Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief

by James M. McPherson

  These were difficult days for the commander in chief. A translator in the State Department who often saw Lincoln wrote that “he looks exhausted, care-worn, spiritless, extinct.” Gen. Ethan Allen Hitchcock, still serving as an aide to Stanton, wrote in his diary on May 24 that the secretary of war “complained to me this morning that the President would not listen to his advice or that of Halleck…. This is a bad state of things.” Lincoln “has given orders to Hooker as his only senior, passing by Halleck as if he were not there. Hooker’s army is not equal to the duties expected of it, and Lee may move—possibly into Pennsylvania.”40

  Lee was indeed planning to move into Pennsylvania. He began to do so in the second week of June. For the third time in thirteen months, Lincoln saw a Confederate offensive as an opportunity rather than a threat. As he had done during Jackson’s Shenandoah Valley campaign in May 1862 and during Lee’s invasion of Maryland the previous September, the president urged his army commander to attack or trap the enemy far from his home base. But as the Army of Northern Virginia began to march up the south bank of the Rappahannock toward the Shenandoah Valley, Hooker proposed to attack the corps Lee had left as a rear guard in the trenches near Fredericksburg. Both Lincoln and Halleck (whom the president brought into communication with Hooker) disapproved. Halleck wanted Hooker to “fight [the enemy’s] movable column first, instead of attacking his intrenchments, with your own forces separated by the Rappahannock.” Lincoln put it more colorfully, using a typically pointed simile. When “you find Lee coming to the North of the Rappahannock, I would by no means cross to the South of it,” advised the president. “I would not take the 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 another.”41

  Five days later, when it became clear that Lee’s whole army was leaving Fredericksburg, Hooker requested Lincoln’s permission to move quickly fifty miles south to attack the lightly defended Richmond defenses. “To march to Richmond at once,” he said, would be “the most speedy and certain mode of giving the rebellion a mortal blow.” Lincoln must have shaken his head in frustration when he read this telegram. He immediately wired Hooker: “Lee’s Army, and not Richmond, is your true objective point. If he comes toward the Upper Potomac, follow on his flank, and on the inside track, shortening your lines, whilst he lengthens his. Fight him when opportunity offers.” By June 14 Union intelligence had learned that the Army of Northern Virginia was strung out almost sixty miles from Winchester back to Chancellorsville. “The animal must be very slim somewhere,” the president telegraphed Hooker. “Could you not break him?”42

  On June 15 Gen. Richard Ewell’s corps captured most of the Union garrison at Winchester and his advance units began crossing the Potomac into Maryland and Pennsylvania. “The enemy’s long and necessarily slim line,” Lincoln wired Hooker, “gives you back the chance I thought McClellan lost last fall” to defeat the Army of Northern Virginia in detail. Lincoln also instructed Hooker and Halleck to cooperate with each other to exploit this “best opportunity we have had since the war began.”43

  The president was fast losing faith in Hooker, however. The general continued to bicker with Halleck, complained that the enemy outnumbered him, and pleaded for reinforcements. After speaking with Lincoln on June 26, Gideon Welles wrote in his diary that the president “betrayed doubts of Hooker, to whom he is quite partial.” “We cannot help beating them if we have the man,” said Lincoln, but he feared that “Hooker may commit the same fault as McClellan and lose his chance.” The next day Hooker forced a confrontation with Halleck over a request that the Harpers Ferry garrison be added to his army. Halleck refused; Hooker offered his resignation; and probably to his surprise, Lincoln accepted it. The president told the cabinet on June 28, according to Welles, that he had “observed in Hooker the same failings that were observed in McClellan after the battle of Antietam—a want of alacrity to obey, and a greedy call for more troops which could not, and ought not to be taken from other points.”44

  Lincoln appointed Meade to succeed Hooker. He was the obvious choice, having been supported for the position by most of the corps commanders since Chancellorsville. When the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac clashed at Gettysburg on July 1, Meade was in his fourth day of command. He directed a skillful defense against repeated Confederate attacks and inflicted a punishing defeat on Lee’s army, which lost at least one-third of its numbers (the Army of the Potomac lost one-fourth).

