In so doing, he grievously offended New York Conservatives led by Thurlow Weed. “Distinctly and emphatically” Weed asked David Davis to tell the President “that if this Custom House is left in custody of those who have for two years sent ‘aid and comfort’ to the enemy, his fitness for President will be questioned.” Disaffection among Conservatives became greater when Lincoln, without notice, followed the recommendation of the Secretary of the Treasury and named John T. Hogeboom as appraiser in the New York Customs House. “The President [had] rather appoint Chase’s friends than to say no,” Senator Edwin D. Morgan grieved. Weed was enraged. “After this outrage and insult,” he fumed, he would cease to annoy the President with the letters and advice he had constantly showered on him since his election; he could no longer be subjected “to the mortifications of knowing that the President has no respect for my opinions.” Deeply troubled, Lincoln sent his private secretary to New York to make peace with the aging boss, but Nicolay found him “quite disheartened and disappointed.” Privately Weed began expressing his belief that the people had “not had the worth of their Blood and Treasure” from the Lincoln administration and his doubts about the advisability of renominating the President were so public that rumor had it that “old Weed was undoubtedly opposed to Lincoln.”
If the President seemed to support the Radicals in New York, in Washington he appeared to back the Conservatives. In late April, Representative Francis P. Blair, Jr., outraged by charges, made with the apparent connivance of Treasury Department officials, that he had profited from illegal trade along the Mississippi River, took the floor to denounce Secretary Chase for fostering fraud and corruption in order to boost his chances for the presidency. In a blistering attack Blair charged that Chase had not really withdrawn from the race after the “disgraceful and disgusting” Pomeroy Circular; he simply “wanted to get down under the ground and work there in the dark as he is now doing, and running the Pomeroy machine on the public money as vigorously as ever.” Chase, he continued, was using “that poor creature” Frémont as a cat’s-paw, believing that the threat of an independent third party would frighten the Republicans into dropping Lincoln. Then “Chase, who has so magnanimously declined to be a candidate, will then be taken up as a compromise candidate.”
What made Blair’s vituperative speech the more infuriating to Radicals was his announcement immediately afterward that he was giving up his seat in Congress to resume his commission as major general commanding a corps in Sherman’s army. Blair, it became known, had a “distinct verbal understanding” with Lincoln that he might resign his commission in order to serve in Congress but that he could, “at any time during the session, at his own pleasure, withdraw said resignation, and return to the field.” Lincoln’s enemies raged that this arrangement was both illegal and unconstitutional; it proved that the President had been behind Blair’s assault on the Secretary of the Treasury. Indignant, Chase planned to resign, but he allowed his friends to persuade him to delay until they could see the President.
When former Congressman Albert G. Riddle of Ohio, accompanied by Rufus P. Spalding, “the personal and confidential friend nearest the Secretary,” met with Lincoln on April 25, they received a frosty reception. He melted, however, after Riddle explained that he had come not to confront the President but to hear his assurance that he was “in no way a party to or responsible for a word uttered by Mr. Blair.” Lincoln explained that he had not known in advance of Blair’s speech; indeed, he did not learn of it until three hours after he had reinstated the general in command. Realizing “that another beehive was kicked over,” he initially thought of canceling the order restoring Blair’s commission but on reflection decided to let it stand. “If I was wrong in this,” he told his visitors, “the injury to the service can be set right.”
As the time for the Baltimore convention approached, the stress of mediating between the two Republican factions was beginning to tell on the President. Riddle, who had not seen him for five months, was shocked by the change in his appearance. Now, he reported, the President “looked like a man worn and harassed with petty faultfinding and criticisms, until he had turned at bay, like an old stag pursued and hunted by a cowardly rabble of men and dogs.”
