Lincoln, the unknown

by Tom Clancy

  He rested his arm a moment, then slowly signed the document, and gave freedom to three and a half million slaves.

  The proclamation did not meet with popular approval then. "The only effect of it," wrote Orville H. Browning, one of Lincoln's closest friends and strongest supporters, "was to unite and exasperate the South and divide and distract us in the North."

  A mutiny broke out in the army. Men who had enlisted to save the Union swore that they wouldn't stand up and be shot down to free niggers and make them their social equals. Thousands of soldiers deserted, and recruiting fell off everywhere.

  The plain people upon whom Lincoln had depended for support failed him utterly. The autumn elections went overwhelmingly against him. Even his home state of Illinois repudiated the Republican party.

  And quickly, on top of the defeat at the polls, came one of the most disastrous reverses of the war—Burnside's foolhardy attack on Lee at Fredericksburg and the loss of thirteen thousand men. A stupid and futile butchery. This sort of thing had been going on for eighteen months now. Was it never going to stop? The nation was appalled. People were driven to despair. The President was violently denounced everywhere. He had failed. His general had failed. His policies had failed. People wouldn't put up with this any longer. Even the Republican members of the Senate revolted; and, wanting to force Lincoln out of the White House, they called upon him, demanding that he change his policies and dismiss his entire Cabinet.

  This was a humiliating blow. Lincoln confessed that it distressed him more than any other one event of his political life.

  "They want to get rid of me," he said, "and I am half disposed to gratify them."

  Horace Greeley now sharply regretted the fact that he had forced the Republicans to nominate Lincoln in 1860.

  "It was a mistake," he confessed, "the biggest mistake of my life."

  Greeley and a number of other prominent Republicans organized a movement having these objects in view: to force Lincoln to resign, to put Hamlin, the Vice-President, in the White House, and then to compel Hamlin to give Rosecrans command of all the Union armies.

  "We are now on the brink of destruction," Lincoln confessed. "It appears to me that even the Almighty is against us. I can see hardly a ray of hope."

  I

  N the spring of 1863, Lee, flushed with a phenomenal series of brilliant victories, determined to take the offensive and invade the North. He planned to seize the rich manufacturing centers of Pennsylvania, secure food, medicine, and new clothes for his ragged troops, possibly capture Washington, and compel France and Great Britain to recognize the Confederacy.

  A bold, reckless move! True, but the Southern troops were boasting that one Confederate could whip three Yankees, and they believed it; so when their officers told them they could eat beef twice a day when they reached Pennsylvania, they were eager to be off at once.

  Before he quit Richmond, Lee received disquieting news from home. A terrible thing had happened! One of his daughters had actually been caught reading a novel. The great general was distressed; so he wrote, pleading with her to devote her leisure to such innocuous classics as Plato and Homer, and Plutarch's Lives. After finishing the letter, Lee read his Bible and knelt in prayer, as was his custom; then he blew out the candle and turned in for the night. . . .

  Presently he was off with seventy-five thousand men. His hungry army plunged across the Potomac, throwing the country into a panic. Farmers rushed out of the Cumberland Valley, driving their horses and cattle before them; and negroes, their eyes white with fear, fled in terror, lest they be dragged back to slavery.

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  Lee's artillery was already thundering before Harrisburg, when he learned that, back in the rear, the Union Army was threatening to break his lines of communication. So he whirled around as an angry ox would to gore a dog snapping at his heels; and, quite by chance, the ox and the dog met at a sleepy little Pennsylvania village with a theological seminary, a place called Gettysburg, and fought there the most famous battle in the history of our country.

  During the first two days of the fighting the Union Army lost twenty thousand men; and, on the third day, Lee hoped finally to smash the enemy by a terrific assault of fresh troops under the command of General George Pickett.

  These were new tactics for Lee. Up to this time, he had fought with his men behind breastworks or concealed in the woods. Now he planned to make a desperate attack out in the open.

  The very contemplation of it staggered Lee's most brilliant assistant, General Longstreet.

  "Great God!" Longstreet exclaimed. "Look, General Lee, at the insurmountable difficulties between our line and that of the Yankees—the steep hills, the tiers of artillery, the fences. And then we shall have to fight our infantry against their battery. Look at the ground we shall have to charge over, nearly a mile of it there in the open, under the line of their canister and shrapnel. It is my opinion that no fifteen thousand men ever arrayed for battle could take that position."

  But Lee was adamant. "There were never such men in an army before," he replied. "They will go anywhere and do anything if properly led."

  So Lee held to his decision, and made the bloodiest blunder of his career.

  The Confederates had already massed one hundred and fifty cannon along Seminary Ridge. If you visit Gettysburg, you can see them there to-day, placed precisely as they were on that fateful July afternoon when they laid down a barrage such as, up to that time, had never before been heard on earth.

  Longstreet in this instance had keener judgment than Lee. He believed that the charge could result in nothing but pointless butchery; so he bowed his head and wept and declined to issue the order. Consequently, another officer had to give the command for him; and, in obedience to that command, General

  George Pickett led his Southern troops in the most dramatic and disastrous charge that ever occurred in the Western world.

