Lincoln Part 43

By spring the President was urging a ma.s.sive recruitment of Negro troops. When neither General Butler nor General Fremont accepted his offer to go South and raise a black army, Lincoln turned directly to men already in the field. "The colored population is the great available and yet unavailed of, force for restoring the Union," he reminded Andrew Johnson, whom he had appointed military governor of Tennessee, and he urged Johnson to take the lead in raising a force of black troops. "The bare sight of fifty thousand armed, and drilled black soldiers on the banks of the Mississippi," he predicted, "would end the rebellion at once."

Eventually he found it necessary to be more aggressive. As the spring campaigns were about to get under way, he authorized General Daniel Ullmann of New York to raise a brigade of volunteers from the freedmen in Louisiana. In a more ambitious undertaking he and Stanton sent Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas into the Mississippi Valley to recruit blacks; by the end of 1863 Thomas had enrolled twenty regiments of African-Americans.

Along with supplying troops, Lincoln made it his responsibility to see that the armies had the best, and most up-to-date, arms. In this effort he was constantly hampered by the army bureaucracy, slow-moving and hidebound. James W. Ripley, his chief of ordnance, who had been born in 1794, was a traditionalist, who objected to every new idea and referred every innovation to a board of inquiry, where most were killed. Ripley was opposed to the breech-loading rifle, to the repeating rifle, to the "coffee-mill gun" (a precursor of the machine gun), and to virtually all other military novelties. The President found the navy more willing to experiment, as the enormous risk that Secretary Welles took in supporting the Monitor proved, but here, too, the bureaucratic machinery often worked creakingly.

Lincoln, on the other hand, was interested in any new ideas that promised to shorten the war-including a number that were wholly impractical. He spent a good deal of time with one Francis L. Capen, who claimed that he could save thousands of lives and millions of dollars through his expert prediction of the weather. After a trial of the scheme, Lincoln recorded on April 28: "It seems to me Mr. Capen knows nothing about the weather, in advance. He told me three days ago that it would not rain again till the 30th of April or 1st. of May. It is raining now and has been for ten hours. I can not spare any more time to Mr. Capen."

Always interested in machinery and gadgets, Lincoln acc.u.mulated models of proposed new weapons-a cuira.s.s of polished blue steel far too heavy for a soldier to carry into battle, a grenade that served as a presidential paperweight, a bra.s.s cannon, which he used to hold down land patents. Himself an inventor, he wanted to give those who came up with fresh ideas a fair chance. Sometimes he tried out their inventions on the back lawn of the White House. More often he went to the Washington Navy Yard, where Dahlgren was always ready to test new weapons and explosives. Secretary Welles thought Dahlgren was a courtier who was trying to ingratiate himself with the President, and no doubt he hoped to advance his own career. But Lincoln found the lean fifty-two-year-old Philadelphian a man of broad-ranging intellectual curiosity and of sound judgment. Hardly a week pa.s.sed that he did not visit the Navy Yard, sometimes to escape the pressure from job hunters and other visitors at the White House, more often to witness the trials of some new weapon or explosive.

He took great interest, for instance, in a repeating rifle of a French inventor named Rafael (or perhaps "Raphael") and referred this "new patern of gun" to Dahlgren for testing. Dahlgren got good results and invited the President to a demonstration at the Navy Yard. Accompanied by Seward, Stanton, and a correspondent of the New York Tribune, the President spent more than two hours watching the machine gun shoot at targets on the Potomac. Afterward there was talk about how the mechanism of the gun prevented the escape of gas at the breech, and the President said, with a mischievous glance at the Tribune correspondent, "Now have any of you heard of any machine, or invention, for preventing the escape of 'gas' from newspaper establishments?"

The chief benefit from the President's exertions was perhaps that he got out of doors and improved his health. Few of the new weapons he examined proved practicable or ever got into the hands of the soldiers. What Gideon Welles called Lincoln's "well-intentioned but irregular proceedings" in the testing of new weapons made him "liable to be constantly imposed upon by sharpers and adventurers."