  When the news of Gettysburg reached Washington and the North on the Fourth of July, celebrations took place and newspapers blazoned forth with such headlines as VICTORY! WATERLOO ECLIPSED! One resident of Washington wrote: “I never knew such excitement.” The New York diarist George Templeton Strong rejoiced that “the results of this victory are priceless…. The charm of Robert Lee’s invincibility is broken. The Army of the Potomac has at last found a general that can handle it, and has stood nobly up to its terrible work in spite of its long disheartening list of hard-fought failures…. Copperheads are palsied and dumb for the moment at least…. Government is strengthened at home and abroad.”45

  Lincoln stood at a White House balcony on this “glorious Fourth” and told a crowd of serenaders that the “gigantic Rebellion” whose purpose was to overthrow the principle that “all men are created equal” had been dealt a severe blow. But the commander in chief wanted more; he wanted Meade to give it a death blow. As the Army of Northern Virginia began its retreat on July 4, a drenching rain began to fall and continued much of the time for the next ten days. Union cavalry destroyed the Confederate pontoon bridge over the Potomac near Williamsport, Maryland, and the rising waters made the ford there impassable. Lee’s crippled army was trapped north of the river for more than a week. Here was the best chance yet to end the war, Lincoln believed. He agreed with his friend Benjamin French, commissioner of public buildings in Washington, that “if our army does all its duty Lee’s army will scarcely ever see old Virginia soil again as an army.”46

  On July 4 at Gettysburg, Meade issued a congratulatory order to the army, and added: “Our task is not yet accomplished, and the commanding general looks to the army for greater efforts to drive from our soil every vestige of the presence of the invader.”47 When Lincoln read these words he burst out: “Drive the invaders from our soil! Great God! Is that all?” To John Hay the president exploded: “This is a dreadful reminiscence of McClellan,” who had proclaimed a great victory when the enemy retreated to Virginia after Antietam. “Will our Generals never get that idea out of their heads? The whole country is our soil.”48

  More temperately the president told Halleck that he was a “good deal dissatisfied” with Meade’s order. Along with other evidence of a lackluster pursuit of the retreating rebels, it seemed to show only a desire “to get the enemy across the river again without a further collision” instead of “a purpose to prevent his crossing and to destroy him.” Halleck fired off telegrams urging Meade to “push forward and fight Lee before he can cross the Potomac…. You have given the enemy a stunning blow at Gettysburg, follow it up and give him another before he can cross the Potomac…. The President is urgent and anxious that your army should move against him by forced marches.”49

  In the midst of this flurry of telegrams came one from Cairo, Illinois, carried there by a fast dispatch boat from Vicksburg. Sent by Acting Rear Admiral Porter to Gideon Welles, it announced the surrender of Vicksburg and its thirty thousand defenders on July 4. Lincoln was ecstatic. He put his arm around the bewigged navy secretary, whom he called Father Neptune, and exclaimed “my joy at this result. It is great, Mr. Welles, it is great!” The president headed for the telegraph office. “I will myself telegraph this news to General Meade…. It will inspire [him].” Instead Lincoln sent a note to Halleck, who wired it verbatim to Meade: “Vicksburg surrendered to General Grant on July 4. Now, if General Meade can complete his work, so gloriously begun so far,
by the literal or substantial destruction of Lee’s army, the rebellion will be over.”50

  From Meade came promises to try, but also reports of supply difficulties, roads of bottomless mud, the exhaustion of his men, and a strong defensive perimeter at Williamsport established by Lee while his engineers worked feverishly to rebuild a pontoon bridge. Lincoln had heard it all before, and he must have sighed with exasperation. On July 11, however, John Hay reported the president to be in “a specially good humor today” because Meade had telegraphed “his intention of attacking them in the morning.” Lincoln had been out of sorts with the general “but concluded today that Meade would yet show sufficient activity to inflict the Coup de grace upon the flying rebels.”51

