Lincoln Part 51

The outcry against Grant made the President want to see for himself what was happening with the Army of the Potomac, and on June 20, accompanied by Tad, he made an unheralded visit to Grant's headquarters at City Point. Looking, as Horace Porter, one of Grant's aides, wrote, "very much like a boss undertaker" in his black suit, the President announced as he landed: "I just thought I would jump aboard a boat and come down and see you. I don't expect I can do any good, and in fact I'm afraid I may do harm, but I'll put myself under your orders and if you find me doing anything wrong just send me [off] right away."

For the next two days he visited with Grant, Meade, Butler, and the troops. Much of the time he rode Grant's large bay horse, Cincinnati. Though he managed the horse well, he was, as Porter remembered, "not a very dashing rider," and as his trousers gradually worked up above his ankles, he gave "the appearance of a country farmer riding into town wearing his Sunday clothes." As news of the President's arrival reached the troops, they gave cheers and enthusiastic shouts. When he rode out to see the African-American troops of the Eighteenth Corps, the soldiers "cheered, laughed, cried, sang hymns of praise, and shouted ... 'G.o.d bless Master Lincoln!' 'The Lord save Father Abraham!' 'The day of jubilee is come, sure.'" Telling frequent anecdotes and showing interest in every detail of army life, the President appeared to have no object in his visit, but his purpose emerged when there was talk of antic.i.p.ated military maneuvers. Quietly he interposed, "I cannot pretend to advise, but I do sincerely hope that all may be accomplished with as little bloodshed as possible."

Tired and sunburned, Lincoln returned to the White House on June 23, and Gideon Welles remarked that the trip had "done him good, physically, and strengthened him mentally." He took satisfaction in repeating what Grant had told him: "You will never hear of me farther from Richmond than now, till I have taken it. ... It may take a long summer day, but I will go in." But Attorney General Bates found the President "perceptably [sic], disappointed at the small measure of our success, in that region." More than ever Lincoln realized that the war would be long and costly.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

I Am Pretty Sure-Footed

In early July 1864 a visitor found Lincoln deeply depressed, "indeed quite paralyzed and wilted down." He had reason to feel blue. War weariness was spreading, and demands for negotiations to end the killing were becoming strident. In the Middle West the Copperhead movement was strong, and there were rumors of an insurrection intended to bring about an independent Northwest Confederation. The Democrats were organizing for their national convention to be held in Chicago at the end of August, and they were likely to adopt a peace platform. The Republicans were badly divided, and Lincoln was whipsawed between those who thought he was too lenient toward the South and those who thought him too severe. Worst of all, the Union armies appeared stalemated. Sherman, at the head of the Western armies, was approaching Atlanta but was not, apparently, nearer victory over Joseph E. Johnston. In the East, the Army of the Potomac was bogged down in a siege of Petersburg.

I

To make matters worse, Washington itself was once more threatened. In an attempt to relieve Grant's pressure on Richmond, Jubal A. Early, heading the Second Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia, marched down the Shenandoah Valley almost without opposition and on July 5 crossed the Potomac. His force was small-only about 15,000 men-but as it spread out over the Maryland countryside, it was strong enough to levy tribute from Hagerstown and Frederick before turning east toward Washington. On July 9 at the Monocacy River the invaders pushed aside the ill-a.s.sorted Union defending force of green hundred-day volunteers commanded by General Lew Wallace and moved close to the national capital.

It seemed that n.o.body was in charge of the defenses of Washington-or perhaps everybody was. Off in Virginia, Grant doubted that the Confederates were making any significant northward movement and was reluctant to divert troops from the siege of Petersburg. Stanton questioned the seriousness of Early's raid. Halleck did what he could by giving rifles to the clerks in the government offices and arming the ambulatory soldiers in the hospitals, but it was far from clear that this makeshift force could hold off the Confederate invaders.

