Tried by War

by James M. McPherson

  The next day Lincoln was inaugurated for his second term. His inaugural address was the shortest and most eloquent in American history. It offered a meditation on God’s purpose in bringing this terrible war upon America. Perhaps, Lincoln suggested, it was a punishment for the sin of slavery. “Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away,” said Lincoln. “Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled up by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.’”76

  Mercifully it did not take that long. A month later came the fall of Richmond, and a week after that came Appomattox. Perhaps appropriately the commander in chief was with the Army of the Potomac when it achieved the decisive breakthrough. Grant had invited the careworn president to get away from the stresses of Washington for a few days for a visit to the army. Lincoln took him up on it and arrived at Grant’s headquarters on March 24. He wound up staying two weeks, visiting the troops every day in camp and hospital. He once grabbed an ax to help them cut timber, and earned the raucous cheers of the men. On his second day with the army the president witnessed the aftermath of Lee’s desperate attempt to break through Grant’s constricting hold by a surprise attack on Fort Stedman, which failed at the cost of almost five thousand Confederate casualties. Grant seized this opportunity on April 1 to launch a flank attack on the Confederate right at Five Forks. The assault succeeded, and Grant followed it with an attack all along the Petersburg lines on April 2, which forced Lee to evacuate both Petersburg and Richmond that night.

  When the news of Richmond’s fall reached the North, wild celebrations broke out. Lincoln felt the same way, but his response was more restrained. He met with Grant in Petersburg on April 3 and discussed the pursuit of Lee, which would bring him to bay at Appomattox six days later. Meanwhile Lincoln returned to Adm. David D. Porter’s flagship USS Malvern, anchored in the James River, and told Porter: “Thank God I have lived to see this! It seems to me that I have been dreaming a horrid dream for four years, and now the nightmare is gone. I want to see Richmond.”77

  Porter was dubious about taking the president to the still-burning enemy capital two days after it fell. But Lincoln insisted, so they went. With an escort of just ten sailors, he walked the streets while thousands of freed slaves crowded to see the Moses they believed had led them to freedom. “I know that I am free,” shouted one woman, “for I have seen father Abraham and felt him.” To one black man who fell on his knees before him, an embarrassed Lincoln said: “Don’t kneel to me. That is not right. You must kneel to God only and thank him for the liberty you will hereafter enjoy.” The president was profoundly moved by these encounters. But he may have experienced the most satisfaction from sitting in Jefferson Davis’s chair in the Confederate White House only two days after Davis had vacated it.78

  While in Richmond, Lincoln met with John A. Campbell, one of the Confederate commissioners at the Hampton Roads “peace conference” two months earlier. Campbell now acknowledged that the war was lost. He suggested that the general commanding the Union forces occupying Richmond allow the Virginia legislature to meet to repeal the ordinance of secession and withdraw all Virginia soldiers from Confederate armies. Such an action, said Campbell, would set off a chain reaction in other Confederate states and bring the war to an end without any more battles. Lincoln liked the idea and ordered Gen. Godfrey Weitzel to permit “the gentlemen who have acted as the Legislature of Virginia” to meet for this purpose.79

  Lincoln made a rare political mistake here. He should have anticipated that Campbell might proceed in a manner that treated the Confederate Virginia legislature as a legitimate governing body (instead of as “the gentlemen who have acted as the Legislature,” in Lincoln’s words). When Lincoln learned that this was precisely what Campbell had done, he angrily repudiated that action on April 12. By then Lee’s surrender at Appomattox had made the whole matter moot, since almost all Virginia soldiers were in the Army of Northern Virginia.80

  Back in Washington on April 11, the president delivered a speech from a White House balcony to a crowd of serenaders celebrating Lee’s surrender. Looking forward to the problem of bringing the defeated Confederate states back into the Union, he said that the victorious army would have to stay in the South for an indefinite period to oversee this process and to suppress “disorganized and discordant elements.” In most of the South “there is no authorized organ for us to deal with”—thereby disposing of Confederate state legislatures and the fugitive Confederate government fleeing southward. “We must simply begin with, and mould from” those disorganized and discordant elements. Lincoln had already begun this process in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee, where he hoped that his newly “moulded” state governments would soon grant the right to vote to literate African Americans and black Union army veterans. In those states as well as in the others, Lincoln’s war powers as commander in chief would remain as important for winning the peace as they had been for winning the war. Concluding his speech, the president promised a “new announcement to the people of the South.”81

  One of the listeners in the crowd turned to his companion. “That means nigger citizenship,” snapped John Wilkes Booth. “Now, by God, I’ll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever make.”82

  EPILOGUE

  BOOTH CARRIED out his ugly threat three days later. A native of Maryland who supported the Confederacy, he hated the Union commander in chief for his success in winning the war and abolishing slavery. Granting equal rights to freed slaves would add insult to injury. So Booth “put him through.” If Lincoln had been a failure, he would have lived a longer life.

