Rise to Greatness

by David Von Drehle

  Such pleasures of office were few, even as unwelcome responsibilities multiplied. Among them was the job of reviewing military death sentences. Lincoln felt compelled to undertake this effort: in times of war and revolution, governments often become casual about death, but the president was determined not to let that happen to him. The records of military commissions and courts-martial piled up on his desk with ominous speed. “I must go through these papers and see if I cannot find some excuse to let these poor fellows off,” he told one visitor on the eve of what he called a “butcher-day.” Such a day came along in late October and after a good deal of reading and creative thinking he managed to find plausible pretexts for sparing three lives. A prisoner from New Mexico, Jose Maria Rivas, spoke only Spanish, so Lincoln reasoned that he might not have known what he was saying when he confessed to being a “spy.” A man in Memphis, Sely Lewis, probably was a smuggler, but the president ruled that the military court had no jurisdiction over his case. And Private Conrad Zachringer, who threw his lieutenant to the ground, then beat and throttled him—well, he was drunk and probably didn’t know what he was doing.

  The authority to grant high offices also came freighted with pain, for Lincoln rarely pleased one man without disappointing at least one other. In October, he took on the excruciating task of deciding which of his friends he would name to the Supreme Court. In late spring he had filled a second vacancy on the court by naming a Kentucky-bred Iowan, Samuel Miller, to the seat left empty after the death of Peter Daniel, one of the Dred Scott justices. Now he had a third vacancy to fill, and he at last was at liberty to choose a justice from Illinois. Two men intensely desired the appointment to the court, Orville Browning and David Davis. Davis was arguably Lincoln’s most effective political supporter, as close to a campaign manager as Lincoln had. And Browning had been his frequent visitor, adviser, and confidant through the tumultuous first half of 1862. It was Browning who had rushed with his wife, Eliza, to be with the Lincolns when Willie died, and Browning who had taken on the job of arranging the funeral.

  Browning had the support of Attorney General Bates and a number of his Republican Senate colleagues. Lincoln agonized over the choice but appeared to have made up his mind when a story circulated that he had remarked: “I do not know what I may do when the time comes, but there has never been a day when if I had to act I should not have appointed Browning.” When those words reached Illinois, Davis’s supporters had no doubt that they were authentic. “No man but he could have put the situation so quaintly,” one recalled. Naturally, they were outraged that the president would turn his back on the Bloomington judge who had done the hard work of organizing Lincoln’s campaign for the nomination in 1860.

  Leonard Swett announced that he was going immediately to Washington to see his friend Lincoln and straighten him out. “No, you are not,” countered Davis, but Swett’s mind was made up. Two days later he knocked on the White House door at seven A.M., knowing full well that the light-sleeping president would be at work. Swett settled into an office chair and laid in. Surely, Lincoln had not forgotten “that he had been brought into prominence by the Circuit Court lawyers of the old Eighth Circuit, headed by Judge Davis.” In fact, he continued brashly, “if Judge Davis, with his tact and force, had not lived … I believe you would not now be sitting where you are.”

  Lincoln did not disagree. So how, Swett wondered, could Lincoln fail to repay the man who made it possible for him to satisfy his own ambitions? “In justice to yourself,” Swett said, “give him this place.” The visitor described this conversation as “pleasant,” but how pleasant can it have been for Lincoln to know that saying yes to one friend’s dream would mean saying no to the other’s? As Swett returned to his room at Willard’s and replayed the episode in his mind, he put himself in Lincoln’s shoes and realized there was something more he could do to tip the excruciating balance. He could promise not to put his friend in another spot like this—in other words, he could surrender his own claims to a presidential favor.

  Swett turned around and went back to Lincoln’s office, this time to deliver a letter offering to let Davis’s fulfillment double as his own. This would “kill ‘two birds with one stone,’” Swett wrote. Maybe this offer did the trick, or maybe Browning botched his chances by criticizing Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation at campaign stops as he battled for reelection across their home state. Maybe Lincoln was swayed by a combination of considerations. However it happened, David Davis was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court on October 17, and now Chief Justice Taney’s proslavery majority was whittled to a single vote. But for Lincoln the price was high: he and Browning were never again as close as they had been in the weeks and months when an old friend from Illinois helped a president survive his grief.

  * * *

  Lincoln’s long letter to McClellan reached the general’s headquarters on October 16; another day went by before Little Mac offered a reply. A month had now passed since the battle of Antietam, yet McClellan had nothing to report. “I am not wedded to any particular plan of operations,” he wrote airily, adding: “I hope to have today reliable information as to the position of the enemy.” The president had warned him not to ignore “the question of time, which can not, and must not be ignored.” But McClellan ignored it with abandon: “Your Excellency may be assured,” he wrote, “that I will not adopt a course which differs at all from your views without first fully explaining my reasons & giving you time to issue such instructions as may seem best to you.”

  Lincoln later said, “I began to fear that he was playing false—that he did not want to hurt the enemy.” In his view, the current situation posed a test for McClellan: Lee was in a bind, and if McClellan let him escape, Lincoln would remove him from command.

