Another eight weeks went by, and all remained essentially quiet along the Rappahannock. Again Lincoln vented his frustration to Welles: “It is the same old story of the Army of the Potomac. Imbecility, inefficiency,—don’t want to do—is defending the Capital…. Oh, it is terrible, terrible, this weakness, this indifference of our Potomac generals, with such armies of good and brave men.” Why not replace Meade? Welles asked. “What can I do with such generals as we have?” Lincoln replied. “Who among them is any better than Meade? To sweep away the whole of them from the chief command and substitute a new man would cause a shock, and be likely to lead to combinations and troubles greater than we now have.”24
Lincoln recognized that the Army of the Potomac had not yet shed the McClellan legacy of risk aversion and a defensive mentality. Many of its high-ranking officers, including Meade, had come up under McClellan. Even though Lincoln had gotten rid of the principal McClellanites—most notably Fitz-John Porter and William Franklin—McClellan still seemed to cast a shadow over the army. To be fair, Meade and other commanders, including McClellan, operated with the government in Washington and the major newspapers of the country looking over their shoulders. Expectations of the army were high, and expressions of disappointment with its failures correspondingly harsh. Grant, Sherman, and other Western commanders had enjoyed the luxury of distance from Washington and less of the glare of publicity and high expectations that seemed to paralyze many Eastern generals.
In mid-September Meade’s scouts detected the disappearance of Longstreet’s two divisions, which soon turned up on the Chickamauga battlefield. Meade proposed to maneuver against Lee’s weakened army to force him back toward Richmond. Lincoln expressed exasperation. “To attempt to fight the enemy slowly back to his intrenchments at Richmond…is an idea I have been trying to repudiate for quite a year…. I have constantly desired the Army of the Potomac, to make Lee’s army, and not Richmond, it’s objective point. If our army can not fall upon the enemy and hurt him where he is, it is plain to me it can gain nothing by attempting to follow him over a succession of intrenched lines into a fortified city.”25
Meade’s apparent unwillingness to attack helped persuade Lincoln to acquiesce in Stanton’s proposal to send the Eleventh and Twelfth Corps to Chattanooga. Meade’s army would still be more than strong enough for the defensive stance the general seemed to prefer. When Lee learned of the Eleventh and Twelfth Corps’ departure, he seized the initiative and moved around Meade’s right toward Manassas. Meade retreated, remaining between the Army of Northern Virginia and Washington. On October 14 the Union Second Corps shattered a reckless attack by A. P. Hill’s corps at Bristoe Station, five miles south of Manassas.
This reverse took the steam out of Lee’s advance. Lincoln thought it provided Meade with an opportunity for a counterattack. The president had Halleck send Meade a telegram stating that if he attacked “the honor will be his if he succeeds, and the blame may be mine if he fails.” This remarkable offer to absolve Meade of any responsibility for failure did not work. Lee began to retreat without further harassment by the Army of the Potomac. Since Meade was close to Washington, Lincoln asked him to come up for a talk. “The president was, as he always is, very kind and considerate,” Meade wrote to his wife. “He found no fault with my operations, though it was very evident he was disappointed that I had not gotten a battle out of Lee.”26
The general misread Lincoln’s affability for lack of censure. Meade seems to have had second thoughts, however, for two weeks later he told Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock that he expected to be relieved of command “at any moment.”27 But no removal order came, and in November, Meade began an offensive that drove Lee across the Rapidan River and promised to maneuver him into a position where Meade could attack to advantage. But Lee foiled this effort when one of the Union corps moved too slowly to catch the Army of Northern Virginia in the open before it could entrench a formidable position behind Mine Run. On November 30 Meade canceled a planned attack on this position because he was afraid it would turn into another Fredericksburg. Campaigning was over for the season as both armies went into winter quarters with the Rapidan between them.
