Rise to Greatness

by David Von Drehle

“And this protection you shall have at once,” Lincoln promised.

  Grant’s next lesson was among the most transformative tutorials of the war. Earl Van Dorn, nettlesome as ever, collected what little remained of his Rebel army and marched on the town of Holly Springs, where Grant had stockpiled more than a million dollars’ worth of supplies. Colonel R. C. Murphy guarded the cache with 1,500 Union soldiers, which ought to have been sufficient to defend the depot. But to the surprise of the Confederates, and to Grant’s eternal fury, Murphy took one look at Van Dorn’s motley party and surrendered. What Van Dorn’s men could not eat or haul away from the Federal trove, they smashed and burned.

  Abruptly Grant found himself far from his Union friends, with no railroad and no supplies. The people around Oxford were delighted by this twist; Grant later remembered that some of them called on him “with broad smiles on their faces, indicating intense joy, to ask what I was going to do now without anything for my soldiers to eat.” Grant knew what he was not going to do: he wasn’t going to tell his men to starve while they had guns in their hands. Turning the tables, he answered the townspeople by saying that he “had already sent troops and wagons to collect all the food and forage they could find for fifteen miles on each side of the road.” The smiles faded as the locals realized that their farms and stores were about to be stripped. “What are we to do?” they demanded. Grant advised them to go someplace more than fifteen miles away, and hope they could find some people in a generous mood.

  The success of this improvisation startled Grant. Though the raids by Forrest and Van Dorn soon forced him to turn back temporarily from his goal of Vicksburg, he was “amazed at the quantity of supplies the country afforded.” He kept his men and mules well fed all the way back to their base. “This taught me a lesson which was taken advantage of later,” Grant wrote after the war. That was an understatement: the realization that an army didn’t need an umbilical cord, that it was possible to cut loose from the supply line and move quickly while living off the countryside, led to some of the most successful and decisive campaigns of the war. This was the lesson Grant would apply in his brilliant maneuvers to capture Vicksburg the following spring. It was the lesson Sherman would use to gut Georgia and the Carolinas while capturing Savannah in 1864. And it was the lesson Philip Sheridan would apply when he stripped the Shenandoah Valley that same year, thus robbing Lee of his larder.

  Grant’s retreat from Mississippi in December 1862 was not without cost. It was humiliating and demoralizing, and it left Sherman in the lurch when he attacked the Chickasaw Bluffs near Vicksburg on December 29 in the mistaken belief that Grant’s army was still menacing the Rebels from nearby. But that was cheap tuition compared to the value of what Grant learned in Oxford, for arguably no military lesson in the four years of the Civil War did more to decide the outcome.

  * * *

  Mary Lincoln dreaded the approach of Christmas. She enjoyed the shopping, of course; the presidential carriage was a frequent sight around town, Horatio Taft reported, “with its tall driver & footman … standing in front of some Merchant’s door while Mrs. L[incoln] sits in her seat and examines rich goods which the obsequious Clerk brings out to her.” But the holiday season reminded her of the last days of 1861, when the White House rang with the laughter and shouts of four happy boys, two Lincolns and two Tafts. That was also a time when she had been busy putting the finishing touches on her great redecorating project and dreaming of the social triumph she would engineer in February. Now everything had changed. “From this time until spring each day will be almost a gloomy anniversary,” she confided to a friend. To another she wrote: “My precious little Willie is as much mourned over & far more missed (now that we realize he has gone).”

  The first lady ended the year with a trip on New Year’s Eve “to see a Mrs. Laury, a spiritualist” who lived in Georgetown. Once again, Willie’s shade was summoned from the great beyond to console his grieving mother. While in the vicinity, Willie took the opportunity—through the medium—to warn his father that “the Cabinet are all enemies of the President, working for themselves, and that they would have to be dismissed.”

