Lincoln

by David Herbert Donald

  The refusal of the Ohio Democrats to accept his offer, considering it a “sacrifice of their dignity and self respect,” simply confirmed Lincoln’s message to the people that his administration was exercising exceptional powers only in the interest of self-preservation.

  III

  Self-preservation also dictated a change in the command of the Army of the Potomac. As Lee moved across the Potomac, Hooker closely followed, offering an effective screen for Washington and Baltimore and keeping his troops in readiness for a major combat on Northern soil. But as usual, he resisted accepting suggestions or orders. Lincoln, who saw in the Confederate invasion “the best opportunity we have had since the war began,” wanted to maintain a sizable garrison at Harpers Ferry, where, to the left and the rear of the Confederate advance, it might compel Lee to divide his forces—as he had been obliged to do in the Antietam campaign. Then Hooker could deliver the devastating defeat to the Army of Northern Virginia that McClellan had failed to inflict in September 1862. But Hooker believed in the military doctrine of concentration of force and insisted that Harpers Ferry be abandoned. When Halleck ordered him to sustain that garrison, Hooker resigned—assuming, no doubt, that on the eve of a major battle his resignation would be rejected.

  It was not. Ignoring the widespread outcry for the recall of McClellan, Lincoln on June 28 replaced Hooker with George Gordon Meade, one of the most experienced corps commanders of the Army of the Potomac, who had been in every major engagement since the first battle of Bull Run. Tall, thin, and bespectacled, Meade was not a charismatic leader; he looked, a Massachusetts soldier reported, like “a good sort of a family doctor.” But he was well organized and highly professional, and he had the respect, if not necessarily the affection, of his men.

  As Meade took command and followed Lee into Pennsylvania, Lincoln showed how much he had learned from his dealings with Hooker. To this new commander went no fatherly notes of admonition, no folksy advice about strategy. Indeed, he wrote to Meade not at all but made his wishes known only through Halleck. The President devoted his energies to raising new troops to reinforce Meade’s army, in order to protect the crossings of the Susquehanna River and other routes that led to Philadelphia, and to calming the excited officials of Pennsylvania and New Jersey who feared their states were in the way of the Confederate advance.

  Lincoln’s attention was not focused solely on the Army of the Potomac, for he kept a close eye on Grant’s campaign against Vicksburg. The President had never tried to direct Grant’s strategy; the distances were too great for the army on the Mississippi to be managed from Washington. But he thought that Grant should bypass Vicksburg, go south and join forces with N. P. Banks, who was advancing up the Mississippi River from Louisiana. Instead, Grant plunged into the interior of Mississippi, defeated Confederate forces in a series of engagements, and pushed John C. Pemberton’s army back into Vicksburg. During much of this campaign Grant told no one of his plans and seemed simply to have disappeared. Failing to reach him by letter or telegram, Lincoln desperately sought for news of his army from reports in the Confederate newspapers. “Do the Richmond papers have anything about... Vicksburg?” he wired General John A. Dix at Fort Monroe. “Have you any thing from Grant?” he telegraphed to General Rosecrans at Murfreesboro.

  As news slowly filtered in, he began to get a better idea of Grant’s campaign, and by the time the Union army put the Confederates under siege in Vicksburg, he could understand both the boldness and the skill of his general. “Whether Gen. Grant shall or shall not consummate the capture of Vicksburg,” he wrote a complainer on May 26, “his campaign from the beginning of this month up to the twenty second day of it, is one of the most brilliant in the world.”

  Even so, as the siege of Vicksburg stretched on through June, he worried constantly about Grant and his army. Carefully he scrutinized Confederate newspapers, which carried reports—all erroneous—that Sherman had been seriously wounded during the siege, that Banks had lost an arm in his campaign for Port Hudson, that Confederate General Edmund Kirby-Smith was bringing reinforcements from the trans-Mississippi region to relieve Vicksburg. Because there was always the danger that the Confederates might draw troops from another arena to assist Pemberton, Lincoln vainly urged Rosecrans, in Tennessee, to do his “utmost, short of rashness, to keep Bragg from getting off to help [Joseph E.] Johnston against Grant.”