Alarmed, General Ethan Allen Hitchc.o.c.k tried to alert the President that the capital was in great danger, but Lincoln wearily replied, "We are doing all we can." Early's army might not be strong enough to hold Washington, Hitchc.o.c.k warned, but if they occupied it for only a few days the nation would be dishonored and the Confederacy would be recognized abroad. He insisted that Grant ought to be directed to send reinforcements. Seeming "almost crushed" and speaking very faintly, Lincoln responded that he would confer with the Secretary of War.

Unlike many in the capital, the President was not worried about his own safety. He only reluctantly obeyed Stanton's directive to move back into the city from the exposed Soldiers' Home where he, Mary, and Tad were spending the summer, and he was furious when he learned that Gustavus V. Fox had ordered a naval vessel to be ready in the Potomac in case the Lincolns needed to escape.

As during previous invasions of the North, he was less concerned about the security of Washington than with the capture of the Confederate force, but he was hamstrung by his pledge not to interfere with Grant's operations. Knowing how severely he had been criticized for meddling with military matters, especially in the case of McClellan, he was reluctant now to give direct orders to his general-in-chief. All he felt he could do was to keep a close watch over Early's progress and try to prevent panic in Washington and Baltimore. But when Grant grandly announced that there were already enough forces in the area to defeat the invaders and offered to come to the capital himself only if the President thought it necessary, Lincoln responded on July 10 that he should leave enough men to retain his hold on Petersburg and "bring the rest [of your army] with you personally, and make a vigorous effort to destroy the enemie's force in this vicinity." But the President ended his telegram: "This is what I think, upon your suggestion, and is not an order."

Still not understanding the seriousness of the threat, Grant chose to remain where he was, dispatching some veteran troops of the Sixth Corps, under General Horatio G. Wright, to a.s.sist in the defense of Washington. On July 11, before they could arrive, Early's men had already pushed down the Seventh Street Pike, marched through Silver Spring, where Francis Preston Blair, Sr., and Postmaster General Montgomery Blair both had houses, and approached the st.u.r.dy but feebly manned defenses of Fort Stevens. The Confederates drove in the Union pickets and came within 150 yards of the fort before artillery fire forced them back.

Lincoln was in the fort when it was first attacked. Having driven out from Washington in his carriage, he mounted to the front parapet. He borrowed a field gla.s.s from signal officer Asa Townsend Abbott and looked out over the field where the Confederates were advancing. "He stood there with a long frock coat and plug hat on, making a very conspicuous figure," Abbott recalled. When the Confederates came within shooting distance, an officer twice cautioned Lincoln to get down, but he paid no attention. Then a man standing near him was shot in the leg, and a soldier roughly ordered the President to get down or he would have his head knocked off. He coolly descended, got into his carriage, and was driven back to the city, where he went to the wharf to greet troops of the Sixth Corps, "chatting familiarly with the veterans, and now and then, as if in compliment to them, biting at a piece of hard tack which he held in his hand."

The next day Early made one last effort to capture the capital. Once again the heaviest fighting was at Fort Stevens, and President and Mrs. Lincoln, along with many other prominent public officials and their wives, came out to witness the fighting. Thoughtlessly Wright invited the President to mount the parapet in order to get a clear view as Union soldiers charged the enemy line, and the general recorded that Lincoln "evinced remarkable coolness and disregard of danger." After a surgeon standing near him was shot, Wright ordered the parapet cleared and asked the President to step down. Lincoln insisted on remaining until the general said he would have him removed forcibly. "The absurdity of the idea of sending off the President under guard seemed to amuse him," Wright recalled, "but, in consideration of my earnestness in the matter, he agreed to compromise by sitting behind the parapet instead of standing upon it."