  Grief was the president’s companion as well, though he managed to keep the upper hand. Just before Christmas, Lincoln learned of yet another friend killed in battle. William McCullough had been a court clerk in Bloomington, Illinois. The president knew what he meant to his family. On December 23, in a letter to McCullough’s daughter, Lincoln wrote: “In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares. The older have learned to ever expect it.” Endurance, he counseled, was the medicine for grief, and time the therapy. Reassuring her that she was “sure to be happy again,” he told the girl: “I have had experience enough to know what I say.” Never one to hide from sorrow, Lincoln spent a bittersweet Christmas Day visiting the hospitals of Washington, which were now full with the wounded of Fredericksburg.

  The last days of 1862 slipped away. Lincoln salved the hurt feelings of the outfoxed Senate Republicans by agreeing to bend the Constitution to create a new state: West Virginia. Conservatives pleaded with him to block the statehood bill. They dreaded the precedent of dividing a state against its will. After long deliberation, Lincoln signed the legislation, thus rewarding the mountain loyalists while punishing the Rebels in Richmond.

  On December 26, a cheer went up in Minnesota when thirty-eight Sioux dropped from a giant scaffold. (One more warrior had been spared at the last minute.) The largest mass execution in American history, it proved to be sufficient vengeance. As Lincoln had calculated, the citizens of the state did not rampage for more blood.

  On December 30, the brave little Monitor sank in high seas, the victim of bad weather, not Confederate guns. The next day, Lincoln gave his support to an ill-fated project to colonize Ile à Vache, an island off the coast of Haiti. As a consequence, some five hundred black Americans would suffer, and many of them die, at the failed colony, in a tragic fiasco that would finally close the book on Abraham Lincoln’s worst idea.

  As the old year ticked down, millions of people wondered whether Lincoln would actually go through with his commitment to emancipate the slaves. Would he quail at the last minute from such a momentous step? Was it all a bluff, or was there perhaps some secret compromise in the works to reunite the country and preserve the peculiar institution? Shortly before New Year’s Day, Charles Sumner paid a visit to the White House to look the president in the eye and test his resolve. Lincoln assured the senator that once he took a position, he was difficult to move. Questioned again during the last week of December, Lincoln declared that “he could not stop the proclamation if he would, and would not if he could.”

  Some urged him to reconsider. Browning enlisted a Massachusetts conservative, Benjamin Franklin Thomas, to call on Lincoln “and have a full, frank conversation with him in regard to the threatened proclamation of emancipation,” which they both believed to be “fraught with evil, and evil only.” After his appeal, Thomas reported back: “The President was fatally bent upon his course, saying that if he should refuse to issue his proclamation there would be a rebellion in the north, and that a dictator would be placed over his head within the week.”

  As the deadline approached, Lincoln worked with his cabinet to refine every word. His decision to exempt thirteen Louisiana parishes from the proclamation led to some awkward language, and in one cabinet meeting Montgomery Blair argued that such a minor matter should be left out. “As this was destined to be read as a great historical document, it was a pity to have its unity, completeness, and direct simplicity marred by such a trifle of detail,” Blair contended. Both Seward and Chase agreed. Pacing by the fireplace, Lincoln said he had promised political leaders in that part of Louisiana that he would count their territory as loyal if they would hold an election for members of Congress. They had done so, and now he was keeping his promise.

  Chase objected that Congress was unlikely to recogniz
e those new members. Lincoln stopped his pacing and wheeled on the Treasury secretary. “Then I am to be bullied by Congress am I?” he snapped. Obviously the cabinet crisis had left a sore spot. “I’ll be damned if I will.”

  * * *

  The day after Christmas, in central Tennessee, General William Rosecrans, Buell’s replacement, departed Nashville with some 47,000 men, marching down the road toward Chattanooga. Rosecrans looked like the marble bust of a Greek emperor and hailed from a distinguished military family in Ohio. At West Point, he had rescued a plebe named Grant from hazing. Bred to be a soldier, “Old Rosy” had waited forty-three years to lead a great army. After long preparation, he was ready to try to bring eastern Tennessee back into the Union fold.

