Lincoln (101 page)

Much more important were the shifts that Lincoln, often with Halleck’s assistance, brought about in Grant’s strategic thinking. Grant was painfully aware that the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia for three long years had “fought more desperate battles than it probably ever before fell to the lot of two armies to fight, without materially changing the vantage ground of either.” He was convinced that success would never come through more such inconclusive engagements, and he proposed “an abandonment of all previously attempted lines to Richmond.” Instead he favored a series of massive raids against the Confederacy—not just by the cavalry, which was unable to inflict permanent damage, but by small armies of 60,000 men—designed to destroy the essential railway lines. One such raid, using Banks’s command at New Orleans, should move against Mobile and then proceed northward to cut the railroads in Alabama and Georgia. A second, under Sherman, should sweep through Georgia and destroy the main east-west transportation line of the Confederacy. A third, moving inland from Suffolk, Virginia, should demolish the rail lines between Weldon and Raleigh, North Carolina, on which Lee depended for supplies to his army.
This, Grant concluded, “would virtually force an evacuation of Virginia and indirectly of East Tennessee.”

Under the influence of Lincoln and Halleck, Grant abandoned nearly all of this plan. The President would not consent to weakening the force between Lee’s army and the national capital; he feared that while Grant was involved in a raid through North Carolina, Lee would seize Washington and again invade the North. Apart from that, Lincoln had developed a contempt for what he scornfully called “strategy.” What he thought was needed was not more maneuvering but assault after assault on the Confederate army. For months that was what he had been urging on Meade, without much success; now he expected Grant to fight.

Without even being aware that he was abandoning his original strategy, Grant developed a new plan for simultaneous massive attacks on the Confederate heartland by all the Union armies. Banks was to advance toward Mobile, Sherman was to move toward Atlanta, Sigel was to cut the Confederate rail line in the Shenandoah, Butler was to advance up the James River against Petersburg and, ultimately, Richmond, while Meade pushed the Army of Northern Virginia back to the Confederate capital. The concerted movement was to begin on the fifth of May.

When Lincoln learned of Grant’s new plan, he was, as Hay recorded, “powerfully reminded” of his “old suggestion so constantly made and as constantly neglected, to Buell and Halleck, et al., to move at once upon the enemy’s whole line so as to bring into action to our advantage our great superiority in numbers.” But he pretended to be surprised when Grant told him about it and, Grant recalled, “seemed to think it a new feature in war.” When Grant explained how all the armies could contribute to victory simply by advancing even if they won no battles, the President remarked, in all apparent innocence: “Oh, yes! I see that. As we say out West, if a man can’t skin he must hold a leg while somebody else does.”

Even with this greatly revised strategy Grant did not succeed in having things his own way. His plan to use Banks’s force for a raid on Mobile and central Alabama had to be scratched. Before Grant became general-in-chief, the War Department, at the President’s urging, had dispatched Banks on a campaign up the Red River, designed in part to liberate more of Louisiana from Confederate rule—and incidentally to liberate 50,000 to 150,000 bales of cotton thought to be stored in central and western Louisiana. Equally important in the President’s mind was the lesson that Banks’s success would send to the French in Mexico, where the Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian of Austria on April 10 accepted the throne of a puppet government protected by the troops of Napoleon III. The Red River expedition was a total disaster. Its only result was to prevent Banks’s army of 40,000 men from helping in Grant’s campaign.

But the other parts of Grant’s plan fell into place. In the early hours of Wednesday, May 4, the Army of the Potomac moved across the Rapidan River
to begin a new campaign against the Army of Northern Virginia. The next day Butler landed 30,000 troops on the south side of the James River, threatening Petersburg. On May 7, Sherman launched his campaign for the capture of Atlanta.