VIII

After Congress adjourned in March, Lincoln found himself, unexpectedly, with time on his hands. There were no senators to be soothed, no representatives to be placated, no bills to be signed. Talk of foreign mediation had died down, and rumors of Copperhead uprisings in the West had abated. One day in April, after a long visit with Dahlgren at the Navy Yard, the President remarked good-humoredly that it was time for him to leave. "Well I will go home," he said; "I had no business here; but, as the lawyer said, I had none anywhere else."

That moment of tranquillity signified that the plans for a great spring a.s.sault on the Confederacy were finally in place. A huge armada, including both ironclad monitors and conventional warships, was being prepared to attack Charleston, the heart of the Confederacy. Generals Grant and Sherman were readying a new campaign to capture Vicksburg, the last major link between the eastern states of the Confederacy and the trans-Mississippi region. From New Orleans, General Banks was supposed to push north to join forces with Grant. In eastern Tennessee, Rosecrans was poised for a drive that would capture Chattanooga, break the most important rail connection between the seaboard and Mississippi Valley states of the Confederacy, and, most important of all from Lincoln's point of view, liberate the longsuffering Unionists of the mountain regions. And in the East, Hooker's vast Army of the Potomac was eager to advance against Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia.

Anxiously Lincoln watched all these elements in his grand strategy that could bring about the collapse of the Confederacy. He frequently consulted Secretary Welles about the naval expedition off South Carolina, and he went almost daily to the War Department to learn of preparations and progress for the military campaigns. He kept the Army of the Potomac under closest scrutiny, partly because it was so near at hand, partly because he had residual doubts about Hooker. But that general in the months since he a.s.sumed command had proved, for all his bl.u.s.ter and bragging, an expert at army organization, and the Army of the Potomac was in better physical shape and had higher morale than at any time in its history.

In early April, Lincoln, perhaps at the suggestion of Mary, who thought her husband needed respite from the cares of office, decided to visit Hooker's headquarters in northern Virginia. The general's welcoming telegram set the tone for the visit: "I... only regret that your party is not as large as our hospitality."

Accompanied by Mrs. Lincoln and Tad, together with Attorney General Bates, Dr. Anson G. Henry, an old friend from Springfield, Noah Brooks, the Washington correspondent of the Sacramento Union, and a few others, Lincoln sailed down the Potomac on the unarmed Carrie Martin and, after being delayed by a snowstorm, was taken by train to Hooker's headquarters. On April 6 he reviewed the entire cavalry of the Army of the Potomac, which Hooker had recently reorganized into a single corps, and the soldiers, though they found him "an ungainly looking man," gave him a hearty welcome because, as one lieutenant wrote in his diary, they "respect him for his integrity, and good management of the war." Mrs. Lincoln received a less favorable rating as "a pleasant, but not an intelligent looking woman." But Tad was the star of the occasion. Booted and spurred, he galloped along on a pony, clinging tenaciously to the saddle with his gray cloak billowing behind him.

During the next three days, in addition to visiting soldiers in the army hospital, the President reviewed more than 60,000 of the troops under Hooker's command. Most of the time he rode a large bay horse, and if, as one soldier remarked, his appearance was "not very graceful, and... hardly calculated to inspire much admiration," he was nevertheless roundly cheered by the soldiers as he rode past them. Mary Lincoln, accompanied by Attorney General Bates, watched the reviews from a carriage drawn by four spanking bays. Though the reviews were exhausting, they were impressive, and Lincoln did not fail to notice the high state of readiness: "Uniforms were clean, arms bright as new, equipments in sp[l]endid condition." As the presidential party left the army headquarters, Lincoln could afford a feeling of satisfaction that he had done everything possible to make the forthcoming campaign a success, and the salute he received at Aquia Creek from all the vessels in port and locomotives on sh.o.r.e, with whistles blown, bells rung, and flags displayed, should have given him a sense of confidence.

But with his native caution, the President was not ready to predict victory. When asked about the chances for Union success in the operations that were already under way, he remarked, "I expect the best, but I am prepared for the worst." Even during the euphoria of his visit to army headquarters, some nagging doubts arose. While he was still in Hooker's camp, discouraging information trickled in from Confederate newspapers and rebel pickets about the a.s.sault on Charleston.

