“Yes,” replied the President, “I am profitably engaged.”
“Well,” commented the visitor, “if you have recovered from your skepticism, I am sorry to say that I have not.”
Looking his old comrade in the face, Lincoln said, “You are wrong, Speed, take all of this book upon reason that you can, and the balance on faith, and you will live and die a happier and better man.” He had come to feel, as he told a delegation of Baltimore African-Americans who presented him a magnificently bound Bible in appreciation of his work for the Negro, that “this Great Book... is the best gift God has given to man.”
Reading the Bible reinforced Lincoln’s long-held belief in the doctrine of necessity, a belief that admirably fitted the needs of his essentially passive personality. The idea that the actions of any individual were predetermined and shaped by the unknowable wishes of some Higher Power was not a new one for him, but with the burden of a never-ending war weighing ever more heavily on his shoulders, he reverted to it more and more frequently. In April he wrote a long letter to Albert G. Hodges, editor of the Frankfort (Kentucky) Commonwealth, explaining why he had felt compelled to shift from his inaugural pledge not to interfere with slavery to the policy of emancipation. It contained his most explicit view of individual responsibility: “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.” “Now,” he continued, “at the end of three years struggle the nation’s condition is not what either party, or any man devised, or expected. God alone can claim it.”
Again and again he reverted to the idea that behind all the struggles and losses of the war a Divine purpose was at work. Never did he express this view more eloquently than in a letter he wrote in September to Mrs. Eliza P. Gurney, who extended the sympathy and prayers of the Society of Friends: “The purposes of the Almighty are perfect, and must prevail, though we erring mortals may fail to accurately perceive them in advance. We hoped for a happy termination of this terrible war long before this; but God knows best, and has ruled otherwise. . . . we must work earnestly in the best light He gives us, trusting that so working still conduces to the great ends He ordains. Surely He intends some great good to follow this mighty convulsion, which no mortal could make, and no mortal could stay.” This comforting doctrine allowed the President to live with himself by shifting some of the responsibility for all the suffering.
VI
As Grant and Sherman grappled with the enemy, Lincoln did what he could to sustain the army and to boost civilian morale. On every possible occasion—even on such an unlikely one as the resumption of White House concerts by the Marine Band—he asked his listeners to give three cheers for “Grant and all the armies under his command.” Again and again, he expressed gratitude to the soldiers, to the officers, and especially to “that brave and loyal man,” the “modest General at the head of our armies.” After his renomination, when the Ohio delegation serenaded him with a brass band, he responded: “What we want, still more than Baltimore conventions or presidential elections, is success under Gen. Grant,” and he urged his hearers to bend all their energies to support “the brave officers and soldiers in the field.”
He continued to have great faith in Grant, but he was conscious of the swelling chorus of criticism of the general. Many doubted Grant’s strategic ability and pointed out that in shifting his base to the James River he was simply repeating what McClellan had done—with far fewer casualties. “Why did he not take his army south of the James at once, and thus save seventy-five thousand men?” asked Senator Grimes, who pronounced Grant’s campaign a failure. Even in the President’s own household there was distrust of the general. “He is a butcher,” Mary Lincoln often said, “and is not fit to be at the head of an army.”
The outcry against Grant made the President want to see for himself what was happening with the Army of the Potomac, and on June 20, accompanied by Tad, he made an unheralded visit to Grant’s headquarters at City Point. Looking, as Horace Porter, one of Grant’s aides, wrote, “very much like a boss undertaker” in his black suit, the President announced as he landed: “I just thought I would jump aboard a boat and come down and see you. I don’t expect I can do any good, and in fact I’m afraid I may do harm, but I’ll put myself under your orders and if you find me doing anything wrong just send me [off] right away.”