  Failure had often seemed imminent. Several times during the war Union prospects were dark. Three times in particular stand out. After the Confederate victory at Second Manassas in August 1862, demoralization in the Eastern Union armies and among the Northern people reached dire levels. Lincoln made the difficult decision—opposed by his cabinet and by principal congressional leaders—to give McClellan command of the reconstituted Army of the Potomac. Victory at Antietam followed, though Lincoln was grievously disappointed with McClellan’s failure to follow it up and “destroy the rebel army.”

  Again in the spring of 1863 the North seemed on the verge of defeat as Grant’s army apparently floundered in the swamps near Vicksburg and Lee’s army headed north after its spectacular victory at Chancellorsville. Lincoln once more made difficult decisions—to keep Grant in command and to replace Joe Hooker with George Gordon Meade. The capture of Vicksburg and victory at Gettysburg followed—but Lee got back to Virginia without further major damage, to Lincoln’s distress.

  A year later, in the summer of 1864, Union prospects seemed to sink almost out of sight. Lincoln resisted enormous pressure to seek a compromise peace and to back away from emancipation. He stayed the course despite universal expectations that it would cost his reelection. The capture of Atlanta, victories in the Shenandoah Valley, and reelection followed. So did Appomattox and assassination.

  Lincoln’s on-the-job training as commander in chief went through some rough patches. He made mistakes—but he also learned from those mistakes. He deferred too long to McClellan’s supposedly superior professional qualifications. Perhaps he should have overruled that general’s preference for the Peninsula strategy. He gave command responsibilities beyond their capacities to such political generals as Frémont, McClernand, Banks, and Butler.

  In retrospect it appears that he also made several wrong appointments to command the Army of the Potomac. Yet in each case the general he named seemed to be the best man for the job when he was appointed. McClellan was everyone’s choice when he took command in July 1861. Burnside had achieved success with an independent command in North Carolina and seeme
d the logical choice in December 1862. Hooker was a controversial choice, but he did everything right in his first three months of command and appeared to have vindicated Lincoln’s decision until he stumbled at Chancellorsville. Meade was a consensus choice, and despite Lincoln’s disappointment with him after Gettysburg he remained commander of the Army of the Potomac through its final triumph.

  Likewise the choices of McClellan and then Halleck as general-in-chief looked like the right appointments at the right time. No one was more disappointed with their shortcomings than the president himself. Their failures put a greater burden on Lincoln to function as his own general-in-chief during much of the war, until he did make the right choice at the right time when he named Grant to this position in March 1864. The visibility of commanding generals who turned out to be disappointments—which would also include Buell and Rosecrans—should not distract us from Lincoln’s key role in placing Grant, Sheridan, Thomas, and (indirectly through his support of Grant) Sherman in top commands and keeping them there until they won the war.

  In all five functions as commander in chief—policy, national strategy, military strategy, operations, and tactics—Lincoln’s conception and performance were dynamic rather than static. He oversaw the evolution of the war from one of limited ends with limited means to a full-scale effort that destroyed the old Union and built a new and better one on its ashes. His initial policy was restoration of the Union—the Union of 1860, with slavery in fifteen of the thirty-three states. By 1864, if not earlier, the abolition of slavery was added to preservation of the Union. This revolutionary policy stemmed in part from the evolution of national strategy from conciliation of the border states and supposed Southern Unionists into an all-out effort to destroy Confederate resources including slavery and to mobilize those resources for the Union—including black soldiers who had been slaves. By July 1862 Lincoln had decided that he would no longer wage this war with elder-stalk squirts charged with rose water.

  “We want the Army to strike more vigorous blows,” Lincoln told cabinet members also in July 1862. “The Administration must set an example, and strike at the heart of the rebellion.” In other words the destruction of slavery as both a national strategy and as policy must be matched by a military strategy of destroying enemy armies. The initial limited military strategy of suppressing rebellious elements in the South evolved by 1862 into one of capturing large expanses of Confederate territory. Union forces did capture a great deal of territory in the first half of 1862, but Confederate armies bounced back stronger than ever. Lincoln understood better than perhaps anyone else that those armies must be destroyed or crippled if the war was to be won. “Destroy the rebel army,” he urged McClellan in September 1862. “Lee’s Army, and not Richmond, is your true objective point,” he told Hooker in June 1863. If Meade could accomplish “the literal or substantial destruction of Lee’s army” after Gettysburg, said Lincoln on July 7, 1863, “the rebellion [would] be over.”

  None of these generals carried out Lincoln’s mandate. The generals who won the war did so by capturing or destroying whole armies: Grant at Vicksburg; Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley; Thomas at Nashville; and Grant at Appomattox. They accomplished this by aggressive operations and tactics of the sort that Lincoln had urged in vain on other generals. In two cases—Sheridan in the valley and Thomas at Nashville—victory was achieved by counteroffensives against Confederate raids or invasions. On five other occasions Lincoln also saw Confederate offensives not primarily as threats but rather as opportunities to trap and destroy the invaders far from home: Jackson’s Shenandoah Valley campaign in the spring of 1862; Lee’s invasion of Maryland in September 1862; Bragg’s and Kirby Smith’s simultaneous invasion of Kentucky; Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania in June 1863; and Jubal Early’s raid to the suburbs of Washington in July 1864. Each time his generals failed him, and in most cases they soon found themselves relieved of command: John C. Frémont and James Shields after failing to intercept Jackson; McClellan after letting Lee get away; Buell after Bragg and Kirby Smith got safely back to Tennessee; and David Hunter after Early’s raid. Meade retained his command despite Lincoln’s disappointment but played second fiddle to Grant in the war’s last year.

