for the next three days. Mobs of thousands attacked and burned government offices, police stations, and newspapers that supported President Lincoln. The city glowed red at night as fires burned everywhere and rioters chanted:

  “No draft!”

  “The poor man’s blood for the rich man’s money!”

  “Tell Old Abe to come to New York!”

  Rioters attacked policemen, anyone who looked rich, and African Americans. Several black men were beaten to death. One mob even attacked an orphanage for African American children. Two hundred children escaped out the back as the cursing crowd set fire to the building.

  Union soldiers rushed to New York from the battle of Gettysburg and finally ended the riots—by firing into the raging crowds. More than a hundred people were killed in the draft riots.

  Down in Washington, Abraham Lincoln said he felt as if he were sitting on a volcano.

  General Tubman in Action

  But this was a wild and massive war, and sometimes bad news and good news came at the same time. If Abe Lincoln had picked up a Boston newspaper called The Commonwealth on July 10, 1863, he would have read a story that began with this remarkable sentence: “Colonel Montgomery and his gallant band of 300 black soldiers, under the guidance of a black woman, dashed into the enemy’s country, struck a bold and effective blow … without losing a man or receiving a scratch.”

  The black woman in question was Harriet Tubman, the former Underground Railroad hero—known to her admirers as “General Tubman.”

  When the Civil War began, Tubman went to work for the Union army as a cook and nurse. She didn’t stop there. While working with the army in South Ca
rolina, Tubman boldly slipped into Confederate territory, gathering information from slaves she met and studying the local geography. Then she came up with a plan.

  On the night of June 2, 1863, three Union gunships cruised up the Combahee River. Aboard the ships were the black soldiers of the Second South Carolina Regiment. Guiding the lead boat was Harriet Tubman.

  Tubman knew exactly where to find warehouses piled high with cotton and rice. Union soldiers jumped off the boats, setting fire to the warehouses and taking the opportunity to torch the homes of plantation owners as well. At the same time, entire families of escaping slaves raced to the riverbank and leaped to freedom on the Union boats. “I never saw such a sight,” Tubman said.

  “Women would come with twins hanging around their necks … bags on their shoulders, baskets on their heads, and young ones tagging along behind, all loaded; pigs squealing, chickens screaming, young ones squealing.

  Harriet Tubman

  Tubman’s Combahee River raid was a smashing success. Union soldiers destroyed tons of supplies that the South badly needed. And about 750 men, women, and children escaped from slavery on nearby plantations. More than one hundred of the men quickly joined the Union army.

  The only flaw in her plan, Tubman later said, was her choice in clothing. In the rush to escape, people (and animals) kept stepping on and ripping the end of her dress. “I made up my mind then I would never wear a long dress on another expedition of the kind,” Tubman said.