For the next two days he visited with Grant, Meade, Butler, and the troops. Much of the time he rode Grant’s large bay horse, Cincinnati. Though he managed the horse well, he was, as Porter remembered, “not a very dashing rider,” and as his trousers gradually worked up above his ankles, he gave “the appearance of a country farmer riding into town wearing his Sunday clothes.” As news of the President’s arrival reached the troops, they gave cheers and enthusiastic shouts. When he rode out to see the African-American troops of the Eighteenth Corps, the soldiers “cheered, laughed, cried, sang hymns of praise, and shouted ... ‘God bless Master Lincoln!’ ‘The Lord save Father Abraham!’ ‘The day of jubilee is come, sure.’” Telling frequent anecdotes and showing interest in every detail of army life, the President appeared to have no object in his visit, but his purpose emerged when there was talk of anticipated military maneuvers. Quietly he interposed, “I cannot pretend to advise, but I do sincerely hope that all may be accomplished with as little bloodshed as possible.”
Tired and sunburned, Lincoln returned to the White House on June 23, and Gideon Welles remarked that the trip had “done him good, physically, and strengthened him mentally.” He took satisfaction in repeating what Grant had told him: “You will never hear of me farther from Richmond than now, till I have taken it. … It may take a long summer day, but I will go in.” But Attorney General Bates found the President “perceptably [sic], disappointed at the small measure of our success, in that region.” More than ever Lincoln realized that the war would be long and costly.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I Am Pretty Sure-Footed
In early July 1864 a visitor found Lincoln deeply depressed, “indeed quite paralyzed and wilted down.” He had reason to feel blue. War weariness was spreading, and demands for negotiations to end the killing were becoming strident. In the Middle West the Copperhead movement was strong, and there were rumors of an insurrection intended to bring about an independent Northwest Confederation. The Democrats were organizing for their national convention to be held in Chicago at the end of August, and they were likely to adopt a peace platform. The Republicans were badly divided, and Lincoln was whipsawed between those who thought he was too lenient toward the South and those who thought him too severe. Worst of all, the Union armies appeared stalemated. Sherman, at the head of the Western armies, was approaching Atlanta but was not, apparently, nearer victory over Joseph E. Johnston. In the East, the Army of the Potomac was bogged down in a siege of Petersburg.
I
To make matters worse, Washington itself was once more threatened. In an attempt to relieve Grant’s pressure on Richmond, Jubal A. Early, heading the Second Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia, marched down the Shenandoah Valley almost without opposition and on July 5 crossed the Potomac. His force was small—only about 15,000 men—but as it spread out over the Maryland countryside, it was strong enough to levy tribute from Hagerstown and Frederick before turning east toward Washington. On July 9 at the Monocacy River the invaders pushed aside the ill-assorted Union defending force of green hundred-day volunteers commanded by General Lew Wallace and moved close to the national capital.
It seemed that nobody was in charge of the defenses of Washington—or perhaps everybody was. Off in Virginia, Grant doubted that the Confederates were making any significant northward movement and was reluctant to divert troops from the siege of Petersburg. Stanton questioned the seriousness of Early’s raid. Halleck did what he could by giving rifles to the clerks in the government offices and arming the ambulatory soldiers in the hospitals, but it was far from clear that this makeshift force could hold off the Confederate invaders.
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nbsp; Alarmed, General Ethan Allen Hitchcock tried to alert the President that the capital was in great danger, but Lincoln wearily replied, “We are doing all we can.” Early’s army might not be strong enough to hold Washington, Hitchcock warned, but if they occupied it for only a few days the nation would be dishonored and the Confederacy would be recognized abroad. He insisted that Grant ought to be directed to send reinforcements. Seeming “almost crushed” and speaking very faintly, Lincoln responded that he would confer with the Secretary of War.
Unlike many in the capital, the President was not worried about his own safety. He only reluctantly obeyed Stanton’s directive to move back into the city from the exposed Soldiers’ Home where he, Mary, and Tad were spending the summer, and he was furious when he learned that Gustavus V. Fox had ordered a naval vessel to be ready in the Potomac in case the Lincolns needed to escape.
