President Lincoln- The Duty of a Statesman

by William Lee Miller

  “I would not relax the discipline”: Don E. Fehrenbacher and Virginia Fehrenbacher, Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 148.

  “I shall never cease to regret”: Francis B. Carpenter, The Inner Life of Abraham Lincoln: Six Months at the White House (1866; repr. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), p. 43. Carpenter himself gave a sample of the president’s pardoning, featuring not only a wife and tears but also a baby. An old White House retainer named Daniel told the mother after Lincoln had granted a pardon to her husband: “Madam, it was the baby that did it.

  ” 338 “I am in a state of entire collapse”: Michael Burlingame, ed., At Lincoln’s Side: John Hay’s Civil War Correspondence and Selected Writings (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), pp. 45, 46.

  “occupying hours at a time”: Ibid., p. 69.

  ten other such heavy days: By 1864 Holt would come over to the executive mansion with so many proposed pardons that years later the sheer numbers and sheer repetition would create a problem for the valiant editors of Lincoln’s Collected Works.

  In the early wartime volumes, for 1860–61 and 1861–62 and 1862–63 (as in the years before the presidency), those editors would print almost every scrap they could find that came from Abraham Lincoln’s hand, including utterly routine messages and five-, four-, three-, and even two-word “endorsements” that Lincoln had scribbled on an envelope. These brief jottings (for example, “All right”—November 7, 1861; “Come here”—August 15, 1862; “What news?”—several times; “None at all”—June 28, 1862 (to Seward, giving his own answer to the same question) were to be part of his “works.” (My favorite is “Profoundly laid by”—June 2, 1862—of course, this one is a joke, about the outrageous impossibility of the proposal inside the envelope.) But for the period after the war intensified, when pardon cases came in by the dozens, the editors’ scrupulously conscientious thoroughness seems to have collapsed under the weight of all the pardons.

  Thus, for February 9, 1864, The Collected Works prints one brief pardon message to Joseph Holt—because it refers to a case to which there are other references—and then in the accompanying note reports that “this is only one of 63 court martial cases reviewed by Lincoln on this date.” “Sentences in other cases,” the note goes on to say, “were approved, remitted, commuted, or pardons were ordered” in “routine endorsements.” Almost nothing, up to that point, had been regarded as too routine to be printed. But then for the next day, February 10, in appendix 2 one learns that Holt brought 32 cases, and for February 11, 1864, in the text itself the editors print three messages that have some distinguishing feature, then add a note that on this day, in addition to these three, Lincoln reviewed 43 more (thus 139 cases in three days!), the others again “routine endorsements” of “pardon, approval, remission, or commutation of sentence.” Either in the text or appendix 2 one finds that on February 15, Holt and Lincoln considered 48 cases; on April 14, 67 cases; April 21, 72 cases; April 26, 51 cases; April 27, 36 cases; July 8, 35 cases; July 9, 31 cases; August 9, 10 cases; August 16, 7 cases; August 17, 15 cases. Then in 1865, on January 23, 45 cases; and on January 25, 30 cases.

  That is 606 cases that the editors of The Collected Works simply count, without reproducing any name or word from Lincoln, in just these fifteen concentrated heavy days. In addition, as noted, for the date March 31, 1863 (approximately), appendix 2 of The Collected Works mentions the 55 cases of soldiers sentenced to be shot for desertion by Hooker. That is 661 (606 plus 55) cases, without names given, that Lincoln had brought to him in great batches, according to The Collected Works.

  Because according to the editors these numbers, except for the 55 from Hooker, include approvals (of the sentences) as well as pardons, remissions, and commutations, we cannot know quite how many of the latter three kinds of decisions (the instances of clemency) these counts include, but surely they are much the larger part. We also cannot know, except in those 55 cases, how many were capital cases, but they were a high percentage of the cases that came to the president.