II
These days Lincoln found it easier to get along with his generals than with the politicians. In Grant he had a commander whom he liked and trusted. Everything about the unpretentious, businesslike general pleased the President. It was an advantage that Grant was from Illinois. His lack of flamboyance, his seeming inattentiveness to rank and protocol endeared him to the President. Lincoln was struck by the simplicity and directness of the language Grant used in his reports. He was even more impressed by their infrequency and brevity. “Gen. Grant,” he had noted back in July 1863, “is a copious worker, and fighter, but a very meagre writer, or telegrapher.” He was pleased that Grant, unlike McClellan, Buell, and some other generals, unquestioningly accepted his policies on emancipation and the recruitment of Negro troops. Most of all, he told another officer, he liked Grant because “he doesn’t worry and bother me. He isn’t shrieking for reinforcements all the time. He takes what troops we can safely give him ... and does the best he can with what he has got.”
The President wanted to give the new general-in-chief everything that he reasonably could. He approved the general’s decision to reorganize and consolidate the cavalry of the Army of the Potomac into a separate corps, and he agreed to the appointment of Grant’s young favorite, Philip Sheridan, to command it. He backed Grant’s decision to make sharp reductions in the numbers of soldiers stationed far behind the lines maintaining civil order in the border states and guarding lines of transportation, and he accepted the general’s decision to terminate profitless expeditions like the months-long siege of Charleston harbor. When Grant demanded that the quartermaster, ordnance, and commissary departments be brought under his control, Lincoln replied that, though he could not legally give him the command of these departments, “there is no one but myself that can interfere with your orders, and you can rest assured that I will not.” Once Grant offended Stanton by withdrawing too many men from the fortifications of Washington, and both men took their cases to the White House. After hearing them out, Lincoln told his Secretary of War: “You and I, Mr. Stanton, have been trying to boss this job, and we have not succeeded very well with it. We have sent across the mountains for Mr. Grant, as Mrs. Grant calls him, to relieve us, and I think we had better leave him alone to do as he pleases.”
In his first private interview with the general, the President assured him “that he had never professed to be a military man or to know how campaigns should be conducted, and never wanted to interfere in them.” In the past, “procrastination on the part of commanders, and the pressure from the people at the North and Congress, which was always with him,” had forced him to play a more active role. But “all he wanted or had ever wanted was some one who would take the responsibility and act, and call on him for all the assistance needed, pledging himself to use all the power of the government in rendering such assistance.” “The particulars of your plans I neither know, or seek to know,” he wrote Grant later. “You are vigilant and self-reliant; and, pleased with this, I wish not to obtrude any constraints or restraints upon you.”
It was a tribute to Lincoln’s skill in managing men that, even while giving the general these assurances of independence, he succeeded in reshaping Grant’s strategy—and that his tact and diplomacy permitted the general to think that he was conducting the war with a free hand. It was probably the President’s quiet influence that caused Grant to give up his plan, ardently urged on him by Sherman, to avoid the political atmosphere in Washington by having his headquarters in the West; instead, he set up his command near the Army of the Potomac, over which he exercised strategic control while Meade remained in tactical command. It was not Grant’s wish, but the President’s, that Halleck became chief of staff, a position in which he performed well, acting as intermediary be
tween the commander-in-chief, the Secretary of War, and the general-in-chief. For political reasons Lincoln picked officers for several subordinate commands who were not favored by Grant. For instance, Benjamin F. Butler, despite his well-known incompetence, remained at the head of the Army of the James because he had a powerful following among Radical Republicans, and Franz Sigel, who had minimal military skills but was a favorite of German-Americans, was chosen to head the Union forces in the Shenandoah Valley.
