A. Lincoln
Here is a typical inquiry by the president, sent on November 3, 1863, to General Meade, that reveals a quite Lincolnian basis for clemency: “Samuel Wellers, private in Co. B 49th. Penn Vols. writes that he is to be shot for desertion on the 6th. Inst. His own story is rather a bad one, and yet he tells it so frankly, that I am some what interested in him.”*60 Then he asked, in hope, about this frank storyteller: “Has he been a good soldier, except the desertion?” And of course: “About how old is he?”
SHOVELING FLEAS AND SHOOTING DESERTERS
DESERTION AND ABSENCE without leave would become an enormous problem in the Union armies, as in the Confederate armies, and the problem would increase as the war expanded and the casualty lists became longer, and as the draft brought in soldiers with backgrounds and motivations different from those of the first waves of volunteers. Lincoln certainly knew the problem that desertions presented; trying to move McClellan’s Army of the Potomac from one place to another, he had said, was like “shoveling fleas.” Article 20 of the military code, passed in 1806, prescribed for desertion “death, or such other punishment as by sentence of court-martial, shall be inflicted”—and required that the sentence of death be approved by the president. That set up a tug-of-war between commanders of armies, many of whom wanted to use executions to stop desertions, and the commander in chief, who kept pardoning the convicted soldiers. A general and a court-martial (composed of officers), eager to achieve an instructively terrifying result, might look only at the fact of a soldier’s absence; but Lincoln, often appealed to by touching letters and visits, looked at the larger story. Why was the soldier absent? Some reasons did not merit sympathy: some soldiers, for example, joined the Union army in order to be sent south and then took the opportunity to desert and enlist in the Confederate army. Sometimes bounty jumpers enlisted, collected a bounty for enlistment, then deserted and reenlisted in order to collect a second (or third, or more) bounty. Lincoln did not pardon them.
But many more of the convicted deserters had much more sympathetic stories, and Lincoln listened to them. Particularly as the war ground on, the hardships of war, weariness, and discouragement increased. Lack of shoes and clothing; lack of supplies, food, and arms; illness and disease; rain, cold, and mud in the winter; and battle losses all took their toll. Concern for their families and lack of pay often sent men home to tend to their obligations there. Further, many recruits in this mainly civilian army knew virtually nothing of military law or their obligations under it. Soldiers frequently left one command and joined another, not realizing they were deserting. Some never received their enlistment bounty and therefore assumed they had not obligated themselves to serve. The foreign-born and the illiterate often had not even been able to read what they were signing on to. Even in the case of bounty jumpers, the money paid was an enticement for desertion and reenlistment, a kind of entrapment, to which poor and ignorant recruits were particularly susceptible. Other deserters were encouraged by civilians to desert, in many cases so that civilian recruiters could collect fees for enlistment of substitutes, or out of lack of sympathy with the war—the situation Lincoln would excoriate in a famous public letter.
TOMORROW IS BUTCHER DAY
OFTEN THE General Court-Martial Orders commanded the death of the offending soldier with the explicit grisly phrase that he be “shot to death with musketry.” It was necessary to specify shot to death because sometimes the first volley would not kill the condemned. Because the executions were intended to have a powerful deterrent effect, they were carried out in full view of the company, which was commanded to watch and then to march by the corpse.
As the executions increased, a place and a day would be set aside: “A gallows and a shooting-ground were provided in each corps and scarcely a Friday passed during the winter of 1863–64 that some wretched deserter did not suffer the death penalty in the Army of the Potomac.” That army was often close enough that Lincoln could hear the shots. John Eaton reported him saying, upon hearing the sound of rifles from across the Potomac, “This is the day when they shoot deserters.” He went on to make a comment that would have stunned a number of his generals, given that they strongly believed the opposite: “I am wondering whether I have used the pardoning power as much as I ought.”