Lincoln watched the campaign with painful interest. For the first two days as Grant’s army plunged into the Wilderness, that trackless tangle of trees and undergrowth which had been the scene of Hooker’s defeat, he received no news because his general-in-chief had forbidden newspaper correspondents to use the telegraph. During this time the President haunted the War Department offices; an observer thought he was “waiting for despatches and, no doubt, sickening with anxiety.” Not until Friday morning did he receive even an indirect report from Grant: “Everything pushing along favorably.” At two o’clock the next morning he interviewed a correspondent from the
New York Tribune,
who had just left the army. Grant told him: “If you do see the President,... tell him that General Grant says there will be no turning back.” With that much reassurance Lincoln felt able to tell a Pennsylvania woman that he was “considerably cheered, just now, by favorable news” from the army, and in response to a serenade by a large crowd that assembled on the White House lawn he gave thanks to “the brave men,” their “noble commanders,” and “especially to our Maker” for victory.

Then the shattering real news began to come in. Grant had thrown his army of 100,000 men against Lee’s much smaller force in the Wilderness, attempting to flank it, and in two days of ferocious fighting had suffered more than 14,000 casualties. Unsuccessful in turning Lee’s army, Grant then moved east, only to encounter Lee again at Spotsylvania, where between May 10 and 19 more than 17,500 Union soldiers were killed or wounded. Over a period of two weeks the Army of the Potomac lost nearly 32,000 men, and thousands more were missing.

During these terrible days Lincoln tried to keep up a pretense of regular business, though his impatience and bitterness occasionally overcame him. Speaker Colfax found him pacing up and down his office, “his long arms behind his back, his dark features contracted still more with gloom,” as he exclaimed: “Why do we suffer reverses after reverses! Could we have avoided this terrible, bloody war!... Is it ever to end!” He hardly slept at all these nights. One morning Francis B. Carpenter, the young artist who was painting a picture he called
First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln,
caught sight of him in the hallway of the Executive Mansion, “clad in a long morning wrapper, pacing back and forth a narrow passage leading to one of the windows, his hands behind him, great black rings under his eyes, his head bent forward upon his breast—altogether... a picture of the effects of sorrow, care, and anxiety.”

Despite the hideous losses, the President did not despair, because Grant, unlike all the previous commanders of the Army of the Potomac, did not withdraw after his engagements with the enemy but continued to push against Lee’s army. Lincoln took great comfort from the message that Grant
sent Stanton on the seventh day of the fighting: “I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.” “It is the dogged pertinacity of Grant that wins,” the President said hopefully to John Hay.

During the weeks after the unsuccessful assault at Spotsylvania, Lincoln continued strongly to support the general. There was no alternative to Grant. Except for Sherman, whose capacity for independent command had yet to be fully tested, and George H. Thomas, who was considered too slow, there were no other generals who could be put in charge. Besides, Grant was carrying out the President’s own favored plan of operations. Lincoln did his best to keep his spirits up, and he was encouraged that Grant after each engagement went on to launch a new offensive. “The great thing about Grant,” Lincoln said during the battle of the Wilderness, “is his perfect coolness and persistency of purpose. . . . he is not easily excited ... and he has the
grit
of a bull-dog! Once let him get his ‘teeth’
in,
and nothing can shake him off.”

With a general-in-chief who shared his determination to destroy the Confederate armies, Lincoln directed his own efforts to seeing that the Union forces were adequately supplied and constantly reinforced. Manpower was a constant problem. Many of the Union soldiers had enlisted for three-year terms, which would expire in 1864. Though Congress offered special inducements in the way of bounties and furloughs to those who would reenlist, at least 100,000 decided not to. When the casualties from the Wilderness campaign were added to this number, it was obvious that more recruits were needed. Since volunteering had virtually ceased, Lincoln on May 17 felt forced to draft an order for the conscription of 300,000 additional men.

