Rise to Greatness

by David Von Drehle

  Further snarling matters, Burnside’s pontoon boats, held up by bureaucratic bungling, were late in arriving at the Rappahannock. In the interim, the Rebels had reached Fredericksburg and were taking up strong positions on the formidable ridgeline just behind the city.

  Now, Lincoln told Browning, he and Burnside faced a difficult choice between danger and delay. “To cross the Rappahannock … in the face of an opposing army was very hazardous,” the president said. Perhaps they should “wait a few days” to arrange a diversion along the lines of his own plan. Whatever they concluded, Lincoln said to his friend, “the question would be decided today.”

  The changed roster of senior commanders had seemed to galvanize Lincoln. “The President is immensely quickened, & the War Department is harder at work than ever,” one close observer reported. After dismissing McClellan, Lincoln showed less patience than ever with generals who were slow to fight. On November 22, for instance, he gave Nathaniel Banks a sharp rap on the knuckles. Banks was to replace the lightning rod Benjamin Butler in New Orleans, and his assignment was to take the offensive, moving up the Mississippi Delta. A week past his promised departure date, however, Banks was still in Washington, outfitting his mission in grand McClellanesque style.

  When yet another order for equipment arrived at the War Department, Lincoln was shocked. “I have just been overwhelmed and confounded with the sight of a requisition,” he wrote Banks, and he was “in some hope that it is not genuine.” After pointing out that the order would take at least two months to fill, Lincoln continued, his anger rising: “My dear General, this expanding, this piling up of impedimenta, has been, so far, almost our ruin, and will be our final ruin if it is not abandoned.” Banks was to pack up whatever men and materials he had managed to collect and get himself out of town. And he was to leave now, before a posse of politicians showed up in a sour mood. “You must be off before Congress meets,” the president demanded. Banks left.

  * * *

  Mary and Tad having recently returned from their travels, on Sunday, November 30, the first family attended services. Together the Lincolns filed into the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church and took their usual pew. Also in the congregation that morning was Noah Brooks, the young journalist whom the president had brought to his wife’s séance earlier in the year. For a time the Maine-born Brooks had lived in Illinois, where he first encountered Lincoln as a speaker on behalf of John Frémont’s 1856 presidential campaign. Now, six years later, Brooks was struck by the change in Lincoln’s appearance. Reverend Gurley’s sermon gave the reporter plenty of time to study and describe the transformation wrought by the nation’s ordeal.

  “His Excellency has grievously altered from the happy-faced Springfield lawyer of 1856,” Brooks wrote. “His hair is grizzled, his gait more stooping, his countenance sallow, and there is a sunken, deathly look about the large, cavernous eyes, which is saddening to those who see there the marks of care and anxiety, such as no President of the United States has ever before known. It is a lesson for human ambition to look upon that anxious and careworn face, prematurely aged by public labors and private griefs, and to remember that with the fleeting glory of his term of office have come responsibilities which make his life one long series of harassing care.”

  Tomorrow, Lincoln would deliver his annual message to Congress, explaining himself and charting the way forward—not just for Washington, but for the whole country. Today, marked by “the daily scars of mental anxiety and struggle,” Lincoln wearily stood at the end of the service and started up the aisle. But as he walked, Brooks reported, his exhausted face was “lighted with a smile” and he gave “a cheerful nod [to] his friends on either side.”

  13

  DECEMBER

  The fateful moment was but a month away: on New Year’s Day, Abraham Lincoln was due to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. While no one knew exactly how the consequences of the president’s radical decree would unfold, the nation was clearly on the path to yet more violence and upheaval. Naturally, large numbers of Americans found themselves wishing they could reverse course. Lincoln understood this impulse, but he also knew that the brink was already behind them. There was no realistic way back, only forward.

  He made this point succinctly in response to a ludicrous proposal from Fernando Wood, the colorful New York City ward boss whose latest public office was a seat in the next Congress. Claiming to have inside information from Confederate sources, Wood told Lincoln that the Rebels were ready to send representatives to rejoin the Federal government, provided they were given blanket amnesty from treason charges. The time was ripe, Wood argued, for the president to declare a cease-fire in the war and explore whether the Southern states might return to the fold. With peace restored, the North and South could send the cream of their two armies to drive the French out of Mexico and annex that country for the purpose of creating nine additional slave states, thus assuring the Southerners that their voices would command respect for years to come in Congress and the electoral college. Wood wanted Lincoln’s blessing to open negotiations.

  After initially ignoring Wood’s insistent demands for a reaction to this scheme, the president finally replied. “I strongly suspect your information will prove to be groundless,” Lincoln wrote mildly, “nevertheless I thank you for communicating it to me.” To resume their places in the Union, all the Southerners had to do was “cease resistance, and … submit to, and maintain the national authority,” he explained. Otherwise, there was nothing to negotiate.

  Lincoln’s second annual message to Congress offered a far more detailed version of his views. After opening the message in traditional style with a general survey of government operations, he turned to the meat of his concerns. At this critical and delicate juncture, he sought to explain again why the nation’s ordeal was necessary, and to reassure his nervous countrymen that the future still promised a reign of prosperous peace.