  Under the enormous strain of worry about two armies poised for decisive battle, the President’s health began to suffer. He had a nightmare about Tad, who had accompanied his mother on a shopping trip to Philadelphia. His “ugly dream” featured the pistol he had permitted the boy to have—“big enough to snap caps—but no cartridges or powder”—and he wired Mary: “Think you better put ‘Tad’s’ pistol away.” A visitor found the President’s face told a story of anxiety and weariness, noting “the drooping eyelids, looking almost swollen; the dark bags beneath the eyes; the deep marks about the large and expressive mouth.”

  Then, on July 4, finally came the news that Lincoln had so long awaited. Staying close to the telegraph office in the War Department, he learned of a great and bloody battle that had been fought during the three previous days at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Though details were lacking, it appeared that Lee had been defeated and was retreating. Jubilantly the President issued a press release from the War Department announcing this “great success to the cause of the Union” and urging “that on this day, He whose will, not ours, should ever be done, be everywhere remembered and reverenced with profoundest gratitude.” Three days later Secretary Welles received a dispatch from Admiral David Dixon Porter announcing the fall of Vicksburg and rushed to the White House with the news. His face beaming with joy, Lincoln caught Welles’s hand and, throwing his arm around him, exclaimed: “What can we do for the Secretary of the Navy for this glorious intelligence? ... I cannot, in words, tell you my joy over this result. It is great, Mr. Welles, it is great!”

  For a few days in early July it seemed that the end of the war was at hand. With the fall of Vicksburg, where Pemberton surrendered his army of 30,000, and Port Hudson (July 8), the Mississippi, from Cairo to New Orleans, was once more in Union hands. The fleet, now under Admiral Dahlgren, who succeeded Admiral Du Pont on July 6, was slowly battering Charleston to rubble. And in the East, Meade had to fight just one more battle to destroy Lee’s army, which was trapped between the advancing Army of the Potomac and the Potomac River, swollen with summer rains.

  But Meade did not advance swiftly and, after a council of war with his senior generals, postponed an attack. Lee escaped into Virginia. Never was Lincoln so disappointed and so furious. “If I had gone up there, I could have whipped them myself,” he exclaimed. “Our army held the war in the hollow of their hand and they would not close it,” he fumed. He took special offense at a dispatch of Meade’s praising his army for “driving the invader from our soil.” “The whole country is our soil,” he insisted, and he feared that Meade’s purpose was not to defeat Lee but “to get the enemy across the river again without a further collision.” His anger did not fade quickly. Weeks later he expressed deep mortification that Lee’s army had not been destroyed. “Meade and his army had expended their skill and toil and blood up to the ripe harvest,” he grieved, “and then allowed it to go to waste.”

  From the depths of his unhappiness he wrote a bitter letter to Meade, expressing gratitude for his “magnificent success” at Gettysburg but lamenting: “My dear general, I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee’s escape. He was within your easy grasp, and to have closed upon him would, in connection with our other late successes, have ended the war. As it is, the war will be prolonged indefinitely. . . . Your golden opportunity is gone, and I am distressed immeasureably because of it.”

  Then, characteristically, he did not sign or send the letter. As he cooled down, he came to recognize that he was expecting too much of Meade. At the time the battle of Gettysburg began, Meade had been in
command of the Army of the Potomac for only four days, and he was working with new and untried subordinates. His army had suffered enormous losses during the three days of battle, and some of its ablest and most aggressive generals were dead or wounded. Meade himself was exhausted. As he wrote his wife on July 8, “Now over ten days, I have not changed my clothes, have not had a regular night’s rest, and many nights not a wink of sleep, and for several days did not even wash my face and hands, no regular food, and all the time in a great state of mental anxiety.” It was asking too much of him to attack Robert E. Lee.