After the failure of his final a.s.sault, Early retreated from Washington. Wright made a halfhearted attempt to follow the Confederates, but he soon halted, as Lincoln said scornfully, "for fear he might come across the rebels and catch some of them." Browning found the President "in the dumps," lamenting "that the rebels who had besieged us were all escaped." Though half a dozen generals-Wright, Hunter, Sigel, Wallace, and others-were involved, n.o.body was in charge of pursuing the enemy. As a.s.sistant Secretary of War Charles A. Dana wrote Grant: "There is no head to the whole and it seems indispensable that you should at once appoint one Gen Halleck will not give orders except as he receives them-The President will give none, and until you direct positively and explicitly what is to be done everything will go on in the deplorable and fatal way in which it has gone on for the past week."

Lincoln's patience, even with Grant, began to wear thin. Early continued to stage raids from the Shenandoah, and on July 30 his men rode into Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, demanded a ransom of $500,000 in currency or $100,000 in gold, and, when the townsmen were unable to pay it, burned the town. Northern newspapers decried the humiliation of the raids, which showed "there is folly or incompetence somewhere in our military administration," but Grant, still entrenched before Petersburg, seemed little concerned. Not even a personal visit from the President, who summoned him to Fort Monroe on July 31, stirred the general from the lethargy into which he had unaccountably lapsed. On hearing of Early's continuing activities, he telegraphed that all the Union forces in the Shenandoah Valley command should put themselves south of the enemy and follow him to the death. Lincoln replied that his strategy was just right, but he added tartly: "Please look over the despatches you may have rece[i]ved from here... and discover, if you can, that there is any idea in the head of any one here, of 'putting our army South of the enemy' or of [']following him to the death' in any direction." "I repeat to you," the President insisted, "it will neither be done nor attempted unless you watch it every day, and hour, and force it." Called to heel, Grant immediately started for Washington, and after consultation with the President named the brilliant young cavalry officer Philip Sheridan to command all the Union forces operating in the Valley.

II

It was not only Grant who tried Lincoln's patience during these unusually hot, depressing summer months of 1864. Usually he was ready to spend countless hours listening to visitors who brought him their complaints and pet.i.tions, sometimes over quite trivial matters, but now he had had enough. When two citizens of Maine asked him to intervene to settle a personal problem, the President sharply responded: "You want me to end your suspense? I'll do so. Dont let me hear another word about your case." A few days later his anger erupted again when Charles Gibson resigned as solicitor in the Court of Claims, protesting the radicalism of the Republican platform but expressing grat.i.tude to the President for treating him with "personal kindness and consideration." With what Bates called "blind impetuosity" Lincoln lashed back that there were "two small draw-backs upon Mr. Gibson's right to still receive such treatment, one of which is that he never could learn of his giving much attention to the duties of his office, and the other is this studied attempt of Mr. Gibson's to stab him."

In calmer times Lincoln would have ignored a semiliterate communication from a Pennsylvania man who urged him to remember that "white men is in cla.s.s number one and black men is in cla.s.s number two and must be governed by white men forever." But now, in his irascible mood, he drafted a reply to be sent out over Nicolay's signature requesting the writer to inform him "whether you are either a white man or black one, because in either case, you can not be regarded as an entirely impartial judge." "It may be," the President continued, in an unusual tone of sarcasm, "that you belong to a third or fourth cla.s.s of yellow or red men, in which case the impartiality of your judgment would be more apparant."

Lincoln's sharp temper extended at times even to his closest advisers. Montgomery Blair, furious because Early's men had burned his house in Silver Spring, denounced the "poltroons and cowards" responsible for the defenses of Washington. Halleck, always defensive of professional military men, demanded that the President either endorse "such wholesale denouncement and accusation" or dismiss Blair. Lincoln replied that he did not approve the Postmaster General's remarks but that his words, which "may have been hastily said in a moment of vexation at so severe a loss," were not sufficient grounds for removing him. "I propose continuing to be myself the judge as to when a member of the Cabinet shall be dismissed," he said sternly, and he took the unusual step of reading to the entire cabinet a carefully prepared memorandum: "I must myself be the judge, how long to retain in, and when to remove any of you from, his position. It would greatly pain me to discover any of you endeavoring to procure anothers removal, or, in any way to prejudice him before the public. Such endeavor would be a wrong to me; and much worse, a wrong to the country."