  Strangely enough, this general who led the assault on the Union lines was an old friend of Lincoln's. In fact, Lincoln had made it possible for him to go to West Point. He was a picturesque character, this man Pickett. He wore his hair so long that his auburn locks almost touched his shoulders; and, like Napoleon in his Italian campaigns, he wrote ardent love-letters almost daily on the battle-field. His devoted troops cheered him that afternoon as he rode off jauntily toward the Union lines, with his cap set at a rakish angle over his right ear. They cheered and they followed him, man touching man, rank pressing rank, with banners flying and bayonets gleaming in the sun. It was picturesque. Daring. Magnificent. A murmur of admiration ran through the Union lines as they beheld it.

  Pickett's troops swept forward at an easy trot, through an orchard and corn-field, across a meadow, and over a ravine. All the time, the enemy's cannon were tearing ghastly holes in their ranks. But on they pressed, grim, irresistible.

  Suddenly the Union infantry rose from behind the stone wall on Cemetery Ridge where they had been hiding, and fired volley after volley into Pickett's defenseless troops. The crest of the hill was a sheet of flame, a slaughter-house, a blazing volcano. In a few minutes, all of Pickett's brigade commanders, except one, were down, and four fifths of his five thousand men had fallen.

  A thousand fell where Kemper led; A thousand died where Garnett bled; In blinding flame and strangling smoke The remnant through the batteries broke, And crossed the fine with Armistead.

  Armistead, leading the troops in the final plunge, ran forward, vaulted over the stone wall, and, waving his cap on the top of his sword, shouted:

  "Give 'em the steel, boys!"

  They did. They leaped over the wall, bayoneted their enemies, smashed skulls with clubbed muskets, and planted the battle-flags of the South on Cemetery Ridge.

  The banners waved there, however, only for a moment. But that moment, brief as it was, recorded the high-water mark of the Confederacy.

  Pickett's charge—brilliant, heroic—was nevertheless the beginning of the end. Lee had failed. He could not penetrate
the North. And he knew it.

  The South was doomed.

  As the remnant of Pickett's bleeding men struggled back from their fatal charge, Lee, entirely alone, rode out to encourage them, and greeted them with a self-condemnation that was little short of sublime.

  "All this has been my fault," he confessed. "It is I who have lost this fight."

  During the night of July 4 Lee began to retreat. Heavy rains were falling, and by the time he reached the Potomac the water was so high that he couldn't cross.

  There Lee was, caught in a trap, an impassable river in front of him, a victorious enemy behind him. Meade, it seemed, had him at his mercy. Lincoln was delighted; he was sure the Federal troops would swoop down upon Lee's flank and rear now, rout and capture his men, and bring the war to an abrupt and triumphant close. And if Grant had been there, that is probably what would have happened.

  But the vain and scholarly Meade was not the bulldog Grant. Every day for an entire week Lincoln repeatedly urged and commanded Meade to attack, but he was too cautious, too timid. He did not want to fight; he hesitated, he telegraphed excuses, he called a council of war in direct violation of orders —and did nothing, while the waters receded and Lee escaped.

  Lincoln was furious.

  "What does this mean?" he cried. "Great God! What does this mean? We had them within our grasp, and had only to stretch forth our hands and they were ours; yet nothing that I could say or do could make the army move. Under the circumstances, almost any general could have defeated Lee. If I had gone up there, I could have whipped him, myself."

  In bitter disappointment, Lincoln sat down and wrote Meade a letter, in which he said:

  My dear General, I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee's escape. He was within our easy grasp, and to have closed upon him would, in connection with our other late successes, have ended the war. As it is, the war will be prolonged indefi-

  nitely. If you could not safely attack Lee last Monday, how can you possibly do so south of the river, when you can take with you very few more than two-thirds of the force you then had in hand? It would be unreasonable to expect and I do not expect that you can now effect much. Your golden opportunity is gone, and I am distressed immeasurably because of it.

  Lincoln read this letter, and then stared out the window with unseeing eyes, and did a bit of thinking: "If I had been in Meade's place," he probably mused to himself, "and had had Meade's temperament and the advice of his timid officers, and if I had been awake as many nights as he had, and had seen as much blood, I might have let Lee escape, too."

  The letter was never sent. Meade never saw it. It was found among Lincoln's papers after his death.

  The Battle of Gettysburg was fought during the first week of July; six thousand dead and twenty-seven thousand wounded were left on the field. Churches, schools, and barns were turned into hospitals; groans of the suffering filled the air. Scores were dying every hour, corpses were decaying rapidly in the intense heat. The burial parties had to work fast. There was little time to dig graves; so, in many instances, a little dirt was scooped over a body where it lay. After a week of hard rains, many of the dead were half exposed. The Union soldiers were gathered from their temporary graves, and buried in one place. The following autumn the Cemetery Commission decided to dedicate the ground, and invited Edward Everett, the most famous orator in the United States, to deliver the address.

  Formal invitations to attend the exercises were sent to the President, to the Cabinet, to General Meade, to all members of both houses of Congress, to various distinguished citizens, and to the members of the diplomatic corps. Very few of these people accepted; many didn't acknowledge the invitation.