IN THE MONTHS after Lincoln’s vigorous endorsement of the recruitment of black troops in March 1863, that policy went forward with energy and success. The War Department created the Bureau of Colored Troops and sent Adj. Gen. Lorenzo Thomas to the Mississippi Valley to organize black regiments. Two regiments of General Banks’s Corps d’Afrique participated in an assault at Port Hudson on May 27. They were unsuccessful, but their courage and determination impressed many previously skeptical white soldiers. And after the fall of Port Hudson on July 9, Banks wrote to Lincoln praising the part that the Corps d’Afrique had played in the siege: “Our victory at Port Hudson could not have been accomplished at the time it was but for their assistance.”28
During Grant’s siege of Vicksburg, a new regiment of former slaves helped beat off a Confederate attack on the Union supply depot at Milliken’s Bend on June 7. “The bravery of the blacks” in this battle, wrote Charles A. Dana, who was with Grant’s army, “completely revolutionized the sentiment of the army with regard to the employment of negro troops. I heard prominent officers who formerly in private had sneered at the idea of negroes fighting express themselves after that as heartily in favor of it.”29
After the capture of Vicksburg, Lincoln wrote Grant urging him to help expand Lorenzo Thomas’s recruitment efforts among the freed slaves in the region. These potential soldiers were “a resource which, if vigorously applied now, will soon close the contest,” wrote the president. “It works doubly, weakening the enemy and strengthening us.” Grant assured Lincoln of his “hearty support” for the policy of “arming the negro. This, with the emancipation of the negro, is the heavyest blow yet given the Confederacy…. By arming the negro we have added a powerful ally.”30
The most widely publicized feat of black soldiers was the assault by the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts on Fort Wagner, a Confederate earthwork guarding the entrance to Charleston Bay. This attack took place July 18, just three days after the draft rioters in New York had lynched several black people, including the nephew of a sergeant in the Fifty-fourth who was killed in the attack on Fort Wagner. Few Republican commentators failed to compare the cowardly white murderers in New York with the heroes of the Fifty-fourth, and to point out the moral: Black men who fought for the Union deserved more respect than white men who rioted against it.
Lincoln made the same point in one of his public letters, which was read aloud at a political rally in Illinois on September 3 and published in many Northern newspapers. Addressing himself to anti-emancipation Democrats (few of whom, however, attended this rally), Lincoln said that “some of the commanders of our armies in the field who have given us our most important successes, believe the emancipation policy, and the use of colored troops, constitute the heaviest blow yet dealt to the rebellion.” After this allusion to Grant and Banks (whom he did not name), Lincoln added: “You say you will not fight to free negroes. Some of them seem willing to fight for you,” that is, for the Union. In an obvious reference to the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts at Fort Wagner, the president predicted that when victory finally crowned Union arms, “there will be some black men who can remember that, with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet, they have helped mankind on to this great consummation; while, I fear, there will be some white ones, unable to forget that, with malignant heart, and deceitful speech, they have strove to hinder it.”31
Two weeks before writing this letter, Lincoln had met with the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass at the White House. Douglass asked the president to do what he could to rectify some of the discriminations against black soldiers—especially the inequality of pay between them and white soldiers. Lincoln sympathized with Douglass’s request but pointed out that there was nothing he could do about it immediately. The legal authority for paying black soldiers was the Militia Act
of 1862, which had specified that any black men recruited by the army should receive ten dollars per month as “laborers”—even if they were actually armed as soldiers (white privates received thirteen dollars per month plus a clothing allowance). Only Congress could change this policy, and the next session would not meet until December.
