Lincoln (104 page)

In a shift of strategy, on June 14 he began moving the Army of the Potomac through the swamps of the Chickahominy River, where McClellan’s troops had fought in 1862, to the south side of the James River. There the Army of the Potomac, joining with Butler’s army, could be supplied by sea, and there
—in a return to Grant’s original strategic plan—it could cut the rail lines that connected Richmond to the South. Grant’s change of base was brilliantly executed, so that Lee had no certain idea of his whereabouts. Once his army had crossed the James, Grant launched an immediate assault on the heavily fortified city of Petersburg, through which three of the key railroads ran. Repulsed, he settled down for a siege. Now, for the first time, he contemplated a campaign of attrition; he would pin Lee’s army down so that no reinforcements could be sent to fight against Sherman.

In six weeks of incessant fighting the Union armies lost in killed and wounded nearly 100,000 men—more than the total number in Lee’s army at the beginning of the campaign. The people of the North, who had been overly optimistic when Grant assumed command of the armies, were slow to realize what was happening. Their newspapers, controlled by War Department censorship, told them that Grant had “won a great victory,” that the Army of the Potomac “again is victorious,” that the troops had been “skillfully, and bravely handled,” and that Grant had “succeeded, if not in defeating Lee, certainly in turning his strong position and forcing him to retreat step by step to the very confines of Richmond.” But then the daily black-bordered newspaper columns listing the dead brought home the enormity of war. So did the stories from newspaper correspondents and the letters from soldiers describing the suffering of the maimed and wounded. As thousands of the injured poured into the hospitals around Washington, it was no longer possible to conceal the costs of the campaign. The country shuddered with a sickening revulsion at the slaughter. Grieving for “our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying country,” Horace Greeley wrote the President of the widespread dread of “the prospect of fresh conscriptions, of further wholesale devastations, and of new rivers of human blood.”

Lincoln himself was sensitive to the suffering. His friend Isaac N. Arnold recorded that during these days he was “grave and anxious, and he looked like one who had lost the dearest member of his own family.” One evening, after riding past a long line of ambulances carrying the wounded to the hospital, he turned to Arnold in deep sadness and said: “Look yonder at those poor fellows. I cannot bear it. This suffering, this loss of life is dreadful.”

The Lincolns did what they could to mitigate the hardships. Mary Lincoln regularly visited army hospitals, bringing the wounded flowers from the White House conservatory and comforting words. For his part the President set aside a morning of nearly every week to review the court-martial sentences of soldiers who had found the stress of battle more than they could bear. One week he examined the records in sixty-seven cases; in another, seventy-two cases; in yet another, thirty-six cases. Whenever possible he found excuses to release the prisoners and allowed them to return to duty. He was, he explained, “trying to evade the butchering business lately.” But all his exertions could not erase the knowledge that in the final analysis he was responsible for all this suffering.

Increasingly he brooded over the war and his role in it. “Doesn’t it seem strange to you that I should be here?” he once asked Representative Daniel Voorhees of Indiana. “Doesn’t it strike you as queer that I, who couldn’t cut the head off of a chicken, and who was sick at the sight of blood, should be cast into the middle of a great war, with blood flowing all about me?” Often, when he could spare the time from his duties, he sought an answer to his questions in the well-thumbed pages of his Bible, reading most often the Old Testament prophets and the Psalms.

He found comfort and reassurance in the Bible. He was not a member of any Christian church, for he was put off by their forms and dogmas, and consequently he remained, as Mary Lincoln later said, “not a technical Christian.” But he drew from the Scriptures such solace that he was prepared to forget his earlier religious doubts. One evening during this dreadful summer of 1864, his old friend Joshua Speed found him intently reading the Bible. “I am glad to see you so profitably engaged,” said Speed.

“Yes,” replied the President, “I am profitably engaged.”

“Well,” commented the visitor, “if you have recovered from your skepticism, I am sorry to say that I have not.”

Looking his old comrade in the face, Lincoln said, “You are wrong, Speed, take all of this book upon reason that you can, and the balance on faith, and you will live and die a happier and better man.” He had come to feel, as he told a delegation of Baltimore African-Americans who presented him a magnificently bound Bible in appreciation of his work for the Negro, that “this Great Book... is the best gift God has given to man.”

Reading the Bible reinforced Lincoln’s long-held belief in the doctrine of necessity, a belief that admirably fitted the needs of his essentially passive personality. The idea that the actions of any individual were predetermined and shaped by the unknowable wishes of some Higher Power was not a new one for him, but with the burden of a never-ending war weighing ever more heavily on his shoulders, he reverted to it more and more frequently. In April he wrote a long letter to Albert G. Hodges, editor of the
Frankfort
(Kentucky)
Commonwealth,
explaining why he had felt compelled to shift from his inaugural pledge not to interfere with slavery to the policy of emancipation. It contained his most explicit view of individual responsibility: “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.” “Now,” he continued, “at the end of three years struggle the nation’s condition is not what either party, or any man devised, or expected. God alone can claim it.”

Again and again he reverted to the idea that behind all the struggles and losses of the war a Divine purpose was at work. Never did he express this view more eloquently than in a letter he wrote in September to Mrs. Eliza P. Gurney, who extended the sympathy and prayers of the Society of Friends: “The purposes of the Almighty are perfect, and must prevail, though we erring mortals may fail to accurately perceive them in advance. We hoped for a happy termination of this terrible war long before this; but God knows
best, and has ruled otherwise. . . . we must work earnestly in the best light He gives us, trusting that so working still conduces to the great ends He ordains. Surely He intends some great good to follow this mighty convulsion, which no mortal could make, and no mortal could stay.” This comforting doctrine allowed the President to live with himself by shifting some of the responsibility for all the suffering.

As Grant and Sherman grappled with the enemy, Lincoln did what he could to sustain the army and to boost civilian morale. On every possible occasion—even on such an unlikely one as the resumption of White House concerts by the Marine Band—he asked his listeners to give three cheers for “Grant and all the armies under his command.” Again and again, he expressed gratitude to the soldiers, to the officers, and especially to “that brave and loyal man,” the “modest General at the head of our armies.” After his renomination, when the Ohio delegation serenaded him with a brass band, he responded: “What we want, still more than Baltimore conventions or presidential elections, is success under Gen. Grant,” and he urged his hearers to bend all their energies to support “the brave officers and soldiers in the field.”

He continued to have great faith in Grant, but he was conscious of the swelling chorus of criticism of the general. Many doubted Grant’s strategic ability and pointed out that in shifting his base to the James River he was simply repeating what McClellan had done—with far fewer casualties. “Why did he not take his army south of the James at once, and thus save seventy-five thousand men?” asked Senator Grimes, who pronounced Grant’s campaign a failure. Even in the President’s own household there was distrust of the general. “He is a butcher,” Mary Lincoln often said, “and is not fit to be at the head of an army.”

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 ... ‘God 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 anticipated 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.

I Am Pretty Sure-Footed

I
n 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.

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-assorted Union
defending force of green hundred-day volunteers commanded by General Lew Wallace and moved close to the national capital.

It seemed that nobody 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 Hitchcock 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, Hitchcock 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.