  Whatever the exact number of courts-martial of Union soldiers considered for all offenses and all punishments and outcomes, or of (the smaller but crucial category) capital sentences pardoned, the numbers are already higher than had been thought. Ida Tarbell, the great muckraker-turned-Lincoln-biographer early in the twentieth century, made a count and could find at that time telegrams and other messages representing 275 of these military pardons, reprieves, and stays of execution in the two years from March 1863 until the end of the war. Basler and company, working forty years later with more resources as a team with a formal role, found many more than that. Looking at The Collected Works, dealing just with the one category of instances in which the president stopped by his pardon, commutation, or stay of execution the shooting of a Union soldier; and excluding acts of clemency for Union soldiers and officers for offenses with a lesser punishment (the officers characteristically were sentenced not to be shot but to be dismissed); and excluding Confederate spies and citizens accused of treason, many of whom were sentenced to be hanged; and being careful not to count any soldier twice (or three times!) even though there were two or more messages about him, I count in the text 186 soldiers whose names I could give, whom Lincoln saved from shooting (perhaps in rare cases with the stays of execution only temporarily), and 9 more in the material the editors added in appendix 2.

  By the late 1990s Dr. Thomas Lowry and Beverly Lowry, researchers diligently working away in the difficult and misfiled records in the National Archives, found 570 Lincoln pardons of men condemned by courts-martial that are not recorded by name in The Collected Works. Those pardons, and the further pardons the Lowrys may yet find, may or may not have been included in those piles of papers Holt brought over to Lincoln on the days courts-martial were considered, which the editors of The Collected Works just reported by number. The records have not been as easy to deal with as those in the civil cases because, as Dr. Lowry puts it, the Civil War was not fought for the benefit of later researchers.

  “erroneous”: Donn Piatt, Men Who Saved the Union (New York: Belford, Clarke & Co., 1887), pp. 36, 37. Piatt’s chapter on Lincoln was later included in, and is often cited from, Allen Thorndike Rice’s collection Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguished Men of His Time (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1909), pp. 343–66.

  “successful leaders in history”: Piatt, Men Who Saved the Union, p. 36.

  “As for his steady refusal”: Ibid., p. 37.

  Piatt was surely wrong to deny: The most astonishing of Piatt’s comments on Lincoln cannot be matched anywhere in the vast literature by those who supported Lincoln. It was this: “Lincoln could hate with an intensity known only to strong natures, and when just retribution demanded it he could punish with an iron will no appeals for pity could move.” Ibid., p. 56. To cite but one more of his uniquely peculiar remarks, Piatt also had a view of, and a chapter on, Stanton, wherein he wrote that the president “is weak and timid and the indomitable will, intellect, and energy of Mr. Stanton controls him.”

  “Such kindness to the criminal”: Salmon Chase, quoted ibid., p. 37.

  “if we attempt to shoot” “All this [great outrages]”: General Daniel Tyler and Colonel Theodore Lyman, quoted in Richard N. Current, The Lincoln Nobody Knows (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1958), p. 169.

  “President Lincoln, I pray you not to interfere”: Benjamin Butler, quoted ibid., p. 166.

  “Lincoln had little time to investigate”: William E. Barton, The Life of Abraham Lincoln, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1925), 1:249–50.

  “[F]orty or fifty executions now”: William Tecumseh Sherman, quoted in Jonathan Truman Dorris, President Lincoln’s Clemency (Springfield: Illinois State Historical Society, 1928), p. 551.

  “Because you cannot order men shot by the dozens”: Ella Lonn, Desertion During the Civil War (New York: Century, 1928), p. 223.

  “To what extent”: Carl S
andburg, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and the War Years (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1954), p. 592.

  “Hundreds of Union soldiers were shot”: Thomas P. Lowry, Don’t Shoot That Boy! Abraham Lincoln and Military Justice (Mason City, Iowa: Savas, 1999), p. 263.