  At the town of Murfreesboro, on the west fork of the Stones River, Braxton Bragg came out to meet Rosecrans’s troops with some 40,000 Rebels. Late in the afternoon of December 30, the two armies settled so close together that their regimental bands staged a fight, blasting “Yankee Doodle” and “Dixie” at each other until they settled on a song they could play in unison: “Home Sweet Home.” As the sad tune sounded in the dying light, the rival generals in their headquarters tents bent over their plans, and somehow they settled on precisely the same idea. Rosecrans and Bragg both decided to begin the last day of the year by throwing a hard left hook, thus crashing the enemy’s right and cutting his supply line.

  Bragg swung first, thundering into the Union lines at daybreak on December 31 and driving the Federals back like a folding knife. But just as the blue wall was about to break, the Confederates came up against a reorganized line fighting under Philip Sheridan. His dark eyes blazing over a slash of mustache, Little Phil refused to let the Rebels through. During four of the hottest hours of the war, the young general lost three brigade commanders and a third of his men, but he and his fighters were unconquerable. When his troops ran out of ammunition, Sheridan ordered them to fix bayonets. And when night fell, his soldiers safely occupied a strong position on favorable high ground.

  John Dahlgren had indeed been wrong about the Union’s ability to make soldiers and leaders. At the battle of Stones River, Rosecrans lost 31 percent of his army—the highest proportional toll of the war. But the general held his ground, Bragg’s exhausted forces turned back, and the terrible confrontation proved to be an important Union victory. For Lincoln, it was a critical success to set against the failure at Fredericksburg, a “check … to a dangerous sentiment” of defeat “which was spreading in the North.” Two weeks earlier, it seemed that Providence had set its face against the Union, but the news that Bragg’s men had been beaten back strengthened Lincoln’s confidence that he remained on the right side of history.

  In the end, William Rosecrans would not measure up to the president’s hopes for him, but Lincoln never lost sight of the service he rendered at Murfreesboro. Months later, after Union victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg had lifted Northern spirits and put the memory of Stones River behind the scrim of time, the president still felt the debt keenly. In a letter to the general, Lincoln reaffirmed what he owed: “I can never forget, whilst I remember anything, that about the end of last year … you gave us a hard earned victory which, had there been a defeat instead, the nation could hardly have lived over.”

  EPILOGUE

  “A NEW BIRTH OF FREEDOM”

  As the White House clocks chimed midnight, 1862 passed into history trailing a ragged tail of loose ends. Abraham Lincoln spent another nearly sleepless night, not least because news of the war’s progress remained so bleak. On the Rappahannock, Burnside’s tether on the Army of the Potomac had frayed almost to nothing. In the wake of his frontal assault on Fredericksburg, made against the advice of senior officers, the general now faced a mutiny. Though he had given up on another confrontation at Marye’s Heights, Burnside remained determined to recross the river and try again to seize the offensive. However, as Lincoln noted, “his Grand Division commanders all oppose[d] the movement,” and they made their opposition clear by going over the general’s head to Washington. The president wanted Halleck to visit army headquarters at Falmouth and straighten things out by surveying the ground, interviewing the contending generals, and deciding whether Burnside should give the order. But to Lincoln, Halleck seemed to be dodging responsibility. “Your military skill is useless to me, if you will not do this,” the president scolded his general in chief in a letter dated January 1, 1863.

  Lincoln also had the Army of the Cumberland to worry about that night. He knew that Rosecrans’s troops were joined in battle with Bragg’s Rebels in Tennessee, but he had no idea how that confrontation would turn out, much less how he could deal with another defeat if one came. Farther west, the military situation was cloaked in perplexing near-silence, for Grant’s communications were cut and Sherman’s strike force was somewhere in the bayous around Vicksburg. Much had changed in the year since the president wrote his first tentative telegrams asserting his authority over the far-flung Union troops, but one truth was permanent: during these dark vigils, Lincoln was always a lonely commander in chief.

