Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief

by James M. McPherson

  Without Banks’s Army of the Gulf, troops for a Mobile expedition would have to come mainly from the army occupying East Tennessee. Grant proposed to divide that army and send part of it against the Confederates in northern Georgia and transfer the rest to New Orleans to advance against Mobile from there. Both Lincoln and Halleck opposed this division of forces. It might jeopardize the hard-won conquest of East Tennessee by creating an opportunity for a counteroffensive by Longstreet’s two divisions, wintering near the Virginia-Tennessee border, in cooperation with the Army of Tennessee in northern Georgia, now commanded by Joseph E. Johnston. Lincoln was anxious about holding East Tennessee, considering it a top priority “both [from] a political and military point of view,” Halleck told Grant. And when Union forces went on the offensive in the spring, a single concentrated thrust from Chattanooga into Georgia would be better than a complicated two-pronged campaign.2

  Despite these rebuffs of his strategic recommendations, Grant was the hero of the hour and it was clear that he would soon become the top Union commander. A bill introduced by Elihu Washburne to revive the rank of lieutenant general (three stars), last held by George Washington, was making its way through Congress. Everyone knew that Grant would be the man, and that he would thus outrank everyone else. So Halleck, acting for Lincoln, invited Grant to submit his ideas on the best strategy to be pursued in Virginia.

  If Grant had been more aware of the relations between Lincoln and his commanders in that theater during the past two years, he might have avoided another rebuff. He suggested that instead of moving against Lee in northern Virginia, the Army of the Potomac should be reduced to the minimum necessary for defensive purposes. The rest of it along with other troops should launch a campaign from Norfolk against Raleigh, North Carolina. This thrust, said Grant, would cut Lee’s rail communications with the lower South and force him to come south to meet the threat, leaving Richmond to fall easily into Union hands.

  Halleck promised to submit this plan to Lincoln but warned Grant that the president would not like it. Lincoln had made clear that Richmond was not the main objective; “that point is Lee’s army.” And the best way to defeat that army was to go at it directly. “Our main efforts in the next campaign should unquestionably be against the armies of Lee and Johnston,” Halleck insisted. “All our available forces in the east should be concentrated against Lee’s army.” If Grant had any doubts about who was calling the strategic shots in this discussion, Halleck cleared them up in a letter to Sherman, who was certain to share it with his close friend Grant. Halleck considered himself “simply a military advisor” to Lincoln who “must obey and carry out” his decisions. “It is my duty to strengthen the hands of the President as Commander-in-Chief.”3

  Grant got the message. He also picked up, indirectly, another message from Lincoln. The president was concerned about a Grant boomlet for the presidency launched by some Democrats—even a few Republicans—and supported by a number of newspapers, especially the large-circulation New York Herald. Before promoting Grant to lieutenant general, Lincoln wanted assurance that he had no presidential ambitions. Lincoln could scarcely work with a general-in-chief who wanted to become commander in chief. Upset by the bandying of his name as a candidate, Grant wrote letters to several people declaring that “this is the last thing I desire. I would regard such a consummation unfortunate for myself if not for the country…. Nobody could induce me to think of being a presidential candidate, particularly so long as there is a possibility of having Mr. Lincoln reelected.”4

  Grant’s disavowals were passed along to Lincoln, as the general intended. The president nominated Grant for lieutenant general, the Senate promptly confirmed him, and Lincoln summoned Grant to Washington to receive his commission. Through some mix-up, nobody was at the station to meet the general and his son Fred. They made their way to Willard’s Hotel, where Grant asked for a room. Looking down his nose at the travel-worn, unimpressive figure in a dusty uniform, the desk clerk said he had a small room at the back of the top floor. All right, said Grant. As he signed the register “U. S. Grant and son,” the clerk did a double take and fell all over himself to assign Grant the best suite in the house. From there the general went to the White House, where a public reception happened to be in progress. Lincoln welcomed him, and the guests nearly smothered Grant with their attentions until he climbed onto a sofa to escape that fate. The next day Grant became the highest-ranking officer in the army, and the day after that he replaced Halleck as general-in-chief. Halleck stepped down to fill a new position as chief of staff.5

  Grant initially hoped to maintain his headquarters in the West. But Lincoln made it clear that he wanted him to come east “to see whether he cannot do something with the unfortunate Army of the Potomac.”6 Upon reflection Grant agreed, and decided to make his headquarters in the field with that army while Halleck remained in Washington to function as a clearinghouse for communications between Grant and other field commanders. Two of the first decisions Grant made as general-in-chief were to put Sherman in command of the West and to keep Meade as commander of the Army of the Potomac. Meade’s position would be difficult, with Grant looking over his shoulder and making the strategic decisions. But the two generals took a liking to each other and discovered that they could work together.