  One can find contrasting treatments: The contrasting treatment of officers and men was sharply exhibited to Lincoln on successive days in June 1863. On June 23 he dealt with the case of a Private James G. Lyon, Fifth Vermont Volunteers, who was found guilty of “cowardice and absence without leave”—and sentenced to be shot. On the next day, June 24, he dealt with the case of Captain William P. Eagan of the Twenty-third Kentucky Volunteers, who had also been found guilty of “cowardice”—and was sentenced only to dishonorable dismissal. Lincoln commuted the sentence of Private Lyon to imprisonment at hard labor during the war but upheld the dismissal of Captain Eagan. In the case of a West Point graduate named John Benson Williams, a first lieutenant of the Third Infantry, who was dismissed from the service for “deserting his company in the presence of the enemy,” Lincoln wrote to Stanton: “I decline to interfere in behalf of Lieut. Williams” (April 11, 1863). On July 18 and July 20, 1863, respectively, the president dealt with the separate cases of Lieutenant Alpheus Scott of the Sixth Iowa Cavalry, and Major Joseph Gilmer of the Eighteenth Pennsylvania Cavalry, both of whom were found guilty of “drunkenness”—and sentenced to dismissal. Lincoln, who had drastically mitigated the punishment of Private Zachringer, upheld the punishment of the two officers.

  “Of fifty-nine convictions”: Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Abraham Lincoln Encyclopedia (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982), p. 61.

  “My officers tell me”: Henry Wilson, in Fehrenbacher and Fehrenbacher, Recollected Words, p. 498.

  “Must I shoot” “I understand the meeting”: Abraham Lincoln to E. Corning and others, June 12, 1863, CW, 6:260–69.

  “The Indians, if unpunished”: Thaddeus Williams M.D. to Lincoln, November 22, 1862, AL Papers.

  “Pusillanimity and want of executive force”: Ben Butler, quoted in Current, Lincoln Nobody Knows, p. 169.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN. A HARD WAR WITHOUT HATRED

  “A reckless and unprincipled tyrant”: OR, ser. 1, vol. 2, p. 907.

  “[T]hey [the United States]…are waging”: Jefferson Davis, Message to Congress, July 20, 1861, in Mark E. Neely, Jr., “Was the Civil War a Total War?” Civil War History 50, no. 4 (December 2004), pp. 434–58, quoting Message of the President (Richmond, Va.: Ritchie & Dunnavant, 1861), pp. 3–4.

  “the least militarized” “hastily assembled”: John Keegan, A History of Warfare (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), p. 355.

  prewar national population of 32 million: Ibid.

  “If the same proportion”: James M. McPherson, “From Limited War to Total War in America,” in Stig Förster and Jörg Nagler, eds., On the Road to Total War: The American Civil War and the German Wars of Unification, 1861–1871 (Washington, D.C.: German Historical Institute and Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 295.

  Historian John Keegan puts the round numbers: Keegan, Warfare, pp. 360–61.

  “[p]robably twice as many civilians as soldiers”: James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 619n.

  “Union and Confederate authorities were in substantial agreement”: Neely, “Was the Civil War a Total War?” p. 443.

  “Unlike the combatants”: Michael Fellman, “At the Nihilist Edge,” in Förster and Nagler, Road to Total War, pp. 535–36.

  “When all was said and done”: Mark E. Neely, Jr., “Retaliation: The Problem of Atrocity in the American Civil War,” Forty-first Annual Robert Fortenbaugh Memorial Lecture, Gettysburg College, pp. 28–30.

  “aversion to bloodshed”: Lincoln is quoted as saying, with respect to his clemency: “I reckon there never was a man raised in the country, on a farm, where they are always butchering cattle and hogs and think nothing of it, that ever grew up with such an aversion to bloodshed as I have and yet I’ve had more questions of life and death to settle in four years than all the men who ever sat in this chair put together.” Interview with Henry P. H. Bromwell in the Denver Tribune, May 18, 1879, reprinted in the New York Times, May 27, 1879; see Don E. Fehrenbacher and Virginia Fehrenbacher,Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 40–41.

  “[D]oesn’t it seem strange”: William C. Davis, Lincoln’s Men (New York: Touchstone, 1999), p. 177, quoting Democratic congressman Daniel Voorhees in Fehrenbacher and Fehrenbacher, Recollected Words, p. 458.

  “I deem it proper”: Proclamation Calling Militia and Convening Congress, April 15, 1861, CW, 4:332.