As during previous invasions of the North, he was less concerned about the security of Washington than with the capture of the Confederate force, but he was hamstrung by his pledge not to interfere with Grant’s operations. Knowing how severely he had been criticized for meddling with military matters, especially in the case of McClellan, he was reluctant now to give direct orders to his general-in-chief. All he felt he could do was to keep a close watch over Early’s progress and try to prevent panic in Washington and Baltimore. But when Grant grandly announced that there were already enough forces in the area to defeat the invaders and offered to come to the capital himself only if the President thought it necessary, Lincoln responded on July 10 that he should leave enough men to retain his hold on Petersburg and “bring the rest [of your army] with you personally, and make a vigorous effort to destroy the enemie’s force in this vicinity.” But the President ended his telegram: “This is what I think, upon your suggestion, and is not an order.”
Still not understanding the seriousness of the threat, Grant chose to remain where he was, dispatching some veteran troops of the Sixth Corps, under General Horatio G. Wright, to assist in the defense of Washington. On July 11, before they could arrive, Early’s men had already pushed down the Seventh Street Pike, marched through Silver Spring, where Francis Preston Blair, Sr., and Postmaster General Montgomery Blair both had houses, and approached the sturdy but feebly manned defenses of Fort Stevens. The Confederates drove in the Union pickets and came within 150 yards of the fort before artillery fire forced them back.
Lincoln was in the fort when it was first attacked. Having driven out from Washington in his carriage, he mounted to the front parapet. He borrowed a field glass from signal officer Asa Townsend Abbott and looked out over the field where the Confederates were advancing. “He stood there with a long frock coat and plug hat on, making a very conspicuous figure,” Abbott recalled. When the Confederates came within shooting distance, an officer twice cautioned Lincoln to get down, but he paid no attention. Then a man standing near him was shot in the leg, and a soldier roughly ordered the President to get down or he would have his head knocked off. He coolly descended, got into his carriage, and was driven back to the city, where he went to the wharf to greet troops of the Sixth Corps, “chatting familiarly with the veterans, and now and then, as if in compliment to them, biting at a piece of hard tack which he held in his hand.”
The next day Early made one last effort to capture the capital. Once again the heaviest fighting was at Fort Stevens, and President and Mrs. Lincoln, along with many other prominent public officials and their wives, came out to witness the fighting. Thoughtlessly Wright invited the President to mount the parapet in order to get a clear view as Union soldiers charged the enemy line, and the general recorded that Lincoln “evinced remarkable coolness and disregard of danger.” After a surgeon standing near him was shot, Wright ordered the parapet cleared and asked the President to step down. Lincoln insisted on remaining until the general said he would have him removed forcibly. “The absurdity of the idea of sending off the President under guard seemed to amuse him,” Wright recalled, “but, in consideration of my earnestness in the matter, he agreed to compromise by sitting behind the parapet instead of standing upon it.”
After the failure of his final assault, Early retreated from Washington. Wright made a halfhearted attempt to follow the Confederates, but he soon halted, as Lincoln said scornfully, “for fear he might come across the rebels and catch some of them.” Browning found the President “in the dumps,” lamenting “that the rebels who had besieged us were all escaped.” Though half a dozen generals—Wright, Hunter, Sigel, Wallace, and others—were involved, nobody was in charge of pursuing the enemy. As Assistant Secretary of War Charles A. Dana wrote Grant: “There is no head to the whole and it seems indispensable that you should at once appoint one Gen Halleck will not give orders except as he receives them—The President will give none, and until you direct positively and explicitly what is to be done everything will go on in the deplorable and fatal way in which it has gone on for the past week.”