On the more important issue of possible peace negotiations with the Confederates, the President was obliged to control his anger. Indeed, he gained a certain sardonic pleasure from his skillful handling of the question. The prime mover was the erratic and excitable editor of the New York Tribune. Just as Early's men were approaching the capital, Greeley wrote Lincoln that his "irrepressible friend" William C. ("Colorado") Jewett was certain that representatives of the Confederate government were on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls with full authority to negotiate a peace. Greeley urged the President to explore the possibility, because the country was in such desperate shape. A full and generous announcement of Union conditions for ending the war, even if they were not accepted, would remove the "wide-spread conviction that the Government and its prominent supporters are not anxious for Peace" and help the Republican cause in the fall elections.

Correctly Lincoln suspected a trap. He could not know why the three Confederate emissaries-former Mississippi Congressman Jacob Thompson, former Alabama Senator Clement C. Clay, and Professor James P. Holcombe of the University of Virginia-were in Canada, but his instincts told him that their purpose was not to make peace but to meddle in Northern politics with a view to influencing the presidential election.

He could not reject the proposed negotiations outright, even though he thought Greeley unreliable and mendacious. But this chosen intermediary of the Confederates had the power to shape Northern opinion. The New York Tribune, widely distributed in the West as well as in the East, boasted the largest national circulation of any newspaper. The editor's letter, which reminded the President "how intently the people desire any peace consistent with the national integrity and honor" and that an offer of fair terms would "prove an immense and sorely needed advantage to the national cause," thinly masked a threat to go public in case Lincoln turned down this opportunity. If the Tribune portrayed the President as flatly rejecting a reasonable peace negotiation, it could do irreparable damage.

Shrewdly Lincoln solved his problem by naming Greeley himself as his emissary to the Confederates at Niagara and authorizing him to bring to Washington under safe conduct "any person anywhere professing to have any proposition of Jefferson Davis in writing, for peace, embracing the restoration of the Union and abandonment of slavery." Greeley objected. For all his countrified looks and his shuffling gait, the editor was no fool, and he was unwilling to become "a confidant, far less an agent in such negotiations." But the President refused to let him off the hook. "I not only intend a sincere effort for peace," he wrote Greeley, "but I intend that you shall be a personal witness that it is made." When Greeley continued to delay, the President expressed disappointment: "I was not expecting you to send me a letter, but to bring me a man, or men." He then ordered John Hay to accompany Greeley to Niagara Falls, bearing a letter that spelled out the terms on which he was willing to deal with the Confederate emissaries.

Lincoln himself drafted the letter, consulting only Seward. Addressed "To Whom It May Concern," it read: "Any proposition which embraces the restoration of peace, the integrity of the whole Union, and the abandonment of slavery... will be received and considered by the Executive government of the United States." It also offered safe-conduct to the Confederate negotiators and "liberal terms on other substantial and collateral points."

The letter reflected Lincoln's careful balancing of political considerations against military needs. He could best promote his chances in the fall election by requiring only minimal conditions for beginning negotiations with the Confederates. If he announced that reunification of the nation was the sole condition for peace, he would cement the alliance that he had been trying for months to build with the War Democrats, who loyally supported his efforts to restore the Union, even though many of them had reservations about his emanc.i.p.ation policy. If, as he antic.i.p.ated, Jefferson Davis rejected this reasonable, lenient offer, these Democrats could more easily favor the reelection of a Republican President.

But there was an unacceptable military risk in this approach. Conceivably the Confederates might accept reunion as a condition for discussing peace. If they did, they could propose a cease-fire during the progress of any negotiations, and Lincoln knew that the people were so war-weary and exhausted that it would be almost impossible to resume hostilities once arms were laid down. "An armistice-a cessation of hostilities-is the end of the struggle," he concluded, "and the insurgents would be in peaceable possession of all that has been struggled for."