Much more important were the shifts that Lincoln, often with Halleck’s assistance, brought about in Grant’s strategic thinking. Grant was painfully aware that the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia for three long years had “fought more desperate battles than it probably ever before fell to the lot of two armies to fight, without materially changing the vantage ground of either.” He was convinced that success would never come through more such inconclusive engagements, and he proposed “an abandonment of all previously attempted lines to Richmond.” Instead he favored a series of massive raids against the Confederacy—not just by the cavalry, which was unable to inflict permanent damage, but by small armies of 60,000 men—designed to destroy the essential railway lines. One such raid, using Banks’s command at New Orleans, should move against Mobile and then proceed northward to cut the railroads in Alabama and Georgia. A second, under Sherman, should sweep through Georgia and destroy the main east-west transportation line of the Confederacy. A third, moving inland from Suffolk, Virginia, should demolish the rail lines between Weldon and Raleigh, North Carolina, on which Lee depended for supplies to his army. This, Grant concluded, “would virtually force an evacuation of Virginia and indirectly of East Tennessee.”
Under the influence of Lincoln and Halleck, Grant abandoned nearly all of this plan. The President would not consent to weakening the force between Lee’s army and the national capital; he feared that while Grant was involved in a raid through North Carolina, Lee would seize Washington and again invade the North. Apart from that, Lincoln had developed a contempt for what he scornfully called “strategy.” What he thought was needed was not more maneuvering but assault after assault on the Confederate army. For months that was what he had been urging on Meade, without much success; now he expected Grant to fight.
Without even being aware that he was abandoning his original strategy, Grant developed a new plan for simultaneous massive attacks on the Confederate heartland by all the Union armies. Banks was to advance toward Mobile, Sherman was to move toward Atlanta, Sigel was to cut the Confederate rail line in the Shenandoah, Butler was to advance up the James River against Petersburg and, ultimately, Richmond, while Meade pushed the Army of Northern Virginia back to the Confederate capital. The concerted movement was to begin on the fifth of May.
When Lincoln learned of Grant’s new plan, he was, as Hay recorded, “powerfully reminded” of his “old suggestion so constantly made and as constantly neglected, to Buell and Halleck, et al., to move at once upon the enemy’s whole line so as to bring into action to our advantage our great superiority in numbers.” But he pretended to be surprised when Grant told him about it and, Grant recalled, “seemed to think it a new feature in war.” When Grant explained how all the armies could contribute to victory simply by advancing even if they won no battles, the President remarked, in all apparent innocence: “Oh, yes! I see that. As we say out West, if a man can’t skin he must hold a leg while somebody else does.”
Even with this greatly revised strategy Grant did not succeed in having things his own way. His plan to use Banks’s force for a raid on Mobile and central Alabama had to be scratched. Before Grant became general-in-chief, the War Department, at the President’s urging, had dispatched Banks on a campaign up the Red River, designed in part to liberate more of Louisiana from Confederate rule—and incidentally to liberate 50,000 to 150,000 bales of cotton thought to be stored in central and western Louisiana. Equally important in the President’s mind was the lesson that Banks’s success would send to the French in Mexico, where the Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian of Austria on April 10 accepted the throne of a puppet government protected by the troops of Napoleon III. The Red River expedition was a total disaster. Its only result was to prevent Banks’s army of 40,000 men from helping in Grant’s campaign.
But the other parts of Grant’s plan fell into place. In the early hours of Wednesday, May 4, the Army of the Potomac moved across the Rapidan River to begin a new campaign against the Army of Northern Virginia. The next day Butler landed 30,000 troops on the south side of the James River, threatening Petersburg. On May 7, Sherman launched his campaign for the capture of Atlanta.
Lincoln watched the campaign with painful interest. For the first two days as Grant’s army plunged into the Wilderness, that trackless tangle of trees and undergrowth which had been the scene of Hooker’s defeat, he received no news because his general-in-chief had forbidden newspaper correspondents to use the telegraph. During this time the President haunted the War Department offices; an observer thought he was “waiting for despatches and, no doubt, sickening with anxiety.” Not until Friday morning did he receive even an indirect report from Grant: “Everything pushing along favorably.” At two o’clock the next morning he interviewed a correspondent from the New York Tribune, who had just left the army. Grant told him: “If you do see the President,... tell him that General Grant says there will be no turning back.” With that much reassurance Lincoln felt able to tell a Pennsylvania woman that he was “considerably cheered, just now, by favorable news” from the army, and in response to a serenade by a large crowd that assembled on the White House lawn he gave thanks to “the brave men,” their “noble commanders,” and “especially to our Maker” for victory.