Lincoln’s patience, even with Grant, began to wear thin. Early continued to stage raids from the Shenandoah, and on July 30 his men rode into Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, demanded a ransom of $500,000 in currency or $100,000 in gold, and, when the townsmen were unable to pay it, burned the town. Northern newspapers decried the humiliation of the raids, which showed “there is folly or incompetence somewhere in our military administration,” but Grant, still entrenched before Petersburg, seemed little concerned. Not even a personal visit from the President, who summoned him to Fort Monroe on July 31, stirred the general from the lethargy into which he had unaccountably lapsed. On hearing of Early’s continuing activities, he telegraphed that all the Union forces in the Shenandoah Valley command should put themselves south of the enemy and follow him to the death. Lincoln replied that his strategy was just right, but he added tartly: “Please look over the despatches you may have rece[i]ved from here... and discover, if you can, that there is any idea in the head of any one here, of ‘putting our army South of the enemy’ or of [’]following him to the death’ in any direction.” “I repeat to you,” the President insisted, “it will neither be done nor attempted unless you watch it every day, and hour, and force it.” Called to heel, Grant immediately started for Washington, and after consultation with the President named the brilliant young cavalry officer Philip Sheridan to command all the Union forces operating in the Valley.
II
It was not only Grant who tried Lincoln’s patience during these unusually hot, depressing summer months of 1864. Usually he was ready to spend countless hours listening to visitors who brought him their complaints and petitions, sometimes over quite trivial matters, but now he had had enough. When two citizens of Maine asked him to intervene to settle a personal problem, the President sharply responded: “You want me to end your suspense? I’ll do so. Dont let me hear another word about your case.” A few days later his anger erupted again when Charles Gibson resigned as solicitor in the Court of Claims, protesting the radicalism of the Republican platform but expressing gratitude to the President for treating him with “personal kindness and consideration.” With what Bates called “blind impetuosity” Lincoln lashed back that there were “two small draw-backs upon Mr. Gibson’s right to still receive such treatment, one of which is that he never could learn of his giving much attention to the duties of his office, and the other is this studied attempt of Mr. Gibson’s to stab him.”
In calmer times Lincoln would have ignored a semiliterate communication from a Pennsylvania man who urged him to remember that “white men is in class number one and black men is in class number two and must be governed by white men forever.” But now, in his irascible mood, he drafted a reply to be sent out over Nicolay’s signature requesting the writer to inform him “whether you are either a white man or black one, because in either case, you can not be regarded as an entirely impartial judge.” “It may be,” the President continued, in an unusual tone of sarcasm, “that you belong to a third or fourth class of yellow or red men, in whic
h case the impartiality of your judgment would be more apparant.”
Lincoln’s sharp temper extended at times even to his closest advisers. Montgomery Blair, furious because Early’s men had burned his house in Silver Spring, denounced the “poltroons and cowards” responsible for the defenses of Washington. Halleck, always defensive of professional military men, demanded that the President either endorse “such wholesale denouncement and accusation” or dismiss Blair. Lincoln replied that he did not approve the Postmaster General’s remarks but that his words, which “may have been hastily said in a moment of vexation at so severe a loss,” were not sufficient grounds for removing him. “I propose continuing to be myself the judge as to when a member of the Cabinet shall be dismissed,” he said sternly, and he took the unusual step of reading to the entire cabinet a carefully prepared memorandum: “I must myself be the judge, how long to retain in, and when to remove any of you from, his position. It would greatly pain me to discover any of you endeavoring to procure anothers removal, or, in any way to prejudice him before the public. Such endeavor would be a wrong to me; and much worse, a wrong to the country.”
On the more important issue of possible peace negotiations with the Confederates, the President was obliged to control his anger. Indeed, he gained a certain sardonic pleasure from his skillful handling of the question. The prime mover was the erratic and excitable editor of the New York Tribune. Just as Early’s men were approaching the capital, Greeley wrote Lincoln that his “irrepressible friend” William C. (“Colorado”) Jewett was certain that representatives of the Confederate government were on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls with full authority to negotiate a peace. Greeley urged the President to explore the possibility, because the country was in such desperate shape. A full and generous announcement of Union conditions for ending the war, even if they were not accepted, would remove the “wide-spread conviction that the Government and its prominent supporters are not anxious for Peace” and help the Republican cause in the fall elections.
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