Lincoln was also troubled by some things he saw and heard at Hooker's camp. In describing his plans to the President, the general frequently prefaced remarks with "When I get to Richmond" or "After we have taken Richmond." Taking Noah Brooks aside, Lincoln remarked in a whisper: "That is the most depressing thing about Hooker. It seems to me that he is over-confident." He was also troubled that Hooker and his generals were debating whether the best road to Richmond was by going around Lee's left flank or moving around his right flank, and he jotted down for their guidance a memorandum that combined common sense and a superior military insight: "Our prime object is the enemies' army in front of us, and is not with, or about, Richmond-at all, unless it be incidental to the main object." Finally, as he heard plans of battle discussed, he feared his new commander of the Army of the Potomac might follow his predecessors in throwing in his forces a few at a time. Not wishing to a.s.sume personal responsibility for planning a battle, the President just before leaving told Hooker and General Darius N. Couch: "I want to impress upon you two gentlemen in your next fight... put in all of your men."

Over the next few weeks all of Lincoln's forebodings seemed to be justified. On April 7, while he was with the Army of the Potomac, Samuel F. Du Pont's fleet of nine ironclads steamed into Charleston harbor and attacked Fort Sumter. By the end of the day five of Du Pont's ironclads had been badly damaged, and he was forced to withdraw. Lincoln, who, as Gideon Welles observed, had "often a sort of intuitive sagacity," never had high hopes for this largest naval operation of the Civil War; Du Pont's dispatches and movements reminded him of McClellan's. All he could do now was to put the best face possible on this major defeat. To someone who remarked that Du Pont had suffered a repulse at Charleston, he replied sharply: "A check, sir, not a repulse." He ordered the fleet to hold its position inside the bar near Charleston, in order to prevent the Confederates from erecting new defenses or batteries.

Equally disappointing were the operations on the Mississippi River. After Grant's army spent much of the spring digging a ca.n.a.l on the Louisiana side of the Mississippi River in the hope of bypa.s.sing Vicksburg, the banks caved in, and the whole enterprise was abandoned. An attempt by Union warships to run the batteries of Vicksburg was successful but costly. Then Grant, taking no one into his confidence, marched his troops down the west side of the river, crossed into Mississippi, and disappeared, with no one in Washington knowing where he was or what he planned to do. Banks, after a delay so long that his movement was of no a.s.sistance to Grant, moved up the Mississippi and staged an ill-timed and b.l.o.o.d.y a.s.sault on Port Hudson, Louisiana.

By way of contrast, in Tennessee, Rosecrans offered only inaction. He seemed to operate under the curious idea that the art of war permitted only one campaign to be fought at a time. While Grant was moving against Vicksburg, the rules required him to remain stationary in eastern Tennessee. Nothing Lincoln could do or say could disabuse Rosecrans of this notion. Instead of staging an offensive against Bragg, or, at the least, sending reinforcements to Grant, he spent his time in worrying about alleged slights and indignities. Lincoln was finally obliged to a.s.sure him, "I really can not say that I have heard any complaints of you." But Rosecrans was unconvinced and remained inactive.

Lincoln watched most closely the Army of the Potomac, where, on April 28, Hooker began moving 70,000 of his men across the Rappahannock River and threatened to crush Lee's flank. The President had asked to be informed of Hooker's strategy before the battle, and he wanted frequent dispatches once the fighting began. When he did not receive sufficiently detailed information, he wired General Daniel b.u.t.terfield, Hooker's chief of staff: "Where is Gen. Hooker? Where is Sedgwick? where is Stoneman?" His concern was, once more, that all the Union forces be thrown into the engagement.

The concern was warranted. Hooker, after a most promising start, paused at Chancellorsville and failed to push his offensive. Lee took advantage of his hesitation, boldly divided his much smaller army, and sent "Stonewall" Jackson by a circuitous route to fall on Hooker's right. The Confederates gained another major victory, and Hooker was forced to retreat to the north side of the Rappahannock.

News of the battle of Chancellorsville was slow in reaching Washington. Highly optimistic predictions after the first day's fighting withered as more and more bad news came in. Lincoln spent most of the time at the War Department, showing "a feverish anxiety to get facts." He feared that Hooker had been licked, although he still held on to a shred of hope. But in midafternoon of May 6, holding a telegram in his hand, he came into the room in the White House where Dr. Henry and Noah Brooks were talking. His face was ashen, and his voice trembled as he said to his guests, "Read it-news from the Army." At no other time, Brooks thought, did the President appear "so broken, so dispirited, and so ghostlike." As Brooks and Dr. Henry read of Hooker's defeat and his retreat back across the river, Lincoln paced up and down the room, exclaiming: "My G.o.d! my G.o.d! What will the country say! What will the country say!"