  Lincoln withheld his letter—though he permitted Halleck to wire that the escape of Lee’s army had “created great dissatisfaction in the mind of the President.” Meade promptly submitted his resignation, and Halleck was forced to backtrack, saying that his telegram “was not intended as a censure, but as a stimulus to an active pursuit.”

  By this time Lincoln had recovered his equanimity and could speak of Meade “as a brave and skillful officer, and a true man,” who was responsible for the success at Gettysburg. Indeed the President’s spirits were so high that he composed a doggerel, “Gen. Lees invasion of the North written by himself,” which he gave to John Hay:

  In eighteen sixty three, with pomp,

  and mighty swell,

  Me and Jeff’s Confederacy, went

  forth to sack Phil-del,

  The Yankees they got arter us, and

  giv us particular hell,

  And we skedaddled back again,

  and didn’t sack Phil-del.

  IV

  In the next few weeks Lincoln had need of his good humor. On July 2, Mary Lincoln, who had come back from Philadelphia, had a carriage accident while returning alone to the White House from the presidential cottage at the Soldiers’ Home, an elevated spot three miles from the capital, where the Lincolns sought relief from the oppressive Washington heat. Someone, probably in the hope of injuring the President, had unscrewed the bolts to the driver’s seat in her carriage, and when it became detached, the horses grew frightened and ran away. Mary was thrown out and hit her head on a sharp rock. Initially it seemed that she had only received severe bruises, and the President telegraphed Robert: “Dont be uneasy. Your mother very slightly hurt by her fall.” But the wound became infected, and for three weeks she required round-the-clock nursing. After this accident Mary’s headaches, of which she had long complained, became more frequent, and Robert thought she never fully recovered from her fall.

  Lincoln could not spend much time at his wife’s bedside because on July 13 draft riots erupted in New York City. Attempts to enforce the conscription act led to resistance in many parts of the country—in Holmes County, Ohio, Rush and Sullivan counties in Indiana, in Milwaukee, in the mining districts of Pennsylvania, and elsewhere—but only in New York was there a full-scale insurrection. For three days working-class mobs, consisting mostly of Irish-Americans, roamed the streets, looting and burning. More than 100 people were killed before Union troops, fresh from the battle of Gettysburg, arrived to preserve order.

  Briefed by reports filtered to him by Sydney Howard Gay, the managing editor of the New York Tribune, the President anxiously followed these events. The news from New York, which coincided with reports that Lee’s army had escaped unscathed across the Potomac, deeply depressed him. At one cabinet meeting he told his colleagues that “he did not believe we could take up anything in Cabinet to-day. Probably none of us were in a right frame of mind for deliberation—he was not.” But it was not clear what he could do to help quell the rioting, especially since Governor Seymour did not ask for federal assistance.

  When the violence in New York died down, there was pressure on the President to appoint a special commissioner to investigate the causes of the riots, but Lincoln, after toying with the notion, turned it down. If the commissioner made a thorough investigation, he said, his report would “have simply touched a match to a barrel of gunpowder.” It was best to shy away from the issue. “One rebellion at a time is about as much as we can conveniently handle.”

  The rest of the summer was a relatively tranquil time for the President. Military affairs were under control, with capable professionals like Meade and Grant in command of the armies. The Congress had adjourned, and the President was not constantly badgered by demands from Capitol Hill. During the exceptionally hot weather Lincoln stayed mostly at the Soldiers’ Home. He was often alone, because Mary, after recovering from her accident, went with Robert and Tad to the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Some of the time the President was lonely, but he kept in touch with his traveling family by letters and telegrams. One carried sad news for Tad about the fate of his little goat, Nanny, who caused such destruction in the gardens at the Soldiers’ Home that she had to be brought back to the White House. There she was presently discovered “resting herself, and chewing her little cud, on the middle of Tad’s bed.” Then she disappeared, and, the President wrote his family, “This is the last we know of poor ‘Nanny.’”