That Lincoln was repelled by the execution of young privates for the reasons that the courts-martial gave is evident in his use of the metaphor of butchery. Holt in his interview with Nicolay, quoted above, said that Lincoln regarded the executions as “wholesale butchery.” Not long after Lincoln’s assassination, Leonard Swett, Lincoln’s longtime friend and associate, told Herndon of an occasion when Lincoln dismissed him: “Get out of the way, Swett; to morrow is butcher-day, and I must go through these papers and see if I cannot find some excuse to let these poor fellows off.” Lincoln said in explanation of one of his pardons (January 7, 1864): “I did this, not on any merit in the case, but because I am trying to evade the butchering business lately.”
Leonard Swett’s description of his visit to Lincoln on the day before butcher day is an account much like others: “The pile of papers he had were the records of Courts Martial of men who on the following day were to be shot. He was not examining the Records to see whether the evidence sustained the findings. He was purposely in search of occasions to evade the law in favor of life.”
DISCRIMINATING MERCY
TO BE SURE, Lincoln did not give every soldier a pardon or reprieve. In the letter to Herndon we have already quoted, Swett said this:
He [Lincoln] had very great kindness of heart. His mind was full of tender sensibilities; he was extremely humane, yet while these attributes were fully developed in his character and unless intercepted by his judgment controlled him, they never did control him contrary to his judgments. He would strain a point to be kind, but he never strained to breaking. Most men of much kindly feeling are controlled by this sentiment against their judgment, or rather that sentiment beclouds their Judgment. It was never so with him. He would be just as kind and generous as his judgment would let him be—no more.
By the official count, 272 Union soldiers were executed by the U.S. Army, 141 of them for desertion. Thomas Lowry, who with Beverly Lowry has gone through an enormous number of Union army courts-martial in the National Archives, has discovered that executions were far more numerous than the official numbers specify. Many of them were not brought to Lincoln’s attention, despite the law. But then Lincoln did not pardon every accused person for whom an appeal came to his desk. His mercy, although generous, was discriminating. He did not pardon any soldier found guilty of rape. He did not pardon a soldier, however tearful his wife’s plea, who deserted three times and was incorrigible. Writing to Nicolay about the long July 18, 1863, session with a hundred cases, in which Lincoln seized on any excuse for mercy, Hay added: “He was only merciless in cases where meanness or cruelty were shown.”
THE COURT-MARTIAL GRINDSTONE: I DO WANT TO BE CONSIDERATE OF EVERY CASE
LINCOLN SAID to John Eaton, “I would not relax the discipline of the army, but I do want to be considerate of every case.” By 1864 he would be sitting there with Holt and Nicolay or Hay, in sessions as long as six hours, going through as many as a hundred records of courts-martial.
In early 1864 the painter Francis Carpenter, the artist who did the famous painting First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln, worked on his painting in the Lincoln executive mansion and was able therefore to produce a valuable little book with the subtitle Six Months at the White House. Hearing Lincoln respond to repeated appeals for clemency, Carpenter wrote:
I shall never cease to regret that an additional private secretary could not have been appointed, whose exclusive duty it should have been to look after and keep a record of all cases appealing to executive clemency. It would have afforded full employment for one man, at least; and such a volume would now be beyond price.
It is a striking feature about Lincoln’s pardons that
there were so many of them, and that he took the time to consider them, as much as he could, in the chaos of wartime, case by case. On July 19, 1863, John Hay would write to Nicolay, who was back in Illinois visiting, “I am in a state of entire collapse after yesterday’s work. I ran the Tycoon through one hundred Court martials! a steady sitting of six hours!” Nine days later he would write, “It would do you good to see how I daily hold the Tycoon’s nose to the Court Martial grindstone.”