  Another hallmark of Lincoln’s conception of military strategy and operations remained unfulfilled until he had the team of Grant, Sherman, Thomas, and Sheridan in place by 1864: concentration in time by simultaneous advances of two or more Union armies on exterior lines to counter the Confederate advantage of concentration in space by the use of interior lines. Lincoln had succinctly outlined this strategy in letters to Halleck and Buell in January 1862. Union forces fitfully carried out such a strategy in uncoordinated fashion in 1862 and 1863. But in this as well as in other respects, it was the team of Grant and Sherman who put it into the most effective practice in 1864. Even then, however, the political and ethnic generals whom Lincoln had appointed as part of his national strategy—Banks, Butler, and Sigel—fumbled away their parts of Grant’s strategy of coordinated offensives in 1864.

  Lincoln maintained that “as commander-in-chief of the army and navy, in time of war…I have a right to take any measure which may best subdue the enemy.” This right exceeded any powers of Congress. “I conceive that I may in an emergency do things on military grounds that cannot be done constitutionally by Congress.”1 Lincoln cited these sweeping powers to justify the Emancipation Proclamation. On other occasions he made similar statements in defense of his suspension of habeas corpus and authorization of military tribunals to try civilians.

  These actions were contentious at the time; the suspension of habeas corpus and the creation of military courts, if not the Emancipation Proclamation, remain controversial among historians today. Lincoln’s use of these war powers established precedents invoked by subsequent presidents in wartime. Whether they were constitutional or necessary in the 1860s or in later wars remains a matter of dispute. In the Milligan case of 1866 the U.S. Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the trial of civilians by military courts in areas where the civil courts are open.2 And some of the Lincoln administration’s actions, such as the arrest of Maryland legislators and other officials in September 1861, seemed excessive and unjustified by any reasonable military necessity.

  Whether these violations of civil liberties constitute a negative legacy that offsets the positive legacy of the Union and emancipation is a question everyone must decide for himself or herself. The crisis of the 1860s represented a far greater threat to the survival of the United States than did World War I, World War II, Communism in the 1950s, or terrorism today. Yet compared with the draconian enforcement of espionage and sedition laws in World War I, the internment of more than one hundred thousand Japanese Americans in the 1940s, McCarthyism in the 1950s, or the National Security State of our own time, the infringement of civil liberties from 1861 to 1865 seems mild indeed. And the problem of Reconstruction after the Civil War was not that the federal government exercised too much power but that it did not exercise enough.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ALMOST FIFTY years ago I turned in my first research paper as a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University. The topic of this paper was Lincoln’s secretary of war Edwin M. Stanton, and my principal sources were the Stanton and Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress. In the five decades since that introduction to the rewards as well as the eye-numbing fatigue of research in primary sources, I have spent countless hours in scores of libraries and archives from Maine to California and from Minnesota to Louisiana. The subjects of my research in these repositories ranged from Northern abolitionists to Confederate soldiers. Either directly or indirectly most of that research contributed to my knowledge and understanding of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, and therefore also contributed to the findings and insights in this book. The librarians and curators at these repositories who helped me are far too numerous to name, as are the institutions themselves. But in addition to the Library of Congress and the Firestone Library at my h
ome base of Princeton University, I must single out the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, and the Illinois State Historical Library (now the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library) in Springfield for special mention.

  I have spent three sabbatical years at the Huntington Library, whose collections as well as my lunchtime conversations with other historians and the Q&A sessions after lectures I delivered there have enriched my knowledge of Lincoln. Dialogue with students during thousands of hours in the classroom in forty-two years of teaching at Princeton and with people of widely varied backgrounds at hundreds of public lectures I have delivered in many venues over the years has also honed my understanding of the issues discussed in this book. To all of them I owe thanks for the contributions they have made, sometimes unwittingly, to my knowledge.

  The large community of Lincoln and Civil War scholars has also enriched my understanding. No single mortal could read all of the books and articles produced by these scholars, but I have read as many as possible and have learned from all of them. These historians and biographers are too numerous to name, but I am particularly indebted to one of them, Michael Burlingame, whose editions of the writings of Lincoln’s secretaries John G. Nicolay and John Hay have been invaluable, and whose encyclopedic knowledge of Lincoln and willingness to share that knowledge have been of great help. Careful readings of drafts of Tried by War by historians Craig L. Symonds and Ronald C. White, and by Eamon Dolan of The Penguin Press, saved me from embarrassing errors and yielded fruitful suggestions for revisions.