  Characteristically, Lincoln went back to first principles to construct a stout ladder of logic. “A nation may be said to consist of its territory, its people, and its laws,” he wrote. People and laws could change, but “the territory is the only part which is of certain durability.” The physical imperatives of geography were becoming more powerful all the time, Lincoln noted, as technology—“steam, telegraphs, and intelligence”—shrank the distance between far-flung regions.

  Looking at the landmass of the United States, Lincoln asserted that it was “well adapted to be the home of one national family,” but poorly set up “for two, or more.” Why? Because “physically speaking, we cannot separate. There is no line, straight or crooked, suitable for a national boundary.” In the East the likeliest border between North and South consisted of rivers, easily crossed and bustling with the commerce of a rapidly growing population. In the western two thirds of the landmass, all possible borders were “merely surveyor’s lines, over which people may walk back and forth.”

  Even if two compatible nations could, in theory, live peacefully within these unnatural boundaries, disputes over slavery made conflict inevitable within the United States, Lincoln continued. Quoting from his own inaugural address, he wrote: “One section of our country believes slavery is right, and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong, and ought not to be extended.” This tension would not disappear simply because the antagonists separated behind borders drawn on a map. Abolitionists in the North would continue to aid and encourage escaping slaves to ford rivers or step across surveyor’s lines. Slave catchers from the South would continue to cross those same weak frontiers in search of their “property,” or the South would attempt to harden these borders and thus restrict the free flow of trade from north to south and east to west. A conflict that could not be solved by shared laws within a single nation would be no easier to solve through treaties between two contending nations, Lincoln observed. Strife and violence would be permanent, as they had been on the Kansas prairie in the years before Fort Sumter.

  Perhaps it once
had been imaginable that New England could go one way and the Deep South another, undoing the great compromise of the Founders. But Lincoln directed attention beyond the original colonies to what he called “the great body of the republic,” the nation’s muscular midsection. This vast breadbasket, he explained, “is naturally one of the most important [regions] in the world.” But it “[has] no sea-coast,” and therefore would always depend on routes through adjacent territory to bring its abundant crops and goods to markets around the world. The inhabitants of the American heartland could never be expected to leave their economic destiny hostage to current and future secessionists throwing up new borders and obstacles whenever they pleased. “True to themselves,” he wrote, they “will not ask where a line of separation shall be, but will vow, rather, that there shall be no such line.” Lincoln went on: “There is no possible severing, but would multiply, and not mitigate, evils among us.” The land “demands union, and abhors separation.”

  They were fighting now to avoid fighting later, Lincoln’s essay implied. And the sacrifice would be worth it: the slavery question, he predicted, could be “hushed forever with the passing of one generation.” With that, the president turned to the prospect of race relations after emancipation, an issue that troubled even the most optimistic Americans. Lincoln renewed his case in favor of colonization, arguing that the seemingly impossible cost of emancipation and colonization would be whittled away by the rapid growth of a peaceful nation. Presciently, he foretold a day when the United States would become more prosperous than all of Europe combined: “And we will reach this, too, if we do not ourselves relinquish the chance, by the folly and evils of disunion.”

  But then Lincoln struck a new note in his presidency. “I strongly favor colonization,” he wrote. “And yet—” With those two words, Lincoln turned a corner from past to future, for he then introduced the idea that a harmonious multiracial society was a real possibility. White Americans, he wrote, did not need to fear freedom. Free black workers cannot “displace any more white labor, by being free, than by remaining slaves,” he reasoned. “Are they not already in the land? Will liberation make them any more numerous? Equally distributed among the whites of the whole country … there would be but one colored to seven whites. Could the one, in any way, greatly disturb the seven?” He pointed his audience to places around the country that already had free black populations as large or larger than one of seven. People there—Maryland and Delaware, for example—lived happily, “without any apparent consciousness of evil from” their diversity.

  These words may sound stunted and cautious a century and a half later. But in the context of the time, Lincoln’s vision of a diverse new nation was another step on a long road of revolution. Even as he used the annual message to repeat his arguments in favor of distant colonies for the former slaves, he began to prepare the country for the inevitable failure of that unwieldy scheme, and for the task of living together in freedom. No choice remained, Lincoln asserted: the Union must be saved. And when that terrible work was done, Americans would reap untold dividends in a rich and purposeful future. Peaceful emancipation would be ideal, but in any event he would order the army to begin to enforce his proclamation on January 1.

  In closing, Lincoln offered a call to action that would ring down through the ages: “Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history.… In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last, best hope of earth.”