It was not as though the president had nothing else to do. July 1863 was a huge moment in the history of the war. July 4 had brought the enormously heartening good news of the victory at Gettysburg, and soon thereafter it was reported that Grant had at last taken Vicksburg on the Mississippi. Gettysburg and Vicksburg created a brief moment of triumph and hope for Lincoln and the Union: it seemed that the war might soon be over. But then General Meade, not following his advantage, allowed Lee to take his army back across the Potomac. And on July 11, the Saturday a week before the steady sitting with the courts-martial, New York City exploded in the riot against the draft. Before long, as noted, it turned into a race riot and lasted throughout the week, finally being quelled only on Friday, July 17. And so, still watching and prodding Meade, and still dealing with the riots against the draft, on a hot mid-July Saturday in Washington the president sat down with Joseph Holt and John Hay and scrupulously went through a hundred courts-martial. This case. That case. Another case. One by one. It was on this occasion, on July 18, that he wrote one of his most quoted pardons, of Private Michael Delany, Company K, First Colorado Cavalry, who had been sentenced to be shot for desertion: “Let him fight instead of being shot.”
By 1864 these heroic sessions would be frequent and tended to come in clusters. Joseph Holt would bring huge stacks of courts-martial over to the executive mansion, at a time he could arrange with the president.*61 The president would summon him with stacks already accumulated in a pigeonhole in his desk and, sitting usually with Nicolay or Hay, would work them through, “occupying hours at a time,” Holt would remember later. On February 9, 1864, Lincoln reviewed 63 court-martial cases, with “routine endorsements” of “pardon, approval, remission, or commutation of sentence.” On February 10 he reviewed 32 cases. (After a long morning reviewing court-martial cases, Lincoln learned that his private stables had caught fire and were burning down. The president leaped over the hedge in an unsuccessful attempt to rescue the horses, among them his late son Willie’s pony. He was afterward found weeping in the East Room, watching the burning stables.) On February 11, Holt and Lincoln considered 46 cases (thus 139 cases in three days); on February 15, 48 cases; on April 14, 67 cases; on so on through ten other such heavy days in 1864 and early 1865.
In February 1864 the Union army was defeated in a bloody battle at Olustee, with almost nineteen hundred federal casualties; the president issued an order for half a million more soldiers; he met with a Southern commission to discuss possibilities for peace; he spoke with a Northern delegation to discuss a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery—and he spent three long sessions, on the ninth, tenth, and fifteenth, dealing with court-martial cases.
In April 1864 news of the disastrous Red River Campaign arrived from Arkansas, and of the Fort Pillow Massacre from Tennessee. General Grant, newly promoted to commander, was preparing the Army of Northern Virginia for its big push in the Wilderness Campaign. And the president had four long sessions with court-martial cases.
A POLITICIAN’S MERCY
MANY CRITICIZED Lincoln’s tenderheartedness, but almost no one on the Union side denied that it was real—on the contrary, the prevailing criticism was that it was all too real. But there was one Union man who, long after the war, flatly rejected the folklore picture of the merciful Lincoln. By his sheer rarity he would come to be often quoted. This was Donn Piatt, a reporter and writer who served as an officer in the Union army. Looking back in the 1880s, he wrote that he doubted that Lincoln had “a kind, forgiving nature.” The popular belief in Lincoln’s mercy, Piatt would write, is “erroneous…His good-natured manner misled the common mind.”
He was not alone in having difficulty assimilating the apparently disparate elements of Lincoln’s makeup and conduct—the resolute commander pressing to destroy Lee’s armies on the one hand and the tenderhearted leader on the other. But Piatt resolved the problem by starting with a stereotype of what “great leaders” had to be and then imposing that a priori stereotype on Lincoln. One of his peculiar statements was that “successful leaders in history” are “oily, elastic” on the outside but “angular, hard” in inner purpose—and Lincoln must have been like that too.
He made a quite revealing further observation: “As for his steady refusal to sanction the death penalty in cases of desertion, there was far more policy than kind feeling in this course. To assert the contrary is to detract from Lincoln’s force of character as well as intellect.”
This last sentence gives away Piatt’s worldview: he saw it as a sign of an intellectual and moral defect to act out of “kind feeling” toward deserting soldiers—so, being a great leader, Lincoln must not have done so. There is a kind of cynic who cannot discern, or cannot admit that he does discern, moral characteristics that extend beyond his own outlook. One is reminded of the saying that when a pickpocket looks at a saint, what he sees are his pockets.