  In his memoirs, written two decades later, Grant described his first substantive discussion with Lincoln. The president, according to Grant, said that “he had never professed to be a military man or to know how campaigns should be conducted, and never wanted to interfere with them; but that procrastination on the part of commanders” had compelled him to take a more active part. “All he wanted or had ever wanted was someone who would take the responsibility and act.” Grant, of course, was that someone. “He did not want to know what I proposed to do.”7

  Grant’s account does not ring quite true. After all, the president had vetoed three of his suggestions several weeks earlier. And Lincoln did want to know what Grant was going to do, at least in a broad strategic sense. Over the next few weeks Grant worked out a coordinated strategy for all major fronts, and kept the president informed. Grant noted that in the past the various Union armies in different theaters had “acted independently, and without concert, like a balky team, no two ever pulling together.”8 Employing concentration in time, Grant ordered five separate armies to advance simultaneously from exterior lines against as many smaller Confederate armies to prevent them from using their interior lines to reinforce one or another of them.

  The two principal Union forces were the Army of the Potomac and Sherman’s army group in northern Georgia. “Lee’s army will be your objective point,” Grant told Meade, having absorbed Lincoln’s dictum on that issue. “Wherever Lee goes, there you will go also.” Grant directed Sherman “to move against Johnston’s army, to break it up and to get into the interior of the enemy’s country as far as you can, inflicting all the damage you can against their war resources.”9

  Three smaller Union armies were to coordinate their operations with Meade and Sherman. Benjamin Butler’s Army of the James would advance up that river to threaten Richmond from the south and cut the vital rail line between Petersburg and Richmond. Franz Sigel would lead a small force south up the Shenandoah Valley to pin down Confederate units there. And after finishing the Red River campaign, Nathaniel Banks’s Army of the Gulf would finally attack Mobile and move inland toward Georgia to prevent Confederate forces in Alabama from reinforcing Johnston.

  Lincoln was impressed. Grant’s coordinated strategy reminded him of his own “suggestions so constantly made and as constantly neglected, to Buell & Halleck et al to move at once upon the enemy’s whole line so as to bring into action our great superiority in numbers.” The president also offered one of his inimitable metaphors to describe the pinning-down task of the three smaller Union armies: “Those not skinning can hold a leg.” Grant liked this expression so much that he used it himself in one of his dispatches to Sherman.10

  Befor
e these major spring campaigns began, a number of peripheral operations had taken place. Most of them turned out to be Confederate victories. With one exception (the Red River campaign) they were of little strategic consequence, but they did much to restore sagging Southern morale. And perhaps overconfident Northerners who expected Grant and Sherman to win the war by the Fourth of July should have taken notice of these Confederate successes as a possible omen. In February a small Union force invaded the interior of northern Florida from Jacksonville. One of its goals was to secure control of enough of Florida to begin the process of reconstruction there under Lincoln’s 10 percent plan. But the invaders were routed at the Battle of Olustee on February 20. In March, Nathan Bedford Forrest’s cavalry raided through western Tennessee, destroying Union communications and capturing garrisons, culminating in the notorious massacre of black troops and white Tennessee Unionists at Fort Pillow on April 12. A few days later a Confederate force under Brig. Gen. John Marmaduke routed a Federal foraging party at Poison Springs, Arkansas, and killed more than a hundred soldiers of the First Kansas Colored Infantry after they had been captured. At the same time, half a continent away, Brig. Gen. Robert F. Hoke’s Southern infantry, aided by the ironclad CSS Albemarle, recaptured Plymouth, North Carolina, from the Federals.

  One thing all of these Union defeats—Olustee, Fort Pillow, Poison Springs, and Plymouth—had in common was the deliberate murder of black Union soldiers who were wounded or had tried to surrender.11 The most thoroughly documented of these atrocities was Fort Pillow, which presented the Lincoln administration with a dilemma. The president had threatened retaliation in his proclamation of July 30, 1863. “The difficulty is not in stating the principle,” said Lincoln as reports about Fort Pillow were being investigated, “but in practically applying it.”12 On May 4 the president called a special cabinet meeting to discuss what to do about this matter. Gideon Welles stated the dilemma concisely: “The idea of retaliation—killing man for man—which is the popular noisy demand is barbarous.” We “cannot yield to any [such] inhuman scheme of retaliation.” Lincoln agreed that “blood cannot restore blood, and government should not act for revenge.” The cabinet decided to have Forrest’s officers and soldiers tried for murder if they managed to capture any of them, and to warn the Confederate government that a certain number of Southern officers in Northern prisons would be set aside as hostages against such occurrences in the future.13

  There is no evidence that either decision was ever carried out. Nor were these the last occasions when black Union soldiers were executed in cold blood after capture. The whole controversy further strengthened the administration’s determination to continue the refusal to exchange prisoners until the Confederates guaranteed equal treatment and exchange of black prisoners. The Confederates continued to refuse. Lincoln undoubtedly agreed with the Union exchange commissioner who said that these cases “can only be effectually reached by a successful prosecution of the war.” After all, “the rebellion exists on a question connected with the right or power of the South to hold the colored race in slavery; and the South will only yield this right under military compulsion.” Thus “the loyal people of the United States [must] prosecute this war with all the energy that God has given them.”14

