Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief

by James M. McPherson

  33. Burnside to Lincoln, Jan. 1, 1863, O.R. 21, 940–41.

  34. Lincoln to Halleck, Jan. 1, 1863, Basler, Collected Works, 6:31.

  35. Halleck to Stanton, Jan. 1, 1863, O.R. 21, 940–41; Basler, Collected Works, 6:31.

  36. Halleck to Gen. Horatio Wright, Nov. 18, 1862, O.R. 20, ii:67.

  37. Gasparin to Lincoln, July 18, 1862, Lincoln Papers; Lincoln to Gasparin, Aug. 4, 1862, Basler, Collected Works, 5:355–56.

  38. Lincoln to Samuel Treat, Nov. 19, 1862, Basler, Collected Works, 5:501–2.

  39. Halleck to Banks, Nov. 9, 1862, O.R. 15, 590–91.

  40. Ibid.

  41. In August 1862 Lincoln told the managing editor of the New York Tribune that “I regard General Banks as one of the best men in the army. He makes me no trouble; but, with a large force or a small force, he always knows his duty and does it.” New York Tribune, Aug. 13, 1862.

  42. Lincoln to McClernand, Nov. 10, 1861, Basler, Collected Works, 5:20.

  43. McClernand to Lincoln, March 31, June 20, Sept. 28, 1862, Lincoln Papers; Steven E. Woodworth, Nothing but Victory: The Army of the Tennessee, 1861–1865 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 249–50.

  44. McClernand to Edwin M. Stanton, Nov. 10, 1862, O.R. 17, ii:332–34; John Niven, ed., The Salmon P. Chase Papers, vol. 1, Journals, 1829–1872 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1993), 417, entry of Oct. 7, 1862.

  45. O.R. 17, ii:282; Basler, Collected Works, 5:468–69.

  46. Col. William S. Hillyer to William T. Sherman, Oct. 29, 1862, O.R. 17, ii:307–308; Grant to Halleck, Nov. 10, 1862, Halleck to Grant, Nov. 11, 1862, Grant to Sherman, Nov. 14, 1862, Grant to Halleck, Dec. 9, 1862, in John Y. Simon et al., eds., Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 28 vols. to date (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967–), 6:288, 288n., 310; 7:6.

  47. McClernand to Lincoln, Dec. 29, 1862, Jan. 7, 16, 1863, Lincoln Papers; Lincoln to McClernand, Jan. 22, 1863, Basler, Collected Works, 6:70.

  48. Halleck to Rosecrans, Nov. 27, Dec. 4, 1862, O.R. 20, ii:102, 117–18.

  49. Bragg to Samuel Cooper, Dec. 31, 1862, O.R. 20, i:662.

  50. Lincoln to Rosecrans, Jan. 5, Aug. 31, 1863, Basler, Collected Works, 6:39, 425.

  51. Ibid., 5:530; Boston Commonwealth, Dec. 6, 1862.

  52. Basler, Collected Works, 5:530, 537.

  53. Sumner to Samuel Gridley Howe, Dec. 28, 1862, Sumner Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

  54. Several contemporaries described this historic occasion. This account and Lincoln’s words are from Frederick W. Seward, Seward at Washington, as Senator and Secretary of State: A Memoir of His Life, with Selections from His Letters, 1861–1872 (New York: Derby and Miller, 1891), 151, and from Francis B. Carpenter, Six Months at the White House with Abraham Lincoln (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1866), 87, 269–70.

  55. Basler, Collected Works, 6:29–30.

  56. Pease and Randall, Diary of Browning, 1:155, entry of July 1, 1862; Basler, Collected Works, 5:356–57.

  57. Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln: Supplement 1 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 173; Lincoln to Nathaniel Banks, Jan. 23, March 29, 1863, Lincoln to Andrew Johnson, March 26, 1863, Basler, Collected Works, 6:73, 154, 149–50.

  58. Richard Cobden to Charles Sumner, Feb. 13, 1863, in Belle Becker Sideman and Lillian Friedman, eds., Europe Looks at the Civil War (New York: The Orion Press, 1960), 222; Henry Adams to Charles Francis Adams, Jr., Jan. 23, 1863, in J. C. Levenson, ed., The Letters of Henry Adams, vol. 1, 1858–1868 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 327. 59. James Shepherd Pike to William H. Seward, Dec. 31, 1862, quoted in Dean B. Mahin, One War at a Time: The International Dimensions of the American Civil War (Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 1999), 139.