  No attack occurred July 12. Instead came another telegram from Meade stating that he would attack the next morning “unless something intervenes.” When Lincoln read this dispatch, his shoulders sagged and he remarked: “They will be ready to fight a magnificent battle when there is no enemy there to fight.” The president was right: “Something” intervened. Meade called his seven senior generals into a council of war. A majority voted to postpone the attack and instead to reconnoiter the enemy’s line for a possible weak spot. After talking with Lincoln, Halleck sent Meade an exhortative telegram: “Act upon your own judgment and make your generals execute your orders. Call no council of war. It is proverbial that councils of war never fight.”52

  The next morning—three hours after dawn—the Army of the Potomac’s infantry lurched forward. As Lincoln had predicted, they found no enemy to fight. The Army of Northern Virginia had crossed on the rebuilt pontoon bridge and at a ford (the river had dropped just enough). Union cavalry captured about a thousand men of the rear guard; if the infantry had advanced earlier they might have captured more.

  When the news of Lee’s escape reached Washington, Lincoln was bitter. “That, my God, is the last of this Army of the Potomac,” he exclaimed to Welles. “There is bad faith somewhere.” Only one corps commander had voted for an attack on the thirteenth, when it might have succeeded. “What does it mean, Mr. Welles? Great God! What does it mean?” Only once or twice before, wrote Welles, “have I ever seen the President so troubled, so dejected and discouraged.” Salmon P. Chase confirmed this observation: “He was more grieved and indignant than I have ever seen him.” Lincoln told his son Robert that “if I had gone there I could have whipped them myself.”53

  Halleck conveyed Lincoln’s mood in a telegram to Meade: “The escape of Lee’s army without another battle has created great dissatisfaction in the mind of the President, and it will require an active and energetic pursuit on your part to remove the impression that it has not been sufficiently active heretofore.” Famous for his short-fused temper, Meade fired back a telegram angrily tendering his resignation. Halleck consulted Lincoln, who said that the resignation of the general who was being hailed as the hero of Gettysburg could of course not be accepted. Halleck so informed Meade in a dispatch that constituted a quasi apology.54

  Lincoln sat down to write a letter intended to mollify Meade. “I am very—very grateful to you for the magnificent success you gave the cause of the country at Gettysburg,” he wrote to the general, “and I am sorry now to be the author of the slightest pain to you.” But as his pen scratched over the paper, Lincoln’s words strayed far from those of congratulations and apology. “My dear general,” the president continued, “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 immeasurably because of it.”55

  As he blotted the ink and read over this letter, Lincoln realized that he could not send it unless he really did want to provoke Meade’s resignation. So he filed it away unsent. Within a couple of days the president had recovered his equanimity. The “other recent successes” he referred to in his letter to Meade did much to offset his disappointment: the capture of Port Hudson as well as Vicksburg, which opened the Mississippi and split the Confederacy in twain; and an impressive advance by Rosecrans’s Army of the Cumberland that promised success for Lincoln’s goal of finally liberating East Tennessee. On July 17 the president told his cabinet that Meade “has committed a terrible mistake, but we will try him further.” Four days later Lincoln wrote a letter to General Howard—which he did send, and which Howard probably showed to Meade. Lincoln acknowledged that he had perhaps been unreasonable to expect Lee’s army to have been destroyed. “I had always believed—making my belief a hobby possibly—that the main rebel army going North of the Potomac, could never return, if well attended to.” In any case, “a few days having passed, I am profoundly grateful for what was done, without criticism for what was not done. Gen. Meade has my confidence as a brave and skillful officer, and a true man.”56