Consequently he had to appear open to peace negotiations while proposing terms that would make them impossible. The first of his conditions, the restoration of the Union, was easy to predict; that was what the war, from the outset, had been about. But the second, requiring "the abandonment of slavery" as a condition for peace talks, was a surprise. It went considerably beyond his own Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation or any law of Congress. The Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation had freed slaves only in specified areas and had not ended the inst.i.tution of slavery itself, and Congress had just failed to adopt the Thirteenth Amendment outlawing slavery. This condition was one Lincoln knew the Confederates would never accept.

Lincoln expected that the Confederate emissaries would spurn his offer. When they rushed to print his "To Whom It May Concern" letter, in order to show that he had torpedoed meaningful peace talks, he countered by publicizing the report he had just received from James R. Gilmore and James F. Jaquess, who had recently conducted their own unofficial peace mission to Richmond. There Jefferson Davis told them: "The war ... must go on till the last man of this generation falls in his tracks,... unless you acknowledge our right to self-government. We are not fighting for slavery. We are fighting for Independence,-and that, or extermination, we will have." Reasonable people could only conclude that neither President wanted serious peace negotiations.

III

The New York Herald announced that publication of the President's "To Whom It May Concern" letter "sealed Lincoln's fate in the coming Presidential campaign." By making abolition as much a war aim as Union, the President gave new strength to the Democratic party, preparing for its national convention in Chicago at the end of August. Opposition leaders declared the letter proved Lincoln did not really want to end the war "even if an honorable peace were within his grasp." "All he has a right to require of the South is submission to the Const.i.tution," Democratic editors announced. They were sure that "the people of the loyal states will teach him, they will not supply men and treasure to prosecute a war in the interest of the black race."

The President's letter also undermined his support in his own party. At first, oddly enough, the erosion was most noticeable among the Radicals. Greeley's animus toward the President increased after his venture into amateur diplomacy became a subject of ridicule. He was not alone. Radicals, who should have been pleased by the President's firm insistence on abolition, felt they had Lincoln on the run, and they began to express all their pent-up grievances and frustrations at the President's slowness, his timidity, his indecisiveness, his fence-straddling, his incompetence, his leniency toward the rebels. Chase, though ostensibly out of politics, spent much of the summer in New England conferring with other anti-Lincoln Republicans and spreading the news that there was "great and almost universal dissatisfaction with Mr. Lincoln among all earnest men." In Boston he frequently conferred with Sumner, who grumbled that the country needed "a president with brains; one who can make a plan and carry it out." Pomeroy, the original head of the Chase movement, and Wade, coauthor of the reconstruction bill Lincoln had just vetoed, joined them for a conference, which, as a newspaper correspondent shrewdly surmised, "boded no good to Father Abraham." Radical disaffection was not confined to New England. In Iowa, Grimes concluded: "This entire administration has been a disgrace from the very beginning to every one who had any thing to do with bringing it into power. I take my full share of the... shame to myself. I can atone for what I have done no otherwise than in refusing to be instrumental in continuing it."

On August 5 this dissatisfaction with Lincoln exploded with the publication of a protest by Wade and Henry Winter Davis against Lincoln's "grave Executive usurpation" in pocket-vetoing their reconstruction bill. The congressmen found the President's public message explaining the reasons for his action even more offensive than the veto. "A more studied outrage on the legislative authority of the people has never been perpetrated," they fumed; it was "a blow at the friends of his Administration, at the rights of humanity, and at the principles of republican government." Lincoln must know that "the authority of Congress is paramount and must be respected ... ; and if he wishes our support, he must confine himself to his executive duties-to obey and execute, not make the laws."