  During this quiet period Lincoln had time to assess his administration, and on the whole he was pleased with what he had been able to accomplish. Now that he had roused himself from the torpor into which repeated military and political reverses had cast him, he once more felt himself a leader with a loyal constituency. Increasingly self-confident, he relied less and less on the advice of his cabinet officers. In their separate spheres he recognized their expertise and let them have their own way. When Secretary Chase came to him with a set of complicated regulations for trading with the South, the President promptly signed them, saying, “You understand these things: I do not.” But the cabinet as a whole he consulted only sporadically and unsystematically. Nearly every cabinet member complained. “There is, in fact, no Cabinet,” grumbled Bates, “and the show of Cabinet-councils is getting more and more, a mere show—Little matters or isolated propositions are sometimes talked over, but the great business of the country—questions of leading policy—are not mentioned.” Even the loyal Gideon Welles had to confess that there was no consultation about major issues like slavery and the restoration of the Southern states to the Union. “Of the policy of the administration, if there be one,” he told a correspondent, “I am not advised beyond what is published and known to all.”

  Lincoln was not being intentionally rude to his advisers. Sharing “the general impression that we near the end of the war,” he simply did not think that they could offer any useful ideas on how to eradicate slavery and bring the Southern states back into the Union. These problems the President alone could solve. He did not shrink from the responsibility, and now that he had asserted himself as a popular leader, he rather enjoyed his role as leader of opinion. “The Tycoon is in fine whack,” John Hay reported in August. “I have rarely seen him more serene and busy. He is managing this war, the draft, foreign relations, and planning a reconstruction of the Union, all at once. I never knew with what tyrannous authority he rules the Cabinet, till now. The most important things he decides and there is no cavil.”

  He brought this sense of serenity and power to a controversy that Governor Seymour opened after the New York City draft riots. Seymour, whom critics had accused of coddling the rioters, tried to persuade the President to suspend the draft in New York, on the grounds, first, that conscription was unconstitutional, and, second, that the quotas allotted to his state were “glaringly unjust.” In a series of letters the governor detailed his objections and his protests against the draft quotas.

  In what Hay called “a sockdolager” of a reply, which was widely published in the newspapers, Lincoln showed none of the hesitancy that had paralyzed him for the past six months. If discrimination against New York could be shown, he wrote Seymour, he was willing to make concessions “so far as consistent, with practical convenience,” but he was not prepared to hold up the draft until Seymour could procure a United States Supreme Court ruling on its constitutionality. The Confederacy, he pointed out, was forcing every able-bodied man into their a
rmy, “very much as a butcher drives bullocks into a slaughter-pen,” and the Union could not spare the time either for another experiment with the failed volunteer system or for a test in the courts.

  The correspondence between the New York governor and the President sputtered on for several weeks, Seymour insisting “that there is no theory which can explain or justify the enrollments [i.e., the draft quotas] in this State” and Lincoln persisting: “My purpose is to be just and fair; and yet to not lose time.” Eventually the President felt forced to prepare an order calling the New York State militia into federal service for the purpose of enforcing the draft, but Seymour yielded just in time, and the draft began without much incident on August 19. In the showdown, the governor, not the President, blinked.

  At about the time of this controversy, Lincoln, remembering the success of his letters to Corning and to Birchard about the Vallandigham affair, began drafting another public paper that would explain the draft and defend its constitutionality. “I... address you without searching for a precedent upon which to do so,” he began, noting that it was especially important to avoid “misunderstanding between the public and the public servant.” To opponents who claimed the draft was unconstitutional, he pointed out that the Constitution explicitly gives Congress the power “to raise and support armies.” The conscription act was thus “a law made in litteral pursuance of this part of the United States Constitution.” Nor was there doubt about the expediency of the draft. Only by raising additional armies could the “republican institutions, and territorial integrity of our country... be maintained,” he continued. “There can be no army without men.” Since voluntary recruiting had ceased, the draft was necessary.