  * * *

  His annual message at last finished, Lincoln turned back to the contentious matter of the condemned Minnesota Sioux. He asked Joseph Holt, the judge advocate general of the army, whether he, Lincoln, could describe a set of standards for choosing which Indians should be hanged and delegate the actual selection to someone else. Holt replied that the president must make the decisions himself. Lincoln dutifully went to work plowing through 303 often confusing files, separating out those warriors who unquestionably participated in massacres (as distinguished from battles) or rapes. Meanwhile, Congress boiled with impatience. The Senate passed a resolution demanding copies of all paperwork relating to the Sioux uprising, while the House debated the feasibility of banning all Native Americans from Minnesota. On the far-off frontier, a drunken mob marched on the stockade where the prisoners were being held, but a smooth-talking guard managed to dissuade the crowd from rioting.

  Lincoln completed his deliberations on December 6 and painstakingly wrote out the names and case numbers of the thirty-nine prisoners whom he had condemned to death. He copied out the unfamiliar names as well as he could; the phonetic renderings made it plain that no one with authority over these lives could speak or understand a word of the Sioux language. Very clear, though, was Lincoln’s determination to save as many of the Sioux as he could from unjust punishment. Even after he sent off his list, he continued to worry about the details: he dictated a follow-up message a few days later warning the authorities in Minnesota not to confuse two prisoners who had similar names.

  Given the intense political pressure for revenge and the cyclone of war raging around him, Lincoln’s care and mercy are impressive. He spared roughly seven out of every eight prisoners, apparently spurred only by his conscience. Lincoln “shrank with evident pain from even the idea of shedding human blood,” Army lawyer Joseph Holt later reflected, speaking of the many hours they spent together reviewing the decisions of courts-martial. “These cases came to him by the hundreds, and the carrying out of all these many sentences impressed him as nothing short of ‘wholesale butchery.’ … He always leaned to the side of mercy. His constant desire was to save life.”

  Lincoln’s order was extremely unpopular in Minnesota. But this was one occasion when the president disregarded public opinion. As he later explained, “I could not hang men for votes.”

  * * *

  Night after night in the snowy cold on the Rappahannock, the men of the Army of the Potomac could look across the river past the lights of Fredericksburg and see Rebel campfires burning on the yonder hills. Each night, there were more of them to see. By the second week of December, the enemy was so numerous that no one on the Union side had much faith in Burnside’s plan for a frontal attack—including Burnside. He was not shy about telling people how little he wanted his job and how inadequate he felt. This fretful talk inevitably led to dissent among his generals, and on the night of December 10 the reluctant commander summoned them to a meeting, during which he told them that he had no use for complaints, only determination. Trained by McClellan to see high-level treachery behind every bad decision, many of those senior officers could only assume that Burnside was being ordered from above to persist in his plans long “after all hope of a surprise had faded away.”

  They were wrong. Lincoln continued to argue for a more sophisticated plan, but Burnside seemed to have become almost paralyzed as he waited for the arrival of the pontoon boats that would allow his troops to get across the river. On December 11, with the boats at last on hand, he gave the order to link them to form bridges, and soon the blue legions began crossing. Lovely little Fredericksburg was shelled and sacked in the process.

  Lee held his fire. He couldn’t quite believe his good fortune. He had been assuming that the brunt of the Federal assault would come on his extreme right, as the Union tried to turn his flank. Instead, Burnside appeared intent on attacking across a wide-open field leading to an impregnable position. Longstreet, commanding the Rebel center behind the town, was equally puzzled. Imagining that Burnside might have some ruse in mind, Longstreet asked his superintendent of artillery whether he shouldn’t add to the batteries guarding the open plain. “General,” came the reply, “a chicken could not live on that field when we open on it.”

  That was not much of an exaggeration. The field was about a mile wide. It lay just south of town, facing a hill called Marye’s Heights, named for the wealthy attorney whose pillared mansion stood on top. The hill was st
udded with cannon, and at the foot of the hill, facing the field, was a sunken road guarded by a stone wall that provided a perfect shield for regiments of Rebel riflemen. Moreover, the few buildings on the plain made lethal perches for Confederate sharpshooters.

  December 13 dawned in a thick fog that covered the approach to the field by the Union’s II Corps. When the first brigades charged at noon, the corps commander, Darius Couch, climbed into a church steeple and looked down. As Couch later wrote, he saw “that the whole plain was covered with men, prostrate and dropping, the live men running here and there … the wounded coming back. The commands seemed to be mixed up. I had never seen fighting like that, nothing approaching it in terrible uproar and destruction.… As they charged the artillery fire would break their formation and they would get mixed; then they would close up, go forward, receive the withering infantry fire, and those who were able would run to the houses and fight as best they could; and then the next brigade coming up in succession would do its duty and melt like snow coming down on warm ground.”

  Burnside threw seven divisions into this slaughter pen—ordering as many as fourteen hopeless charges—and as the horrible afternoon wore on, the sight of each new brigade appearing in neat formation and marching from the streets of town to meet its dread appointment grew more pathetically moving. Longstreet saw “the Federals come again and again to their death,” and thought “that they deserved success if courage and daring could entitle soldiers to victory.” It is said that Lee, watching from a nearby hilltop, was moved to speak perhaps his most famous words: “It is well that war is so terrible—we should grow too fond of it.”