  CHAPTER 7: LEE’S ARMY, AND NOT RICHMOND, IS YOUR TRUE OBJECTIVE POINT

  1. Meigs to Ambrose Burnside, Dec. 30, 1862, O.R. 21, 916–18.

  2. Stephen W. Sears, “The Revolt of the Generals,” in Controversies and Commanders: Dispatches from the Army of the Potomac (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 133–36.

  3. M. P. Larry to his sister, Dec. 23, 1862, in Bell Irvin Wiley, The Life of Billy Yank (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1952), 280.

  4. Charles S. Wainwright, A Diary of Battle, ed. Allan Nevins (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962), 157–58, entry of Jan. 19, 1863; Hooker quoted in Sears, “Revolt of the Generals,” 152.

  5. Halleck to William B. Franklin, May 29, 1863, O.R. 21, 1008–9.

  6. Don E. Fehrenbacher and Virginia Fehrenbacher, eds., Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 375.

  7. Lincoln to Hooker, Jan. 26, 1863, in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953–55), 6:78–79.

  8. Ibid., 132–33.

  9. Darius N. Couch, “Sumner’s ‘Right Grand Division,’” in Clarence C. Buel and Robert U. Johnson, eds., Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, 4 vols. (New York: The Century Co., 1888), 3:119.

  10. Bruce Catton, Glory Road: The Bloody Route from Fredericksburg to Gettysburg (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1952), 162; T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and His Generals (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), 232–34; Noah Brooks, Washington in Lincoln’s Time (New York: The Century Co., 1895), 56.

  11. Madeline Vinton Dahlgren, Memoir of John A. Dahlgren (Boston: J. R. Osgood and Co., 1892), 387, diary entry of Feb. 6, 1863; Benjamin B. French, Witness to the Young Republic: A Yankee’s Journal, 1828–1870, ed. Donald B. Cole and John J. McDonough (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1989), 417, entry of Feb. 18, 1863.

  12. Howard K. Beale, ed., Diary of Gideon Welles, 3 vols. (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1960), 1:265, entry of April 9, 1863; Lincoln’s telegram to Du Pont is quoted by New York Tribune reporter Albert Richardson in a letter to his managing editor, Sydney Howard Gay, March 20, 1863, in Fehrenbacher and Fehrenbacher, Recollected Words, 380. Richardson was present when Lincoln told one of Du Pont’s officers who was in Washington to convey the same message to the admiral.

  13. Beale, Welles Diary, 1:259, entry of April 2, 1863.

  14. The best account of these events is Kevin J. Weddle, Lincoln’s Tragic Admiral: The Life of Samuel Francis Du Pont (Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Press, 2005), 154–207.

  15. William M. Strong to Samuel R. Curtis, Dec. 23, 1862, in Fehrenbacher and Fehrenbacher, Recollected Words, 431; Halleck to Grant, March 25, 1863, O.R. 24, i:22.

  16. McClernand to Lincoln, March 15, 1863, Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress.

  17. John Y. Simon, ed., The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 28 vols. to date (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967–), 7:317–18n. for letter from Medill to Washburne, Feb. 19, 1863.

  18. Chase to Lincoln, April 4, 1863, enclosing Halstead to Chase, April 1, 1863, Lincoln Papers; Cadwalader Washburn to Elihu Washburne (the brothers spelled their last name differently), March 28, 1863, in Jean Edward Smith, Grant (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 230.

  19. Fehrenbacher and Fehrenbacher, Recollected Words, 11, 292.

  20. Albert D. Richardson to Sydney Howard Gay, March 20, 1863, ibid., 381; Halleck’s dispatch in O.R. 24, i:25.

  21. Charles Bracelen Flood, Grant and Sherman: The Friendship That Won the Civil War (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 154–55; Brooks D. Simpson, Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph over Adversity, 1822–1865 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 184–85.

  22. Halleck to Grant, April 2, May 11, 16, 1863, Halleck to Banks, May 23, 1863, O.R. 24, i:25, 36; ibid., 26, i:500–501.

  23. Washburne to Lincoln, May 1, 1863, Lincoln Papers; Lincoln to Isaac Arnold, May 26, 1863, Basler, Collected Works, 6:230.

  24. Sumner to Francis Lieber, Jan. 17, 1863, in Edward L. Pierce, Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner, 4 vols. (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1877–93), 4:114.

  25. Clement L. Vallandigham, The Great Civil War in Am
erica (New York, 1863), a pamphlet publication of his January speech in the House, reprinted in Frank Freidel, ed., Union Pamphlets of the Civil War, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), 2:697–738, quotations from 706, 711, 719, 732.