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

A New Birth of Freedom

The weeks after the battle of Chancellorsville were among the most depressing of Lincoln's presidency. Everything went wrong-at Charleston, at Vicksburg, in eastern Tennessee, and, especially, in northern Virginia. Failure of Union arms led to renewed protests against the war and to demands for peace negotiations. Controversy over the arrest of Vallandigham and the suppression of civil liberties mounted. So did complaints about the incompetence of Lincoln's administration. At one end of the political spectrum a Democratic politician addressing a huge peace rally in New York City characterized the President as a donkey in a china shop and urged, "You must get him out or he will smash the crockery." At the other end Missouri Radical Republicans attacked Lincoln for his compromising, indecisive course and for refusing to put abolitionist generals like Fremont and Butler in command of the armies. Even more disturbing were reports that some army officers, like Major Charles J. Whiting of the Second United States Cavalry, were denouncing this "d.a.m.ned abolition n.i.g.g.e.r war," claiming that "the President had exceeded his authority in proclaiming the n.i.g.g.e.rs free, and in suspending the writ of Habeas Corpus, and that Republicans would not have the war cease, if they could.... They were all making money out of it, and consequently it was for their interest to prolong the war."

Grimly Lincoln informed his critics that it might be "a misfortune for the nation that he was elected President. But having been elected by the people, he meant to be President, and to perform his duty according to his best understanding, if he had to die for it." But the downward spiral of events during the past six months finally convinced the reluctant President that he had to exert more active leadership, both in the conduct of military operations and in the shaping of public opinion. Firmly taking the lead, he recovered much of the ground he had lost during the previous months of indecision and inaction.

I

The immediate issue after Chancellorsville was what to do about the Army of the Potomac. In public the President tried to be of good cheer, but in private he predicted that effects of the defeat at Chancellorsville "would be more serious and injurious than any previous act of the war."

Immediately he set about determining responsibility for the disaster, and on May 6, accompanied by Halleck, he went to the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac at Falmouth, Virginia. Pleased to discover that the "troops are none the worse for the campaign," he let it be known that he was "agreeably surprised with the situation." Less encouraging was the mental state of their commander. Hooker, as always, was "cool, clear and satisfied," unwilling to recognize his mistakes and unable to learn from his defeat.

In deciding on the general's future, Lincoln was torn. He genuinely liked Hooker, who had shown himself candid and brave. He also learned that the general had skillfully planned the battle and had been on the verge of victory until he was stunned by a falling beam when a Confederate cannonball hit his headquarters at the Chancellor house. Sardonically the President mused that if the ball had been aimed lower-so as to hit Hooker-the battle would have been a great Union success. On leaving Falmouth he announced to a newspaper correspondent that "his confidence in Gen. Hooker and his army [was] unshaken." When another reporter asked whether he intended to replace the general, he replied with some displeasure that since he had tried McClellan "a number of times, he saw no reason why he should not try General Hooker twice."

He was determined, though, to keep a closer personal control of the general's future operations. "What next?" he asked Hooker. Did the general have in mind a new movement against the enemy that would "help to supersede the bad moral effect of the recent one"? Hooker remarked that less than one-third of his army had been engaged at Chancellorsville and promised that in the next action "the operations of all the Corps" would be under his personal supervision. Lincoln did not remind him that was exactly what he had instructed the general to do before the battle.

Hooker had a plan-a hopelessly wrongheaded one. Learning that Lee was moving north of the Rappahannock, he proposed to cross that river and attack the Confederate rear guard at Fredericksburg. Promptly Lincoln warned, "I would not take any 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 the other." But Hooker seemed not to learn. Within a week he suggested that if Lee invaded the North the Army of the Potomac should march south and attack Richmond. Quietly Lincoln reminded him of the dangers of this harebrained scheme and pointed out a basic truth so many of his commanders seemed unable to grasp: "Lee's Army, and not Richmond, is your true objective point."

