Lincoln

by David Herbert Donald

  In deciding on the general’s future, Lincoln was torn. He genuinely liked Hooker, who had shown himself candid and brave. He also learned that the general had skillfully planned the battle and had been on the verge of victory until he was stunned by a falling beam when a Confederate cannonball hit his headquarters at the Chancellor house. Sardonically the President mused that if the ball had been aimed lower—so as to hit Hooker—the battle would have been a great Union success. On leaving Falmouth he announced to a newspaper correspondent that “his confidence in Gen. Hooker and his army [was] unshaken.” When another reporter asked whether he intended to replace the general, he replied with some displeasure that since he had tried McClellan “a number of times, he saw no reason why he should not try General Hooker twice.”

  He was determined, though, to keep a closer personal control of the general’s future operations. “What next?” he asked Hooker. Did the general have in mind a new movement against the enemy that would “help to supersede the bad moral effect of the recent one”? Hooker remarked that less than one-third of his army had been engaged at Chancellorsville and promised that in the next action “the operations of all the Corps” would be under his personal supervision. Lincoln did not remind him that was exactly what he had instructed the general to do before the battle.

  Hooker had a plan—a hopelessly wrongheaded one. Learning that Lee was moving north of the Rappahannock, he proposed to cross that river and attack the Confederate rear guard at Fredericksburg. Promptly Lincoln warned, “I would not take any risk of being entangled upon the river, like an ox jumped half over a fence, and liable to be torn by dogs, front and rear, without a fair chance to gore one way or kick the other.” But Hooker seemed not to learn. Within a week he suggested that if Lee invaded the North the Army of the Potomac should march south and attack Richmond. Quietly Lincoln reminded him of the dangers of this harebrained scheme and pointed out a basic truth so many of his commanders seemed unable to grasp: “Lee’s Army, and not Richmond, is your true objective point.”

  Certainly Hooker was obtuse, but the President himself was in part responsible for the general’s failure. Though Lincoln had excellent strategic sense, which improved as the war progressed, he was not a professional military man and knew that he was not competent to draft proper orders for a military campaign. He also knew how much military men objected to what they regarded as meddling by a civilian. Consequently he deprecated the advice he offered as “my poor mite” and advanced ideas hesitantly, “incompetent as I may be.” Expressing his wishes as suggestions, rather than commands, he relied on Halleck, his general-in-chief, to translate his ideas into military orders that the armies could follow.

  Besides being cumbersome, the system could not work because of Halleck. That general, as Lincoln knew very well, was unwilling to take the initiative or assume responsibility. Like McClellan, Halleck was a master of procrastination when he did not agree with the President’s ideas. He could always find technical reasons why Lincoln’s suggestions could not be carried out, and the President usually yielded to his objections, saying, “It being strictly a military question, it is proper I should defer to Halleck whom I have called here to counsel, advise and direct, in these matters, where he is an expert.” Gideon Welles accurately described the resulting stalemate: “No one more fully realizes the magnitude of the occasion, and the vast consequences involved than the President—he wishes all to be done that can be done, but yet [in army operations] will not move or do except by the consent of the dull, stolid, inefficient and incompetent General-in-Chief.”

  In dealing with Hooker, Lincoln faced the further problem that Halleck disliked the commander of the Army of the Potomac, who had once borrowed money from him in California and failed to pay it back; indeed, Halleck had opposed Hooker’s appointment. For his part, Hooker despised the general-in-chief and would have as little as possible to do with him. When he took command of the Army of the Potomac, he had insisted on communicating directly with the President, bypassing the War Department, yet, now, with Lee on the march, he complained that he had “not enjoyed the confidence of the Major General Commanding the Army.”

  As the Confederates swept through western Maryland, many in Washington panicked. Rumor had it that a steamer was anchored in the Potomac, ready to take the President and his cabinet to safety when the rebels arrived. But Lincoln was in excellent spirits, spending much of his time in the telegraph office of the War Department, joking and reading the latest dispatches. He improved the occasion to instruct the sober quartermaster general, Montgomery C. Meigs, about the writings of Orpheus C. Kerr. “Any one who has not read them must be a heathen,” he exclaimed. The humorist’s papers delighted him, he said, except when their wit was turned on him; then he found them unsuccessful and rather disgusting. “Now the hits that are given to you, Mr. Welles I can enjoy,” he laughingly told the Secretary of the Navy, “but I dare say they may have disgusted you while I was laughing at them. So vice versa as regards myself.”

  Lincoln’s good cheer stemmed from his conviction that Lee’s invasion offered a chance to bag the entire Confederate army. The Army of the Potomac, facing the rebels on Union soil, could not “help beating them, if we have the man,” Lincoln told Welles, but he worried that “Hooker may commit the same fault as McClellan and lose his chance.”

  That remark revealed his doubts about Hooker. Like everybody else, he heard reports that the general was drinking too much. He knew, too, that there had been much grumbling against Hooker since the defeat at Chancellorsville. Both General Darius N. Couch and General Henry W. Slocum asked the President to remove Hooker. In a long interview at the White House, General John F. Reynolds, disavowing any desire to command the Army of the Potomac himself, urged Lincoln to replace Hooker with his fellow Pennsylvanian George Gordon Meade. Lincoln demurred, saying that he was not inclined to throw away a gun because it had once missed fire but “would pick the lock and try it again,” but he thought the complaints sufficiently serious to warn Hooker that he did not have the full confidence of some of his division commanders.