  26. Dubuque Herald, n.d., Canton (Ill.) Weekly Register, April 20, 1863, quoted in Wood Gray, The Hidden Civil War: The Story of the Copperheads (New York: The Viking Press, 1942), 12, 133. For draft resistance, encouragement of desertion, and other acts of resistance, see Jennifer L. Weber, Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the North (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), esp. chaps. 3–4.

  27. Lincoln to Burnside, May 29, 1863, Basler, Collected Works, 6:237.

  28. Erastus Corning et al. to the President, in Frank Freidel, ed., Union Pamphlets of the Civil War, 2:740–43; Matthew Birchard et al., “Resolutions Presented to Lincoln,” in Basler, Collected Works, 6:300–301n.

  29. The two letters are in Basler, Collected Works, 6:260–69, 300–306.

  30. John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, 10 vols. (New York: The Century Co., 1890), 7:336–37. The quotation is a close paraphrase of the judge’s opinion. In 1866, after the passions of the war had partly cooled, the Supreme Court overturned a similar conviction by a military court in 1864 of an Indiana Copperhead, Lambdin P. Milligan, on the grounds that a civilian cannot be tried by a military tribunal in an area where the civil courts are functioning. This principle would have voided Vallandigham’s conviction. Ex parte Milligan, 4 Wallace 2.

  31. Basler, Collected Works, 6:164–65.

  32. Hooker to Lincoln, April 11, 1862, Lincoln Papers.

  33. Darius N. Couch, “The Chancellorsville Campaign,” in Buel and Johnson, Battles and Leaders, 3:155.

  34. In Hooker’s defense it should be noted that on the morning of May 3 he suffered a concussion when a pillar of the Chancellor house, on which he was leaning, was hit by an enemy cannonball and fell on his head. He did not fully recover his faculties for several hours and was not able thereafter to do much to shape the course of events. Stephen W. Sears, “In Defense of Fighting Joe,” in Controversies and Commanders, 169–89. But even before his concussion Hooker seemed to have lost control of events, so it is not clear how much difference the concussion made.

  35. Brooks wrote several versions of this incident that vary only in minor details. This account is from his dispatch to the Sacramento Union dated May 8 and published in that newspaper on June 5, in Michael Burlingame, ed., Lincoln Observed: Civil War Dispatches of Noah Brooks (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 50; and from Brooks, Washington in Lincoln’s Time, 57–58.

  36. Meade to his wife, May 8, 1863, George G. Meade III, ed., The Life and Letters of George Gordon Meade, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913), 1:372–73; Lincoln to Hooker, May 7, 1863, Basler, Collected Works, 6:201.

  37. Lincoln to Hooker, May 14, 1863, Basler, Collected Works, 6:217.

  38. George G. Meade to his wife, June 13, 1863, Life and Letters of Meade, 1:385.

  39. James Dixon to Lincoln, June 28, 1863, Alexander McClure to Lincoln, July 1, 1863, Lincoln Papers; Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, eds., The Diary of George Templeton Strong, vol. 3, The Civil War 1860–1865 (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 324, entry of June 24, 1863.

  40. Adam Gurowski, Diary, 1863 (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1866), 241, entry of June 5, 1863; William A. Croffut, ed., Fifty Years in Camp and Field: The Diary of Ethan Allen Hitchcock (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1909), 447, entry of May 24, 1863.

  41. Halleck to Hooker, June 5, 1863, O.R. 27, i:31–32; Lincoln to Hooker, June 5, 1863, Basler, Collected Works, 6:249.

  42. Hooker to Lincoln, June 10, 1863, O.R. 27, i:35; Lincoln to Hooker, June 10, 14, 1863, Basler, Collected Works, 6:257, 273.

  43. Lincoln to Hooker, June 16 (three telegrams), Lincoln to Joel Parker, June 30, 1863, Basler, Collected Works, 6:280–82, 311.

  44. Beale, Welles Diary, 1:334, 348, entries of June 26 and 28, 1863; O.R. 27, i:58–60.

  45. Freeman Cleaves, Meade of Gettysburg (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960), 171; Nevins and Thomas, Diary of George Templeton Strong, 330, entry of July 6, 1863.

  46. Basler, Collected Works, 6:319–20; French, Witness to the Young Republic, 426, entry of July 8, 1863.

  47. O.R. 27, iii:567.

  48. James B. Fry, in Allen Thorndike Rice, ed., Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguished Men of His Time (New York: North American Publishing Co., 1885), 402; Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner Ettlinger, eds., Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), 62, entry of July 14, 1863.