  The long struggle between the president and the general was at last reaching a climax. The “fine dry weather of the autumn [was] daily passing,” with “no sign of life in the Army of the Potomac,” Nicolay wrote. As the last hours of the test ticked by, both the president and the general grew touchy. McClellan, still suffering from supply problems, complained endlessly of his need for fresh cavalry horses. Lincoln, who knew of only one cavalry in the vicinity that had any reason to be worn out, snapped: “Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have done since the battle of Antietam that fatigue anything?” McClellan complained to his wife about such barbed remarks, which he called Lincoln’s “dirty little flings that I can’t get used to.”

  On October 26, nineteen days after Halleck first relayed the order to move, McClellan finally began sending his men across the Potomac. Even then, the tension between the commander in chief and his general did not abate. When Lincoln pronounced himself “so rejoiced” at the news of the army’s movement, McClellan perceived his comment as “wretched innuendo.” At this critical moment, Little Mac’s opinion of Lincoln settled back to the dark depths of his first impressions. Writing to his wife, he said: “There never was a truer epithet applied to a certain individual than that of the ‘Gorilla.’”

  The river crossing had just begun when Stanton charged through the frosted glass doors leading to the president’s office suite, intent on some unrecorded bit of business. Nicolay poked his head into Lincoln’s room to announce the secretary of war, and was surprised to see the president surrounded by kneeling Quakers “holding a prayer-meeting around him.”

  Lincoln “was compelled to bear the infliction until the ‘spirit’ moved them to stop”; then he offered a brief reply to his fervent visitors. “We are indeed going through a great trial—a fiery trial,” he said, adding that he was but “a humble instrument in the hands of our Heavenly Father … I have sought his aid.” He also acknowledged that he had been unable to control the course of events. “If I had had my way, this war would never have been commenced; if I had been allowed my way this war could have been ended before this, but we find it still continues; and we must believe that He permits it for some wise purpose of his own, mysterious and unknown to us.
”

  Lincoln’s view of a Providential destiny working itself out through these strange human instruments was deeply ingrained now, and it would stay with him to the end. But how awful and grinding was the slow machinery of divine will. Lincoln bitterly counted each day as the Army of the Potomac sloshed across the ford, and when the last man stepped onto the Virginia shore, the president did not fail to note that the tally was nine. Later, explaining his reaction to this unforgivable lethargy, Lincoln remarked: “Lee crossed his entire army between one dark night and daylight the next morning. That was the last grain of sand which broke the camel’s back.”

  12

  NOVEMBER

  The weather was fair but hinting winter. The first snow of the season was just a few days off. The first family continued to live on the grounds of the Soldiers’ Home, and now Lincoln’s rides to and from the cottage each day passed through amber fields and woods of thinning yellow, orange, red, and brown. About a mile from the White House, where the city met the woodlots, stood Camp Barker, a hastily constructed village that housed more than four thousand newly freed slaves and contrabands in tents and two-story clapboard dormitories. Lincoln passed the camp twice a day; apparently he stopped at least once for a visit, and according to a witness he wiped tears from his eyes as he listened to a concert of spirituals. He must have noticed that the facility was not designed with winter in mind. The crowded conditions were already unhealthy, and by the end of winter the camp would be losing some twenty-five refugees a week to disease and neglect.

  Mary Lincoln was well briefed on conditions among the former slaves. Her dressmaker friend Elizabeth Keckly, herself a freedwoman, was a founder of the Contraband Relief Association of Washington. November found Keckly traveling with Mary and Tad Lincoln to New York and Boston, where she hoped to raise money for relief efforts. But while the free blacks of these cities gave generously, even the reflected glow of the first lady was not enough to open the wallets of white Northerners, and Mrs. Lincoln decided to give Keckly $200 from a discretionary fund donated by a wealthy philanthropist for the president’s use. Keckly bought a supply of blankets with the money. In a note to her husband dated November 3, Mary wrote: “She [Keckly] says the immense number of Contrabands in [Washington] are suffering intensely, many without bed covering & having to use any bits of carpeting to cover themselves. I am sure, you will not object to [the money] being used in this way—The cause of humanity requires it.”

  As this poignant letter suggests, most Americans were completely unprepared for the revolution now under way. Before the guns opened on Fort Sumter, no one could have imagined that the wife of a president would soon be arranging to buy blankets for freed slaves. At the same time, the inadequacy of the gesture is striking: a few hundred blankets, when several thousand former slaves were suffering within a short walk of the White House. And at the same time, the president had recently announced his commitment to add millions more free men, women, and children to a far-flung society that had no place and no plans for them. The fate and future of four million slaves and their descendants loomed large, and that $200 pile of blankets was a minuscule down payment on the enormous moral accounting that would soon come due.