Publication of the Wade-Davis "Manifesto," as it was generally called, produced a short-lived political commotion. Democrats, of course, enjoyed the spectacle of prominent congressional leaders attacking the presidential nominee of their own party, and they congratulated "the country that two Republicans have been found willing at last to resent the encroachments of the executive on the authority of Congress." The manifesto, according to the New York World, was "a blow between the eyes which will daze the President." The New York Herald, always glad to jab at the administration, called it an acknowledgment that Lincoln was "an egregious failure" who ought "to retire from the position to which, in an evil hour, he was exalted." But the rhetoric of the proclamation was so excessive and the accusations against Lincoln so extreme that the charges backfired. Most Republican papers criticized Wade and Davis more severely than they did the President.

Lincoln did not read the manifesto. He had no desire to get involved in a controversy with its authors, he told Welles. The attack saddened him, and he admitted to Noah Brooks, "To be wounded in the house of one's friends is perhaps the most grievous affliction that can befall a man." But he refused to brood about it. "It is not worth fretting about," he joked; "it reminds me of an old acquaintance, who, having a son of a scientific turn, bought him a microscope. The boy went around, experimenting with his gla.s.s upon everything One day, at the dinner-table, his father took up a piece of cheese. 'Don't eat that, father,' said the boy; 'it is full of wrigglers.' 'My son,' replied the old gentleman, taking ... a huge bite, 'let 'em wriggle; I can stand it if they can.'"

Less public, but more dangerous to the President, was a Radical plan to replace Lincoln, already the official nominee of his party, with another candidate who would be more positive and energetic, who would be more deeply committed to equal rights, and who would, presumably, have a greater chance of success. Little groups of Radicals in Boston, Cincinnati, and, especially, New York concocted plans for summoning a new Republican nominating convention. Some of the schemers favored Chase; others, Butler. Few looked to Fremont, whose candidacy was already failing, and they tried to get him to withdraw from the race on the condition that Lincoln did so. Most put their hopes on Grant.

In a preliminary meeting on August 18, about twenty-five Radicals gathered at the house of Mayor George Opd.y.k.e of New York. The editors of the major newspapers-Greeley of the Tribune, Parke G.o.dwin of the Evening Post, Theodore Tilton of the Independent, and George Wilkes of the Spirit of the Times-were present, as were Wade, Davis, and Governor John A. Andrew of Ma.s.sachusetts. Chase sent his regrets, hoping that the deliberations would be "fruitful, of benefit to our country, never more in need of wise words and fearless action by and among patriotic men." Sumner too stayed away. "I do not as yet see the Presidential horizon," he explained. "I wait for the blue lights of [the Democratic convention at] Chicago, which will present the true outlines." Those who did attend-the diarist George Templeton Strong termed them "our wire-pullers and secret, unofficial governors"-decided to send out a circular letter calling for a new convention, to be held at Cincinnati on September 28, which would "concentrate the union strength on some one candidate who commands the confidence of the country, even by a new nomination if necessary." Less politely Davis said that the convention was intended "to get rid of Mr Lincoln and name new candidates." To make final arrangements they promised to meet again on August 30.

Inevitably reports of these plans reached Lincoln's ears. He was neither surprised nor worried by most of the schemes to replace him as the nominee of the Republican party, but he was alarmed when he heard that the dissidents were thinking of running Grant. He did not think the general had political aspirations but, concluding that he ought to sound him out again, he asked Colonel John Eaton, who had worked closely with Grant in caring for the freedmen in the Mississippi Valley, to go to the Army of the Potomac and ascertain his views. At City Point, Eaton told Grant that many people thought he ought to run for President, not as a party man but as a citizens' candidate, in order to save the Union. Bringing his hand down on the arm of his chair, Grant replied: "They can't do it! They can't compel me to do it!" He went on to say that he considered it "as important for the cause that [Lincoln] should be elected as that the army should be successful in the field." When Eaton reported the conversation to the President, his relief was obvious. "I told you," he said, "they could not get him to run until he had closed out the rebellion."