  49. Lincoln to Halleck, July 6, 1863, Basler, Collected Works, 6:318; Halleck to Meade, July 7 (two dispatches), July 8, 1863, O.R. 27, i:82–83, 84–85.

  50. Beale, Diary of Welles, 1:364–65, entry of July 7, 1863; Lincoln to Halleck, July 7, 1863, Basler, Collected Works, 6:319. The original of this note from Lincoln to Halleck was recently found in the National Archives.

  51. Meade to Halleck, July 8, 1863, O.R. 27, i:84; Burlingame and Ettlinger, Diary of Hay, 61, entry of July 11, 1863.

  52. David Homer Bates, Lincoln in the Telegraph Office (New York: The Century Co., 1907), 157; Meade to Halleck, July 13, 1863, Halleck to Meade, July 13, 1863, O.R. 27, i:91, 92.

  53. Beale, Diary of Welles, 370–71, entry of July 14, 1863; Chase to William Sprague, July 15, 1863, in John Niven, ed., The Salmon P. Chase Papers, vol. 4, Correspondence, April 1863–1864 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1997), 81–82; Burlingame and Ettlinger, Diary of Hay, 63, entry of July 15, 1863.

  54. Halleck to Meade, July 14, 1863 (two dispatches), Meade to Halleck, July 14, 1863, O.R. 27, i:92–94.

  55. Basler, Collected Works, 6:327–28.

  56. Beale, Diary of Welles, 1:374, entry of July 17, 1863; Lincoln to Oliver O. Howard, July 21, 1863, Basler, Collected Works, 6:341.

  57. Lincoln to Grant, July 13, 1863, Basler, Collected Works, 6:326.

  CHAPTER 8: THE HEAVIEST BLOW YET DEALT TO THE REBELLION

  1. Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner Ettlinger, eds., Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), 63, entry of July 15, 1863; Hay to Nicolay, Aug. 7, 1863, in Tyler Dennett, ed., Lincoln and the Civil War in the Diaries and Letters of John Hay (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1939), 76.

  2. Lincoln to Seymour, Aug. 7, 11, 15, 16, in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953–55), 6:369–70, 381–82, 389–92.

  3. Lynn M. Case and Warren F. Spencer, The United States and France: Civil War Diplomacy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970), esp. chaps. 15–16.

  4. Lincoln to Grant, Aug. 9, 1863, Basler, Collected Works, 6:374. See also Lincoln to Edwin M. Stanton, July 29, 1863, Lincoln to Francis P. Blair, July 30, 1863, Lincoln to Nathaniel P. Banks, Aug. 5, Sept. 19, 1863, ibid., 354–55, 356, 364, 465–66; Henry W. Halleck to Banks, July 24, Aug. 6, 10, 12, 20, O.R. 26, i:652–53, 673, 675, 682–83; Halleck to Grant, Aug. 6, 1863, O.R. 24, iii:578.

  5. Lincoln to Rosecrans, Feb. 17, 1863, Basler, Collected Works, 6:108–9.

  6. Halleck to Rosecrans, June 11, 16, 1863, Rosecrans to Halleck, June 16, 1863, O.R. 23, i:8, 10.

  7. Basler, Collected Works, 2:32–36.

  8. Robert V. Bruce, Lincoln and the Tools of War (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1956). Basler, Collected Works, contains dozens of communications and orders by Lincoln concerning weapons, gunpowder, and other aspects of ordnance and naval technology.

  9. O.R. 23, ii:518.

  10. Ibid., ii:552, 554–56, 592, 594; Rosecrans to Halleck, Aug. 1, 1863, Civil War Collection, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.

  11. Rosecrans to Lincoln, Aug. 1, 1863, Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress; Lincoln to Ro
secrans, Aug. 10, 1863, Basler, Collected Works, 6:377–78.

  12. Daniel Harvey Hill, “Chickamauga—The Great Battle of the West,” Clarence C. Buel and Robert U. Johnson, eds., Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, 4 vols. (New York: The Century Co., 1888), 3:644.

  13. Burlingame and Ettlinger, Inside Lincoln’s White House, 85, entry of Sept. 27, 1863.

  14. David Homer Bates, Lincoln in the Telegraph Office (New York: The Century Co., 1907), 202; Lincoln to Rosecrans, Sept. 21, 1863 (two dispatches), Lincoln to Burnside, Sept. 21, 25, 1863, Basler, Collected Works, 6:469, 470, 472, 480–81.