  That is what Grant and Lincoln wanted to do. But one part of Grant’s plan for simultaneous advances on five fronts fell victim to another Union defeat before the big push was scheduled to begin in the first week of May. Grant had from the outset considered Banks’s drive up the Red River toward Texas a wasteful diversion. He ordered Banks to get it over with as quickly as possible, leave an occupation force to secure northwestern Louisiana and show the flag in Texas, and take the main body of his troops to attack Mobile. But it was not to be. Banks started late, conducted the campaign poorly, and decided to retreat after his advance divisions were defeated at Mansfield, forty miles south of Shreveport, on April 8. The retreat was also disorderly and encumbered by the cotton and other plunder that poorly disciplined Union troops tried to carry with them. The only bright spot in the campaign was the remarkable exploit by a Wisconsin colonel with a lumbering background. When Adm. David D. Porter’s gunboat fleet was stranded by low water and rapids in the Red River at Alexandria, Col. Joseph Bailey supervised the construction of wing dams that enabled the gunboats to shoot the rapids and saved the fleet from capture or destruction. The Army of the Gulf did not get back to southern Louisiana until May 26, a month too late to begin the aborted Mobile campaign.15

  Grant was exasperated by this failure. He told Halleck he wanted Banks removed from command. Halleck found it necessary to tutor Grant on the political realities in Washington, which Halleck had been painfully learning to negotiate for almost two years. He informed Grant that the president wanted to delay acting on the request for Banks’s removal until he could get more information on that general’s conduct of the campaign. “General Banks is a personal friend of the President, and has strong supporters in and out of Congress,” Halleck told Grant. “There will undoubtedly be a very strong opposition to his being removed or superseded.” Lincoln would do it “very reluctantly, as it would give offense to many of his friends,” and only if Grant took the responsibility of insisting on it as “a military necessity.” The president “must have something, in a definite shape, to fall back on, as his justification.”

  Grant suggested a compromise that would leave Banks in administrative command of the Department of the Gulf but would place Maj. Gen. Edward R. S. Canby in field command of the army. Lincoln was agreeable—especially since he needed Banks to carry out his reconstruction policy in Louisiana. The change was made on May 7, 1864, and Canby began planning a campaign against Mobile. It would eventually begin in July, a year after Grant had first suggested it.16

  This affair actually strengthened the bonds of understanding between Lincoln and Grant. The president deferred to Grant on a military matter that fell within his province as general-in-chief. But Grant learned that Lincoln’s responsibilities as commander in chief included important political considerations that could never be fully divorced from questions of military command in a democracy—especially in an election year. This potentially divisive question was amicably settled just in time, for Grant was about to take the field with the Army of the Potomac in what came to be called the Overland campaign.

  DESPITE MILITARY SETBACKS in marginal theaters during the early months of 1864, the Northern people had high expectations for main campaigns in Virginia and Georgia. Media attention focused overwhelmingly on the titanic contest of Grant versus Lee in Virginia. People crowded around newspaper and telegraph offices eager for news. These were “fearfully critical, anxious days,” wrote a New York diarist, in which “the destinies of the continent for centuries” would be decided.17

  The mood in Washington was also one of “painful suspense” that “almost unfits the mind for mental activity,” reported Gideon Welles. No one was more anxious than the president. He told Welles on May 7 that he had not slept the previous night. Francis Carpenter, the artist staying in the White House while he worked on his famous painting of Lincoln reading the Emancipation Proclamation to the cabinet, wrote that during the first week of Grant’s campaign, the president “scarcely slept at all.” On one of those days Carpenter met Lincoln “clad in a long morning wrapper, pacing back and forth [along] a narrow passage leading to one of the windows, his hands behind him, great black rings under his eyes, his head bent forward on his breast.”18

  The Army of the Potomac crossed the Rapidan River on May 4 and began moving south through the “Wilderness” of Virginia, a thick second-growth forest of scrub oak and pine where the Battle of Chancellorsville had taken place exactly a year earlier. Lee decided to hit Grant in the flank in this difficult terrain that neutralized the Union advantage in numbers and artillery. Lee’s initiative brought on two days of the most confused, frenzied fighting the war had yet seen. Although the toll of casualties—almost eighteen thousand Union and at least eleve
n thousand Confederate—suggested a Confederate victory, Grant refused to recognize it as such. He did not think in terms of victory or defeat in single set-piece battles, which had been the previous pattern in this theater, but rather in terms of a particular stage in a long campaign. Instead of retreating north of the river as Joe Hooker had done after a similar pounding at Chancellorsville, Grant headed south toward the crucial crossroads hamlet of Spotsylvania, where almost two weeks of heavy fighting exacted another eighteen thousand and twelve thousand casualties in the two armies.

  After the two days of combat in the Wilderness, Grant had sent word to Lincoln by a newspaper reporter that whatever happened in the campaign, “there is to be no turning back.” Two days later came a dispatch from Grant declaring that “I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.”19 Lincoln expressed deep satisfaction. “How near we have been to this thing before and failed,” he said to John Hay and Francis Carpenter. “I believe if any other General had been at the Head of that army it would now have been on this side of the Rapidan…. The great thing about Grant…is his perfect coolness and persistency of purpose…. He has the grit of a bull-dog! Once let him get his ‘teeth’ in, and nothing can shake him off…. It is the dogged pertinacity of Grant that wins.”20