Lincoln went on to note, as Douglass recalled nearly twenty years later, that “the employment of colored troops at all was a great gain to the colored people—that the measure could not have been successfully adopted at the beginning of the war…that their enlistment was a serious offense to popular prejudice…that they were not to receive the same pay as white soldiers seemed a necessary concession to smooth the way to their employment at all as soldiers…. But I assure you, Mr. Douglass, that in the end they shall have the same pay as white soldiers.”32
Another subject that Lincoln and Douglass discussed was the Confederate threat to reenslave captured black soldiers or even to execute them and their white officers. After Lincoln had announced in the Emancipation Proclamation that black recruits would be accepted as soldiers, Jefferson Davis had retaliated with an order that captured officers would be turned over to state governments for punishment as “criminals engaged in inciting servile insurrection.” The punishment for that crime in slave states was death. Captured enlisted men were to be remanded to “the respective States to which they belong to be dealt with according to the laws of said States”—which meant, in effect, reenslavement. The Confederate Congress on May 30 enacted these policies into law, except that the captured officers were to be tried by military courts rather than by states.33
To prevent the Confederacy from carrying out such draconian policies, Secretary of War Stanton suspended the exchanges of Confederate officers so that these captives could be held as hostages against the Southern threat to execute Union prisoners.34 The Confederacy did not officially carry out any executions. But individual Southern officers and enlisted men did sometimes shoot captured black soldiers or their officers in the field even before the infamous Fort Pillow and Poison Springs massacres in 1864. On July 30, 1863, Lincoln issued an order that “for every soldier of the United States killed in violation of the laws of war, a rebel soldier shall be executed; and for every one enslaved by the enemy or sold into slavery, a rebel soldier shall be placed at hard labor on the public works.” Douglass praised this order at his meeting with Lincoln on August 10, but the president expressed reservations about enforcing it. “Retaliation was a terrible remedy,” Douglass paraphrased Lincoln’s words, “and one which was very difficult to apply—that, if once begun, there was no telling where it would end—that if he could get hold of the Confederate soldiers who had been guilty of treating colored soldiers as felons he could easily retaliate, but the thought of hanging men for a crime perpetrated by others was revolting to his feelings.”35
The Lincoln administration never did execute a Confederate soldier or place any of them at hard labor. Reports trickled in, however, that some captured Union soldiers had been reenslaved. As Confederate officials made clear that they would not exchange black captives under the exchange cartel that had been in effect since July 1862, the Lincoln administration suspended exchanges until the Confederacy treated alike all prisoners wearing the uniform of the U.S. Army. By the end of 1863 the Confederates offered to exchange black prisoners who had been legally free when they enlisted (mostly from the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts). But the South would “die in the last ditch,” said the Confederate exchange commissioner, before “giving up the right to send slaves back as property recaptured.” If that was their policy, said Stanton, the twenty-six thousand Confederate soldiers in POW camps could stay there. To accept Confederate conditions would be “a shameful dishonor…. When they agree to exchange all alike there will be no difficulty.” The journalist Noah Brooks, who discussed this matter with Lincoln, condemned the Confederacy’s “insane pertinacity upon this subject…. Uncle Sam is firm, and will not give up his protection of his soldiers.”36
DESPITE HIS DISAPPOINTMENT with Meade and the Army of the Potomac, Lincoln was far more optimistic as the year 1863 approached its end than he had been during the previous two Decembers. The off-year elections had brought solid Republican victories almost everywhere, in contrast to the 1862 political contests. Observers (including Lincoln) interpreted these elections as a ringing endorsement of emancipation as a war policy. In his address at the dedication of the soldiers’ cemetery at Gettysburg on November 19, Lincoln declared that those men gave “the last full measure of devotion” so that the nation founded four score and seven years earlier not only “shall not perish from the earth,” but also “shall have a new birth of freedom.”37
In his annual message to Congress on December 8, Lincoln acknowledged that the Emancipation Proclamation had been “followed by dark and doubtful days.” But now, he said hopefully, “the crisis which threatened to divide the friends of the Union is past.” Black soldiers had proved that they were “as good soldiers as any” and had helped convert many opponents to supporters of emancipation. Referring to indigenous movements for the abolition of slavery in Maryland and Missouri (which were exempted from the Emancipation Proclamation), Lincoln noted that neither state “three years ago would tolerate any restraint upon the extension of slavery into new territories,” but they “only dispute now as to the best mode of removing it within their own limits.” Commenting on these developments, an Illinois newspaper maintained that if the Emancipation Proclamation had been submitted to a referendum a year earlier, “there is little doubt that the voice of a majority would have been against it. And yet not a year has passed before it is approved by an overwhelming majority.”38
With the war going well and large parts of several Confederate states controlled by Northern troops, Lincoln turned his attention to further steps to bring them back into the Union. Accompanying his message to Congress, the president issued a “Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction.” Under his constitutional authority to grant pardons for offenses against the United States, he offered “full pardon” and restoration of property “except as to slaves” to former participants in rebellion who would swear an oath of allegiance to the United States and to all laws and proclamations concerning emancipation. (Certain classes of high-ranking Confederate civil and military officials were exempted from this offer.) When the number of voters taking the oath in any state equaled 10 percent of the number who had voted in 1860, this loyal nucleus could reestablish a state government to which Lincoln promised executive recognition.39
This proclamation looked to the future readmission of former Confederate states to the Union as free states. But Lincoln envisaged its main short-term purpose as a war measure to weaken the Confederacy by attracting whites to the side of the Union. In that respect it was a sort of emancipation proclamation for free white men—to “emancipate” them from their Confederate allegiance. It was part of Lincoln’s national strategy to weaken the Confederacy and to mobilize maximum support for the Union cause. The president had been nursing along this effort in occupied portions of Tennessee and Louisiana for more than a year. The Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction codified the process.