The order was never issued because on May 18 the
New York World
and the
Journal of Commerce
published a proclamation, purportedly originating in the White House, in which Lincoln announced that, “with a heavy heart, but an undiminished confidence in our cause,” he was ordering an additional draft of 400,000 men. This depressing news caused a flurry of speculation on Wall Street, and the price of gold, as measured in greenbacks, rose 10 percent. That was the object of the authors of the bogus proclamation, Joseph Howard, an editor of the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle,
and Francis A. Mallison, a reporter for that paper, who managed a fairly skillful imitation of Lincoln’s style. Doubtless Howard, who had worked for the
New York Times
and the
New York Tribune,
heard rumors of an impending draft call, and he took advantage of inside information in the hope of making a fortune in the gold market.

The Lincoln administration came down heavily on the two newspapers. In an order drafted by Stanton, Lincoln directed the army to “take possession by military force” of the premises of the two offending papers and ordered the arrest of their editors and proprietors. Shortly afterward authorities
discovered that Howard and Mallison were responsible, and the two men were imprisoned in Fort Lafayette.

Though the editors and owners of the papers were promptly released and the
World
and the
Journal of Commerce
resumed publication after two days, the episode further illustrated the determination, amounting almost to ferocity, with which Lincoln was prosecuting the war. Offered an opportunity to disavow responsibility for the order suppressing the newspapers by blaming subordinates, he refused to do so. He was already angry at the speculators and profiteers who were making money from the war, often by betting against the success of the government. Gold speculators—and Howard planned to be one—were a special object of his wrath. Banging his clenched fist on the table for emphasis, he told Governor Curtin: “I wish every one of them had his
devilish
head shot off!”

Fortunately for Lincoln neither the bogus proclamation nor the news of Grant’s losses in Virginia had much immediate effect on the slow political processes that were inevitably moving toward the Republican nominating convention. State after state continued to wheel into line behind the President. Support for Lincoln was strongest in the Western states, like California, Iowa, and Wisconsin, where National Union (Republican) conventions chose delegates unanimously pledged to vote for his renomination. In Illinois, one Republican wrote, the people “think that God tried his best when he made Mr Lincoln and they are all for his re election.”

In the East, Cameron, as he had promised, persuaded the Pennsylvania Republican convention to reinforce the endorsement already given by the state legislators, and the Keystone State sent a delegation, loaded with federal employees appointed by the President, to cast fifty-two votes for Lincoln. In Massachusetts, despite foot-dragging by Governor John A. Andrew and angry opposition from the abolitionist Wendell Phillips, the Republican convention instructed its twenty-four delegates to support the renomination of the President. The Ohio convention, composed as a critic said of “aspirants for Congress, who expect Administration favor,” echoed the earlier vote of Republicans in the legislature and strongly endorsed Lincoln, while rejecting a resolution that praised Chase’s services in the Treasury Department. In New York, an even larger prize with sixty-six convention votes, Thurlow Weed momentarily forgot his disenchantment with Lincoln and procured a delegation unanimous for the President.

The only remaining obstacle to Lincoln’s renomination was the convention of disaffected Republicans that assembled in Cleveland on May 31. Called to protest the “imbecile and vacillating policy of the present Administration in the conduct of the war,” it initially seemed a real threat to Lincoln, who had agents on the ground to observe and report on the proceedings. But the gathering was poorly attended, with only 350 to 400 persons present, only 158 of whom were actual delegates. Most of these represented the German-American element, especially in Missouri, where hatred of Lincoln burned bright and loyalty to Frémont was fierce. To these was added a small
contingent of ultra-Radical abolitionists from the Northeast, men who broke with William Lloyd Garrison, now a Lincoln supporter, and followed Wendell Phillips, who denounced the administration as “a civil and military failure” and attacked the President for supporting a reconstruction policy “more disastrous to liberty than even disunion.” Most of the delegates were political unknowns. Prominent anti-Lincoln Eastern Republicans, who hoped that the convention would nominate Grant and thus provide a real challenger to Lincoln in the National Union Convention, stayed away after learning that the assembly was heavily packed in favor of Frémont. Horace Greeley, who had earlier touted the Cleveland meeting, quietly withdrew the support of the
New York Tribune.