  What eventually turned the President against his commanding general was Hooker’s obdurate failure to follow directions. The general refused to recognize that Lincoln’s homespun suggestions were, in fact, commands. At the same time, he also ignored Halleck’s more specific orders, not realizing that they came from the President. Eventually Lincoln was forced to put Hooker in his place in a dispatch of two terse sentences: “To remove all misunderstanding, I now place you in the strict military relation to Gen. Halleck, of a commander of one of the armies, to the General-in-Chief of all the armies. I have not intended differently; but as it seems to be differently understood, I shall direct him to give you orders, and you to obey them.”

  II

  While Lincoln was trying to establish his control over the Army of the Potomac, he also sought to give a new direction to public opinion. Up to this point he had largely accepted the traditional view that the President, once elected, had no direct dealings with the public. His job was to administer the government and to report his actions and wishes to the Congress. Presidents rarely left the capital city, except for brief vacations; they almost never made public addresses; and they maintained, in theory, a sublime indifference to public opinion and political pressures.

  Like many other self-made men, Lincoln was very conventional and hesitated to break this tradition. It never occurred to him to go in person before Congress and read his eloquent messages, for that was something that had not been done since Jefferson’s day. Though occasionally he would say a few words at a Union rally in Washington, he knew that he was not good at extemporaneous speaking and rarely made any public appearances outside the White House. His one innovation had been to maintain an open house at the Executive Mansion, during which as many of the curious and the complainers, the office-seekers and the favor-hunters, as wanted to wait in line had an opportunity to speak with the President.

  Though that kind o
f openness certainly did not injure him in public esteem, it did little to get his message across to the people, and by midsummer of 1863 it was desperately important that the administration’s policies should be understood. On no issue was this need so great as on the abrogation of civil liberties. Curtailment of the freedom of speech and of the press, arrests of dissenters and the disloyal—always called “arbitrary arrests” by his opponents—and, above all, suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus deeply troubled many Americans. Of course, the Peace Democrats vigorously protested against these measures, and, after the arrest and trial of Vallandigham, many of the War Democrats joined them. But they were not alone. Within the President’s own party a Conservative like his friend Browning believed that the arrests ordered by the Lincoln administration “were illegal and arbitrary, and did more harm than good, weakening instead of strengthening the government.” The Radical Lyman Trumbull agreed that “all arbitrary arrests of citizens by military authority ... are unwarrantable, and are doing much injury, and that if they continue unchecked the civil tribunals will be completely subordinated to the military, and the government overthrown.” Even in the President’s own cabinet, Gideon Welles lamented “that our military officers should, without absolute necessity, disregard those great principles on which our government and institutions rest.” Most dangerous of all was the growing sentiment in the army that, as one Massachusetts soldier wrote his family, the President, “without the people having any legal means to prevent it, is only prevented from exercising a Russian despotism by the fear he may have of shocking too much the sense of decency of the whole world.”

  Aware of the widespread public unhappiness, Lincoln grew restive at remaining a prisoner of the White House. For a time he considered attending a huge July 4 celebration planned for Philadelphia, where he could for the first time since his inauguration have a chance to speak directly to the public, but Lee’s impending invasion of Pennsylvania put an end to that idea. The favorable reception of his public letters to friends of the Union cause in Manchester and London suggested another way he could explain to the people why he had found it necessary to suspend the writ of habeas corpus. As ideas came to him that “seemed to have force and make perfect answer to some of the things that were said and written” about his actions, he jotted them down on scraps of paper and put them in a drawer. When the appropriate time came, he could put together these disconnected thoughts in a public letter.

  The protest of a group of New York Democrats against the arrest of Vallandigham gave him the opportunity for which he had been waiting. Headed by Erastus Corning, president of the New York Central Railroad, the meeting adopted resolutions strongly condemning the arrest and trial of Vallandigham as a “blow... against the spirit of our laws and Constitution” and an abrogation of “the liberty of speech and of the press, the right of trial by jury, the law of evidence, and the privilege of habeas corpus.” If sustained by the President, the arrest and banishment would strike “a fatal blow at the supremacy of law, and the authority of the State and Federal Constitutions.”

  When a copy of the resolutions reached Lincoln, he realized that his enemies had been delivered into his hands. The signers of the Albany protest were not, apart from Corning himself, persons of much political influence, nor were they supporters of the Union cause whose loyalty was being tested by the Vallandigham case. Instead, they were obscure local Democratic politicians, who made their partisanship clear by including a gratuitous complimentary reference to Governor Horatio Seymour in the resolutions. The whole affair, as one White House intimate judged, had “the stinking aroma of party politics,” and the protesters, with “no defined idea of moulding the present state of things into a sane unity,” wanted either “to run the machine independently of the President, or to bully him into their notions.”