  Nevertheless the president continued to believe that Meade should have attacked at Williamsport. Historians will continue to debate the pros and cons of that question. A Union assault might have succeeded—or it might not have. Failure might have neutralized the success at Gettysburg. But as Lincoln said on another occasion, to McClellan: “If we never try, we shall never succeed.” On the day before he wrote his unsent letter to Meade, the president sent a much different letter to a general who did try: “I do not remember that you and I ever met personally,” Lincoln wrote to Ulysses S. Grant. “I write this now as a grateful acknowledgment for the almost inestimable service you have done the country.” The president confessed that he had been impatient with the various abortive efforts to get through the bayous and swamps in February and March. And when Grant finally did run the batteries and get below Vicksburg, “I thought you should go down the river and join Gen. Banks; and when you turned Northward Eastward of the Big Black [River], I feared it was a mistake. I now wish to make the personal acknowledgment that you were right, and I was wrong.”57

  It would be another eight months before Lincoln and Grant met personally. But from the moment the commander in chief wrote this letter, they began to forge the partnership that would win the war.

  8

  THE HEAVIEST BLOW YET DEALT TO THE REBELLION

  VICTORY WAS a wondrous tonic for Lincoln. Three weeks after John Hay had described the president as “grieved silently but deeply about the escape of Lee,” Hay wrote to his fellow secretary John Nicolay that “the Tycoon [their private nickname for Lincoln] is in fine whack. I have rarely seen him more serene & busy. He is managing this war, the draft, foreign relations, and planning a reconstruction of the Union, all at once.”1

  Managing the draft was no small task after the lethal riots in New York City on July 13–17. Governor Horatio Seymour pleaded with the administration after the riots were suppressed to postpone the draft lottery for fear of sparking another eruption. Lincoln refused to give in to what he considered another form of rebellion.2 Drafting resumed in New York on August 19, protected by twenty thousand troops that the government had moved to the volatile city. This time peace and order prevailed.

  In foreign policy Lincoln’s main concern in the summer of 1863 was French intervention in Mexico. The French presence not only violated the Monroe Doctrine but also presented the danger of French support for the Confederacy. Mexican political and financial instability in 1861 had provoked a joint military expedition by Britain, France, and Spain to collect debts owed by Mexico to foreign creditors. Britain and Spain withdrew their troops in 1862 after negotiating a settlement. But Emperor Napoleon III imposed impossible demands on the weak Mexican government. He sent additional French troops (thirty-five thousand by 1863), who seized Mexico City and overthrew the liberal leader Benito Juárez in June 1863. The Confederacy had formed quasi alliances with anti-Juárez chieftains in Mexico’s northern provinces, which profited from the contraband trade across the Texas border. Confederate diplomats also angled for an agreement w
ith France for recognition of the Confederacy in return for Confederate support of Napoleon’s puppet regime in Mexico.3

  The Lincoln administration regarded this situation as intolerable. A cornerstone of the administration’s national strategy was prevention of foreign intervention in the war. After the capture of Vicksburg and Port Hudson, Lincoln felt that he was in a position to warn off the French. But his plans for doing so produced a conflict with the military strategy recommended by two of his principal subordinates. Now that the Mississippi River was open from Minnesota to the Gulf, Generals Grant and Banks wanted to launch a campaign against Mobile, the Confederacy’s chief blockade-running port on the Gulf. This was a sound strategic goal, but Lincoln’s first priority was an expedition into Texas to plant the flag there as a warning to France. A campaign against Mobile, the president told Grant, “would appear tempting to me also, were it not that in view of recent events in Mexico, I am greatly impressed with the importance of re-establishing the national authority in Western Texas as soon as possible.”4

  Lincoln’s reference to western Texas is puzzling, since any Union invasion would have to be mounted from Louisiana against eastern Texas. General Banks did undertake such a campaign in September 1863. A naval flotilla and a division of four thousand soldiers commanded by none other than William B. Franklin, who had been transferred as far away from Virginia as possible, attacked Confederate defenses at Sabine Pass on the Gulf just west of the Louisiana border. Franklin bungled the operation, and the Texans drove the invaders away in ignominy. Banks eventually landed a force at Brownsville to control the mouth of the Rio Grande. But this was a rather feeble “occupation” of Texas and did little if anything to impress France. And the failure to launch a campaign against Mobile in 1863 may have been a major missed opportunity.