Piatt was surely wrong to deny that Lincoln was genuinely merciful. The evidence to the contrary is overwhelming. It includes the sheer number of Lincoln’s acts of clemency, the testimony of many observers, and the accounts of many who asked him for pardons. Many words from Lincoln’s own hand would be difficult to explain if his humane sense were not genuine and primary. His remark that he wanted to be out of the “butchering business” is not a metaphor that a calmly hard-boiled politician would have come up with.
YOU PARDON HIM, AND THE ARMY IS WITHOUT DISCIPLINE
A PARTICULARLY pointed statement of the alleged result of Lincoln’s tenderheartedness was attributed perhaps surprisingly, or perhaps not surprisingly, to the most radical member of his cabinet, Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase: “Such kindness to the criminal [meaning the pardons] is cruelty to the army, for it encourages the bad to leave the brave and patriotic unsupported.”
If civilian officials—including Lincoln’s close associates Chase, Welles, Bates, and Stanton—had reservations about his (as they thought) overdone kindness, how much more would it be true of the leaders of vast armies?
General Daniel Tyler said, for a characteristic example, that whereas Confederate general Braxton Bragg shot his deserters, “if we attempt to shoot a deserter, you pardon him and our army is without discipline.” Colonel Theodore Lyman, on the staff of the Army of the Potomac in General Meade’s day, complained not to Lincoln but privately, “All this [great outrages in the rear] proceeds from one thing—the uncertainty of the death penalty through the false merciful policy of the President.”
The colorful scamp General Benjamin Butler, an actor in such varied roles in so many different acts of the Civil War, joined in this one: “President Lincoln, I pray you not to interfere with the courts-martial of the army. You will destroy all discipline among our soldiers.”
Most of the writing about Lincoln since his apotheosis has treated his pardons of soldiers favorably, indeed as an important part of his myth—but not all biographers do. William Barton, writing in the 1920s, put it harshly and suggested that Lincoln may have been fooled:
Lincoln had little time to investigate and it is to be feared that in some cases the alleged widow had rented the black clothes for the occasion, and had help in inventing the fiction about her family. Lincoln was very easily imposed upon…In the long run it had been better for the discipline of the army if he had kept his hands off.
WAR LOOKS BUT TO THE FRONTAGE
THE ARGUMENT against what Lincoln was doing as it might be stated in the exigency of war was put with distinctive force by the American novelist of the Civil War generation Herman Melville i
n his short, posthumously discovered novel Billy Budd. Writing years later and placing his story not in the American Civil War but on a British man-of-war at sea in the Napoleonic Wars, Melville has a ship captain, “Starry” Vere, to most readers a sympathetic character, make the argument that Billy must hang for striking a superior officer, even though Billy did not mean to strike him, let alone to kill him, had a most strong provocation, and in the eyes of heaven (as Vere knows and says) would be totally innocent. But, says Captain Vere, doing his hard duty, “Budd’s intent or not intent is nothing to the purpose” in this wartime shipboard situation: “War looks but to the frontage, the appearance. And the mutiny act, war’s child, takes after the father.”
Generals Sherman and Butler and Dix might have said that that reasoning applied in Civil War cases: these “men” (whom Lincoln often called “boys,” and who often were really boys) had left their post, slept on sentry duty, run at gunfire, or gone home in despair—that is, committed a punishable offense—and the uniform code of military justice looked but to the frontage, to the deed itself and no more, and had to condemn them to be executed. One did not ask how old the soldier was, or whether the mustering officer deceived him, or whether he was having trouble with his girlfriend back home, or even what his intent or reason or motive or excuse was. One must look solely at the overt act (these generals believed)—because this was war. Is your heart moved? Even so is mine, says Vere. “But let not warm hearts betray heads that should be cool.” The critics thought Lincoln’s heart had betrayed his head, which should have been cool; Vere goes on to a point the critics of Lincoln repeatedly suggested: “[W]ill an upright judge allow himself off the bench to be waylaid by some tender kinswoman of the accused seeking to touch him with her tearful plea”?
President Lincoln- The Duty of a Statesman Page 43