Abolitionists and some radical Republicans objected to parts of this policy because, while it made freedom the basis of restoration, it did not enfranchise any black men nor did it strip the planter class of land or of political power if they took the oath of allegiance. In Louisiana particularly, many of the whites who took the oath were former Whigs of wealth and conservative inclinations, while the educated gens de couleur libre (free people of color) class in New Orleans remained disfranchised. Congressional Republicans wanted to raise the bar for white participation and to postpone reconstruction until the war was over, in order to carry out a more radical transformation of Southern society.
Lincoln was not necessarily averse to a more thorough postwar policy. But he insisted on his 10 percent plan as a wartime measure to weaken the rebellion by weaning
away as many of its former supporters as possible. In Louisiana he wanted “a tangible nucleus which the remainder of the State may rally around as fast as it can.” The purpose of his policy, Lincoln reiterated in March 1864, was “to suppress the insurrection and to restore the authority of the United States.”40 He ordered the Union commander in the occupied portion of Arkansas to support the newly elected state government as “the best you can do to suppress the rebellion.” In July 1864 the president killed the Wade-Davis reconstruction bill by a pocket veto (by which a president can veto a bill passed at the end of a congressional session simply by not signing it). He explained that he was not “inflexibly committed to any single plan of restoration” and might be willing to carry out the more radical Wade-Davis plan once the war was over. But he was unwilling “that the free-state constitutions and governments, already adopted and installed in Arkansas and Louisiana, shall be set aside and held for nought, thereby repelling and discouraging the loyal citizens who have set up the same.”41
Tensions between the president and Congress over reconstruction policy gave Lincoln some difficult moments in the election year of 1864. His main preoccupation, however, remained the war itself. Starting with promises of success following the great military victories in the second half of 1863, prospects for 1864 dimmed by the summer as failures and stalemates on several fronts brought a plunge in Northern morale and even threatened Lincoln’s reelection.
9
IF IT TAKES THREE YEARS MORE
DURING THE first two months of 1864 a long-range epistolary discussion of military strategy took place among Lincoln and Halleck in Washington and Grant at his new headquarters in Nashville. Grant had renewed his recommendation for a campaign to capture Mobile and then to use that city as a base for a strike northeast through Alabama into Georgia. Lincoln vetoed this plan. The same foreign-policy goals that had favored a campaign to plant the flag in Texas instead of Mobile still prevailed. The French emperor Napoleon III had created a puppet Mexican government headed by Ferdinand Maximilian, archduke of Austria and now also emperor of Mexico. The small Union presence at Brownsville did nothing to deter the French from moving to consolidate their control of Mexico right up to the Texas border. Lincoln and Halleck wanted Gen. Nathaniel Banks to undertake a major campaign to invade Texas via the Red River valley through northwest Louisiana. If successful, this enterprise would have the added benefit of gaining control of more of Louisiana and bringing out thousands of bales of cotton supposedly stored there. If it were purely a matter of military strategy, Halleck informed Grant, a thrust against Mobile might make more sense, but as “a matter of political or State policy, connected with our foreign relations,” the president considered it more important to “occupy and hold at least a portion of Texas.” So Banks began preparing his Red River campaign.1
Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief Page 21