  However vague and troubling the news from the battlefield, though, the day had arrived when Lincoln was to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. Despite the president’s repeated assurances to Sumner, the cabinet, and various others, many Americans North and South continued to speculate that Lincoln’s determination would fail at the last minute, that he would suspend the decree in favor of some final attempt at compromise. Even Mary Lincoln, who knew the enormous pressure her husband was under from conservative supporters to find some excuse to shelve the proclamation, is said to have asked him: “Well, what do you intend doing?” Lincoln answered her by sending a glance heavenward and saying: “I am a man under orders; I cannot do otherwise.” The decision was final.

  For Lincoln, standing by his commitments was a matter of pride: he once described the “ability to keep my resolves” as “the gem of my character.” Yet he understood, more than many of his contemporaries, that his actions on the first day of 1863 would be far more significant than any earlier promise he had pledged and kept. As he would put it later, the Emancipation Proclamation was “the central act of my administration and the great event of the nineteenth century,” for it “knocked the bottom out of slavery.” Here was the “new birth of freedom” he would speak of so brilliantly at Gettysburg.

  Lincoln had come a long way in a year—and a very long way from a New Year’s Day twenty-two years earlier, one of the lowest moments of his life. On that occasion, anguish over his muddled future left Lincoln bedridden with depression, so wretched that Joshua Speed feared his friend would try to kill himself. Yet despite—or because of—his torment, this unschooled, unmarried, unpolished man of thirty-one confessed to Speed the true scale of his ambition and the shape of his greatest fear. He wanted to be remembered forever, Lincoln admitted—to engage so impressively with “the events transpiring in his day and generation” as to “link his name with something that would redound to the interest of his fellow man.” Only by accomplishing something great could he register his existence on this sad earth beyond his own life span and the lives of those who knew him personally.

  Lincoln feared oblivion the way others feared death, and this dread had stalked him from childhood, when, according to one family story, he worked alongside his father fashioning the pegs that would hold his mother’s coffin together. They buried his mother in a tiny graveyard on a wild hillside; a dozen years later, they left her behind when they moved away. Revisiting the place as a grown man, Lincoln felt as if the whole world was saturated in death: “Every sound appears a knell / And every spot a grave.” Yet no one could name all the anonymous men, women, and children lost to time; it was as if they had never lived. Lincoln’s dream was to be the rare individual whose name and story would live on.

  Now the moment he sought had come; today he would step across the threshold from mortality to permanence. Later, he would speak in exactly these terms when talking ab
out the Emancipation Proclamation with Joshua Speed. When Lincoln reminded his friend of their long-ago conversation about ambition and fear, Speed remembered it clearly. Lincoln then said he had come to believe that “my fondest hopes will be realized,” thanks to his signature on the momentous decree. As Lincoln put it to Charles Sumner on another occasion: “I know very well that the name which is connected with this act will never be forgotten.”

  As faint light rose in the White House windows, the new year dawned clear and mild—“very smilingly,” as one Washingtonian put it. After crossing the second floor from the family quarters to his office, Lincoln inked his pen and began work on the final draft of his decree. At a meeting the previous day, members of the cabinet had suggested a few small changes to the document, and Lincoln decided to incorporate several of them. First, to defend himself against accusations that he was deliberately stirring up a slave insurrection, he added a sentence calling on the freed slaves of the South to “abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defense.” He also retreated slightly from the promise in his preliminary proclamation that the liberated slaves would be “forever” free. His reasoning, as he deleted that ringing word, was that the order drew its constitutional authority from the president’s war powers, and the war would not go on forever. Still, the final proclamation pledged the strength of the U.S. Army and Navy to “maintain” the freedom of the former slaves, and called on the armed forces to enlist freed black troops. These revolutionary commitments would secure lasting freedom far beyond the power of that single missing word.

  After filling nearly three pages with his careful handwriting, Lincoln ended the decree with a new flourish. Suggested by Chase and others, it was designed to give this dust-dry document a glow of glory. “And upon this act,” Lincoln wrote, “sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God.” With that, he summoned a messenger to carry the order to the State Department, where, despite the holiday, a scribe was waiting to make an official copy.