Certainly Hooker was obtuse, but the President himself was in part responsible for the general's failure. Though Lincoln had excellent strategic sense, which improved as the war progressed, he was not a professional military man and knew that he was not competent to draft proper orders for a military campaign. He also knew how much military men objected to what they regarded as meddling by a civilian. Consequently he deprecated the advice he offered as "my poor mite" and advanced ideas hesitantly, "incompetent as I may be." Expressing his wishes as suggestions, rather than commands, he relied on Halleck, his general-in-chief, to translate his ideas into military orders that the armies could follow.

Besides being c.u.mbersome, the system could not work because of Halleck. That general, as Lincoln knew very well, was unwilling to take the initiative or a.s.sume responsibility. Like McClellan, Halleck was a master of procrastination when he did not agree with the President's ideas. He could always find technical reasons why Lincoln's suggestions could not be carried out, and the President usually yielded to his objections, saying, "It being strictly a military question, it is proper I should defer to Halleck whom I have called here to counsel, advise and direct, in these matters, where he is an expert." Gideon Welles accurately described the resulting stalemate: "No one more fully realizes the magnitude of the occasion, and the vast consequences involved than the President-he wishes all to be done that can be done, but yet [in army operations] will not move or do except by the consent of the dull, stolid, inefficient and incompetent General-in-Chief."

In dealing with Hooker, Lincoln faced the further problem that Halleck disliked the commander of the Army of the Potomac, who had once borrowed money from him in California and failed to pay it back; indeed, Halleck had opposed Hooker's appointment. For his part, Hooker despised the general-in-chief and would have as little as possible to do with him. When he took command of the Army of the Potomac, he had insisted on communicating directly with the President, bypa.s.sing the War Department, yet, now, with Lee on the march, he complained that he had "not enjoyed the confidence of the Major General Commanding the Army."

As the Confederates swept through western Maryland, many in Washington panicked. Rumor had it that a steamer was anch.o.r.ed in the Potomac, ready to take the President and his cabinet to safety when the rebels arrived. But Lincoln was in excellent spirits, spending much of his time in the telegraph office of the War Department, joking and reading the latest dispatches. He improved the occasion to instruct the sober quartermaster general, Montgomery C. Meigs, about the writings of Orpheus C. Kerr. "Any one who has not read them must be a heathen," he exclaimed. The humorist's papers delighted him, he said, except when their wit was turned on him; then he found them unsuccessful and rather disgusting. "Now the hits that are given to you, Mr. Welles I can enjoy," he laughingly told the Secretary of the Navy, "but I dare say they may have disgusted you while I was laughing at them. So vice versa as regards myself."

Lincoln's good cheer stemmed from his conviction that Lee's invasion offered a chance to bag the entire Confederate army. The Army of the Potomac, facing the rebels on Union soil, could not "help beating them, if we have the man," Lincoln told Welles, but he worried that "Hooker may commit the same fault as McClellan and lose his chance."

That remark revealed his doubts about Hooker. Like everybody else, he heard reports that the general was drinking too much. He knew, too, that there had been much grumbling against Hooker since the defeat at Chancellorsville. Both General Darius N. Couch and General Henry W. Sloc.u.m asked the President to remove Hooker. In a long interview at the White House, General John F. Reynolds, disavowing any desire to command the Army of the Potomac himself, urged Lincoln to replace Hooker with his fellow Pennsylvanian George Gordon Meade. Lincoln demurred, saying that he was not inclined to throw away a gun because it had once missed fire but "would pick the lock and try it again," but he thought the complaints sufficiently serious to warn Hooker that he did not have the full confidence of some of his division commanders.

What eventually turned the President against his commanding general was Hooker's obdurate failure to follow directions. The general refused to recognize that Lincoln's homespun suggestions were, in fact, commands. At the same time, he also ignored Halleck's more specific orders, not realizing that they came from the President. Eventually Lincoln was forced to put Hooker in his place in a dispatch of two terse sentences: "To remove all misunderstanding, I now place you in the strict military relation to Gen. Halleck, of a commander of one of the armies, to the General-in-Chief of all the armies. I have not intended differently; but as it seems to be differently understood, I shall direct him to give you orders, and you to obey them."

II