Then the shattering real news began to come in. Grant had thrown his army of 100,000 men against Lee’s much smaller force in the Wilderness, attempting to flank it, and in two days of ferocious fighting had suffered more than 14,000 casualties. Unsuccessful in turning Lee’s army, Grant then moved east, only to encounter Lee again at Spotsylvania, where between May 10 and 19 more than 17,500 Union soldiers were killed or wounded. Over a period of two weeks the Army of the Potomac lost nearly 32,000 men, and thousands more were missing.
During these terrible days Lincoln tried to keep up a pretense of regular business, though his impatience and bitterness occasionally overcame him. Speaker Colfax found him pacing up and down his office, “his long arms behind his back, his dark features contracted still more with gloom,” as he exclaimed: “Why do we suffer reverses after reverses! Could we have avoided this terrible, bloody war!... Is it ever to end!” He hardly slept at all these nights. One morning Francis B. Carpenter, the young artist who was painting a picture he called First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln, caught sight of him in the hallway of the Executive Mansion, “clad in a long morning wrapper, pacing back and forth a narrow passage leading to one of the windows, his hands behind him, great black rings under his eyes, his head bent forward upon his breast—altogether... a picture of the effects of sorrow, care, and anxiety.”
Despite the hideous losses, the President did not despair, because Grant, unlike all the previous commanders of the Army of the Potomac, did not withdraw after his engagements with the enemy but continued to push against Lee’s army. Lincoln took great comfort from the message that Grant sent Stanton on the seventh day of the fighting: “I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.” “It is the dogged pertinacity of Grant that wins,” the President said hopefully to John Hay.
During the weeks after the unsuccessful assault at Spotsylvania, Lincoln continued strongly to support the general. There was no alternative to Grant. Except for Sherman, whose capacity for independent command had yet to be fully tested, and George H. Thomas, who was considered too slow, there were no other generals who could be put in charge. Besides, Grant was carrying out the President’s own favored plan of operations. Lincoln did his best to keep his spirits up, and he
was encouraged that Grant after each engagement went on to launch a new offensive. “The great thing about Grant,” Lincoln said during the battle of the Wilderness, “is his perfect coolness and persistency of purpose. . . . he is not easily excited ... and he has the grit of a bull-dog! Once let him get his ‘teeth’ in, and nothing can shake him off.”
III
With a general-in-chief who shared his determination to destroy the Confederate armies, Lincoln directed his own efforts to seeing that the Union forces were adequately supplied and constantly reinforced. Manpower was a constant problem. Many of the Union soldiers had enlisted for three-year terms, which would expire in 1864. Though Congress offered special inducements in the way of bounties and furloughs to those who would reenlist, at least 100,000 decided not to. When the casualties from the Wilderness campaign were added to this number, it was obvious that more recruits were needed. Since volunteering had virtually ceased, Lincoln on May 17 felt forced to draft an order for the conscription of 300,000 additional men.
The order was never issued because on May 18 the New York World and the Journal of Commerce published a proclamation, purportedly originating in the White House, in which Lincoln announced that, “with a heavy heart, but an undiminished confidence in our cause,” he was ordering an additional draft of 400,000 men. This depressing news caused a flurry of speculation on Wall Street, and the price of gold, as measured in greenbacks, rose 10 percent. That was the object of the authors of the bogus proclamation, Joseph Howard, an editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and Francis A. Mallison, a reporter for that paper, who managed a fairly skillful imitation of Lincoln’s style. Doubtless Howard, who had worked for the New York Times and the New York Tribune, heard rumors of an impending draft call, and he took advantage of inside information in the hope of making a fortune in the gold market.
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