  On the battlefield, too, few were prepared to manage the influx of the newly free. In Mississippi and Tennessee, thousands of former bondsmen took refuge in camps commanded by Ulysses Grant. Like Union generals everywhere in the South, he was forced to think about the great upheaval in terms beyond winter blankets. He could put able-bodied young men to work in his army, but what was he to do with the rest? “Orders from the government prohibited the expulsion of the negroes from the protection of the army,” he later wrote of this period, and “humanity forbade allowing them to starve.” He looked around for work to occupy them, and saw that “the plantations were all deserted; the cotton and corn were ripe.” He figured that “men, women and children above ten years of age could be employed saving these crops.” In the abstract, this was a fine idea, but to house, nourish, clothe, and educate these workers required a large new bureaucracy inside Grant’s Army of the Tennessee, and countless hours of effort. The bureaucracy was created, the effort was spent—and even then, Grant’s solution was only a temporary answer to the limited question of how to meet the immediate needs of freedpeople in the vicinity of his troops.

  Change was moving so rapidly now and on such a huge scale that America couldn’t take it all in. The first lady was caring for refugees from slavery, in a land where the Fugitive Slave Law was still on the books. Black troops were wearing Union blue and carrying rifles in Louisiana and Florida. Louisiana planters were reportedly ready to pay wages to their African-American fieldworkers, news so startling to Lincoln that he wrote in search of confirmation. Any one of these events would have been inconceivable before 1862; now the impossible was happening daily, and racing by in a blur.

  Another exchange of letters, later in November, illustrates the same phenomenon in a slightly different light. The prominent Kentucky lawyer George Robertson, a friend of the Todd family and a longtime acquaintance of Lincoln’s, raised a complaint with the president: one of his slaves was living in a Union army camp, and the officers were refusing to return Robertson’s property. Lincoln was flabbergasted. Here was a learned, observant man who somehow missed the fresh reality taking shape before his eyes. The president drafted a reply comparing Robertson to the farmer in revolutionary times who wandered through the ranks of victorious Americans at Yorktown, demanding the return of two steers that the army had taken from his land. How could anyone be so petty at such a moment? This clever answer evidently went into a file; a few days later, Lincoln sent a milder reply making the same point less colorfully, and offering to compensate the lawyer for his loss. Robertson’s experience was “the life of the nation” distilled to a single household, the president noted. The old order was gone, and the slave was not returning. The Union army, Lincoln wrote, was going to “make him free.”

  * * *

  This was Lincoln’s great worry now: that the American people still were not braced to the scope and scale of the war. Not even Antietam and emancipation had brought the reality home. In early November, as he watched McClellan’s inadequate movements and studied the discouraging election returns that had continued to roll in over the past few weeks, the president became convinced that these were two symptoms of the same disease. Both the army and the voters labored under the delusion that there was an easy way to restore the Union. In the ranks, this false hope showed itself in the multitude of soldiers on furlough from the front. Even while standing face-to-face with the enemy, troops by the tens of thousands blithely asked to go home, and their elected officers lacked the backbone to say no. The number of troops away on leave had grown so large that Lincoln could not find precise figures. “At this very moment,” he wrote in an undated November memo, “there are between seventy [thousand] and one hundred thousand men absent on furlough from the Army of the Potomac.”

  Wishful thinking about the war also prevailed among many in the general public, and wherever it did it produced support for Democratic candidates who promised a quick peace and the restoration of the Union “as it was”—the Union with all the old compromises over slavery intact. In a note to himself, the president lamented: “The army, like the nation, has become demoralized by the idea that the war is to be ended, the nation united, and peace restored, by strategy, and not by hard desperate fighting.”

  Lincoln used some of the same words when a delegation of women from the U.S. Sanitary Commission paid him a visit one evening in early November. No civilian organization was more important to the war effort than the Sanitary Commission, which organized volunteers and raised money to meet the medical and morale needs of the troops. The delegation called on the president in hopes of hearing a few words of good news to take home with them, but Lincoln had none to offer. “A deeper gloom rested on his face than on that of any person I had ever seen,” the writer and activist Mary Livermore recal
led—though, she reported, he did cheer up slightly when he heard that she was from Chicago. Chicago’s mud, he joked, was even worse than Washington’s.

  Then he sagged again. “The military situation is far from bright; and the country knows it as well as I do,” he said. The room was silent. “The fact is,” Lincoln continued, “the people haven’t yet made up their minds that we are at war with the South. They haven’t buckled down to the determination to fight this war through; for they have got the idea into their heads that we are going to get out of this fix, somehow, by strategy.”

  One visitor protested: Surely Mr. Lincoln was not forgetting the fierce fighting at places like Fort Donelson and Shiloh. Yes, he allowed, there had been huge battles—yet the voters were now electing Democrats out of a belief that “there is a royal road to peace, and that General McClellan is to find it.” And voters were not the only ones mistaken, he pointed out: “The army has not settled down into the conviction that we are in a terrible war that has got to be fought out—no; and the officers haven’t either.” Lincoln challenged his visitors to consider their own experiences. “When you came to Washington, ladies … very few soldiers came on the trains with you,” he ventured. But they should watch carefully on the northbound return: “You will find the trains and every conveyance crowded with them. You won’t find a city on the route, a town, or a village, where soldiers and officers on furlough are not plenty as blackberries.”