  Drawing on the notes he had collected in his drawer, Lincoln took exceptional care in preparing his response, although he said he “put that paper together in less time than any other of like importance ever prepared by me” because he had already given too much thought to the subject. On June 5 he took the unusual precaution of reading his proposed response to the members of the cabinet, and Gideon Welles noted, “It has vigor and ability and with some corrections will be a strong paper.” By June 12 he had revised and polished his letter, and he sent it off to Corning that day—with a copy to the influential New York Tribune.

  Lincoln’s public letter began disarmingly with praise for the Albany protesters’ “eminently patriotic” statement that they favored sustaining the Union and would uphold the administration in all constitutional measures. That left the question whether the military arrests and subsequent trials, for which the President was “ultimately responsible,” were constitutional. Willingly Lincoln conceded that in normal times these would be violations of constitutionally guaranteed rights, but he pointed out that the Constitution itself provided for the suspension of these liberties “in cases of Rebellion or Invasion, [when] the public Safety may require it.” Clearly the United States now faced a rebellion, “clear, flagrant, and gigantic,” so that public safety did require suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. “Thoroughly imbued with a reverence for the guarranteed rights of individuals,” Lincoln explained that he had been “slow to adopt the strong measures” of his administration, and he predicted that “the time [was] not unlikely to come when I shall be blamed for having made too few arrests rather than too many.”

  Turning directly to the protesters’ objection that Vallandigham had been arrested far from any insurrection and outside any military lines, Lincoln bluntly replied that the suspension of civil liberties was “constitutional wherever the public safety does require them.” Vallandigham, he pointed out, was not jailed because he was a political opponent of the administration or of the commanding general, Burnside, but “because he was damaging the army, upon the existence, and vigor of which, the life of the nation depends.”

  Then, in his most effective paragraph, the President noted that even his Albany petitioners had to recognize his right and duty to sustain the armies by punishing desertion, even with the death penalty. “Must I shoot a simpleminded soldier boy who deserts,” he asked, “while I must not touch a hair of a wiley agitator who induces him to desert?”

  Finally, Lincoln rejected the argument that the precedent set by military arrests during the rebellion would be followed in the peaceful postwar future. This argument, he suggested, was like saying “that a man could contract so strong an appetite for emetics during temporary illness, as to persist in feeding upon them through the remainder of his healthful life.”

  Lincoln considered his letter to Corning the best state paper he had written up to that time, and public response confirmed his feeling. If it did nothing to convince the disloyal or the more extreme among the Peace Democrats, it reassured Unionists genuinely troubled by an assumption of despotic power on the part of the President. Lincoln’s low-key announcement that he regretted the arrest of Vallandigham—or, as he carefully phrased it, that he was “pained that there should have seemed to be a necessity for arresting him”—and his promise to discharge the congressman “so soon as... the public safety will not suffer by it” undercut charges of presidential tyranny and gave credence to his statement to a White House visitor that he was more of a “Chief Clerk” than a “Despot.” If Lincoln’s letter was—perhaps by intention—not an overwhelming, technical defense of the constitutionality of his actions, it was a clear demonstration of their necessity. Its lasting impact could be measured by the fact that henceforth Clement L. Vallandigham would always be stigmatized as “a wiley agitator.”

  Proud of his letter, Lincoln had copies printed and sent out under Nicolay’s frank to leading Republicans. Their response was enthusiastic. “The right word has at last been spoken by the right man, at the right time, and from the right place,” rejoiced John W. Forney of the Washington Chronicle. “It will thrill the whole land.” It was “one of your best state
Papers,” judged former Governor E. D. Morgan, and another New Yorker considered it “of more value to the cause we all have at heart than a victory.” Praising the letter as “felicitous and timely,” Roscoe Conkling, defeated in the recent congressional contest, recognized the value of the document in the upcoming New York elections, where he thought it made “the best campaign document we can have in this state.” Published in the New York Tribune, reissued as a pamphlet, and given further distribution as a publication of the Loyal Publication Society, at least 500,000 copies of the Corning letter were read by 10,000,000 people.

  So successful was Lincoln’s first attempt to reach out directly to the people that he lost no time in following it with a second public letter, this time addressed to Matthew Birchard and other delegates to the Ohio state Democratic convention who came to the White House in order to protest Vallandigham’s arrest, trial, and banishment. Ohio Governor David Tod wanted Lincoln to treat these visitors “with the contempt they richly merit.” Secretary Chase, who understood the intricacies of Ohio politics, urged him to respond to the delegation in writing. Aware that the Ohio Democrats had just chosen Vallandigham as their gubernatorial candidate, even though he was a convicted lawbreaker now in exile, Lincoln issued a hard-hitting statement. Vallandigham, he bluntly asserted, was responsible “personally, in a greater degree than... any other one man,” for the desertions from the army, the resistance to the draft, and even the assassination of Unionists. By endorsing him the Ohio delegation was itself encouraging “desertion, resistance to the draft and the like.” He concluded by promising to allow Vallandigham to return to the country providing that each member of the delegation would sign a pledge to “do all he can to have the officers, soldiers, and seamen of the army and navy... paid, fed, clad, and otherwise well provided and supported.”