  “This was a national strategy of limited war”: James McPherson, “Lincoln and the Strategy of Unconditional Surrender,” in Gabor Boritt, ed., Lincoln the War President (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 75.

  “Up to the battle of Shiloh”: Ulysses S. Grant, Memoirs and Selected Letters (New York: Library of America, 1990), p. 246.

  “Up to that time it had been the policy”: Ibid., pp. 246–47.

  “[Sherman’s] experiences in Tennessee”: McPherson, “Lincoln and Unconditional Surrender,” p. 79.

  “contemplated authority to Commanders”: Salmon P. Chase, Inside Lincoln’s Cabinet: The Civil War Diaries of Salmon P. Chase, ed. David Herbert Donald (New York: Longmans, Green, 1954), p. 95.

  “The year 1863 marked a significant watershed”: Mark Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy Toward Southern Civilians, 1861–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 143.

  “I have always regretted”: Grant, Memoirs, p. 588.

  “forty-eight hours after”: Ibid., pp. 585–88. William S. McFeely’s Grant: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982) presents what he called the “inexcusable behavior” of Grant and Lee with particular force: “Union soldiers, who had charged, lay where they had fallen wounded, moaning in the blistering sun. Their brothers watched their torment, unable to retrieve them because of Confederate sharpshooters. After two days, on June 5, Grant sent one of Meade’s aides across the lines with a letter suggesting that firing cease while litter bearers went out on the field. Lee insisted that ‘a flag of truce be sent, as is customary.’ The next morning, June 6, Grant wrote Lee that at noon men with stretchers and white flags would go out for the wounded, but again Lee insisted that he could ‘accede with propriety’ only to a request made under flag of truce: ‘I have directed that any parties you may send out be turned back.’ Grant, that afternoon, reminded Lee that ‘wounded men are now suffering from want of attention’ and agreed to a formal two-hour truce. Lee replied that it was too late to accomplish this by daylight, but agreed to a break between 8:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. that evening. The letter was received by Grant after 10:45 p.m., and it was not until late the next morning, June 7, that Grant wrote and informed Lee of the missed opportunity. Lee then proposed, and Grant accepted, a second truce, which took place that evening. For days, as commanders stupidly corresponded, untended men had lain in agony dying” (pp. 171–73).

  “The effort was a tremendous failure”: Grant, Memoirs, p. 613.

  “more evil than Ivan the Terrible”: North Carolina secretary of cultural resources, in the Raleigh News Observer, quoted in Grimsley, Hard Hand, p. 1.

  Joseph T. Glatthaar’s careful account: Joseph T. Glatthaar, The March to the Sea and Beyond: Sherman’s Troops in the Savannah and Carolinas Campaigns (New York: New York University Press, 1985).

  “Events…have made the vandalism of Sherman”: Gameliel Bradford, Union Portraits (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1916), p. 155n; quoted in Neely, “Was the Civil War a Total War?,” p. 445.

  “This may not be war”: W. T. Sherman to U. S. Grant, November 6, 1864, OR, ser. 1, vol. 39 (pt. III), p. 660.

  “I know that this recent movement”: W. T. Sherman to H. Halleck, December 21, 1864, OR, ser. 1, vol. 44, p. 799.

  “[S]hould you sh
oot a man”: Lincoln to John C. Frémont, September 2, 1861, CW, 4:566.

  “Civilized belligerents”: Lincoln to James C. Conkling, August 26, 1863, CW, 6:408.

  “Military necessity”: General Order No. 100, “Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field,” OR, ser. 2, vol. 5, p. 672. Francis Lieber’s code does include glimpses of philosophical or ethical statements about war. He says: “Men who take up arms against one another in public war do not cease on this account to be moral beings, responsible to one another and to God” (p. 150); and “Peace is their normal condition; war is the exception. The ultimate object of war is a renewed state of peace” but nonetheless, “The more vigorously wars are pursued the better it is for humanity. Sharp wars are brief” (p. 151). Lieber’s document also comprises more basic instructions for the administration of war; it establishes the treatment of prisoners of war and private citizens, the management of enemy land and private property, protection for flags of truce, and other sorts of provisions one might expect to find in a military code.