  The committee had not the least idea that the President would come. In fact, they had not even troubled to write him a personal invitation. He got merely a printed one. They imagined that his secretaries might drop it in the waste-basket without even showing it to Lincoln.

  So when he wrote saying he would be present, the committee was astonished. And a bit embarrassed. What should they do?

  Ask him to speak? Some argued that he was too busy for that, that he couldn't possibly find time to prepare. Others frankly asked, "Well, even if he had the time, has he the ability?" They doubted it.

  Oh, yes, he could make a stump speech in Illinois; but speaking at the dedication of a cemetery? No. That was different. That was not Lincoln's style. However, since he was coming anyway, they had to do something. So they finally wrote him, saying that after Mr. Everett had delivered his oration, they would like to have him make "a few appropriate remarks." That was the way they phrased it—"a few appropriate remarks."

  The invitation just barely missed being an insult. But the President accepted it. Why? There is an interesting story behind that. The previous autumn Lincoln had visited the battle-field of Antietam; and, one afternoon while he and an old friend from Illinois, Ward Lamon, were out driving, the President turned to Lamon and asked him to sing what Lincoln called his "sad little song." It was one of Lincoln's favorites.

  "Many a time, on the Illinois circuit and often at the White House when Lincoln and I were alone," says Lamon, "I have seen him in tears while I was rendering that homely melody."

  It went like this:

  I've wandered to the village, Tom; I've sat beneath the tree Upon the schoolhouse play-ground, that sheltered you and me; But none were left to greet me, Tom, and few were left to know Who played with us upon the green, some twenty years ago.

  Near by the spring, upon the elm you know I cut your name,— Your sweetheart's just beneath it, Tom; and you did mine the

  same. Some heartless wretch has peeled the bark—'twas dying sure

  but slow, Just as she died whose name you cut, some twenty years ago.

  My lids have long been dry, Tom, but tears came to my eyes; I thought of her I loved so well, those early broken ties: I visited the old churchyard, and took some flowers to strow Upon the graves of those we loved, some twenty years ago.

  As Lamon sang it now, probably Lincoln fell to dreaming of the only woman he had ever loved, Ann Rutledge, and he thought of her lying back there in her neglected grave on the Illinois prairie; and the rush of these poignant memories filled

  his eyes with tears. So Lamon, to break the spell of Lincoln's melancholy, struck up a humorous negro melody.

  That was all there was to the incident. It was perfectly harmless, and very pathetic. But Lincoln's political enemies distorted it and lied about it and tried to make it a national disgrace. They made it appear like a gross indecency. The New York "World" repeated some version of the scandal every day for almost three months. Lincoln was accused of cracking jokes and singing funny songs on the battle-field where "heavy details of men were engaged in burying the dead."

  The truth is that he had cracked no jokes at all, that he had sung no songs, that he had been miles away from the battlefield when the incident occurred, that the dead had all been buried before that, and rain had fallen upon their graves. Such were the facts. But his enemies didn't want facts. They were lusting for blood. A bitter cry of savage denunciation swept over the land.

  Lincoln was deeply hurt. He was so distressed that he could not bear to read these attacks, yet he didn't feel that he ought to answer them, for that would merely dignify them. So he suffered in silence, and when the invitation came to speak at the dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery, he welcomed it. It was just the opportunity he desired to silence his enemies and pay his humble tribute to the honored dead.

  The invitation came late, and he had only a crowded fortnight in which to prepare his speech. He thought it over during his spare moments—while dressing, while being shaved, while eating his lunch, while walking back and forth between Stanton's office and the White House. He mused upon it while stretched out on a leather couch in the war-office, waiting for the late telegraphic reports. He wrote a rough draft of it on a piece of pale-blue foolscap paper, and carried it a
bout in the top of his hat. The Sunday before it was delivered he said: "I have written it over two or three times, but it is not finished. I shall have to give it another lick before I am satisfied."

  He arrived in Gettysburg the night before the dedication. The little town was filled to overflowing. Its usual population of thirteen hundred had been swelled to almost thirty thousand. The weather was fine; the night was clear; a bright full moon rode high through the sky. Only a fraction of the crowd could find beds; thousands paraded up and down the village until dawn. The sidewalks soon became clogged, impassable; so hun-

  dreds, locked arm in arm, marched in the middle of the dirt streets, singing, "John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave."

  Lincoln devoted all that evening to giving his speech "another lick." At eleven o'clock he went to an adjoining house, where Secretary Seward was staying, and read the speech aloud to him, asking for his criticisms. The next morning, after breakfast, Lincoln continued working over it until a rap at the door reminded him that it was time for him to take his place in the procession headed for the cemetery.

  As the procession started, he sat erect at first; but presently his body slouched forward in the saddle; his head fell on his chest, and his long arms hung limp at his sides. ... He was lost in thought, going over his little speech, giving it "another lick." . . .

  Edward Everett, the selected orator of the occasion, made two mistakes at Gettysburg. Both bad—and both uncalled for. First, he arrived an hour late; and, secondly, he spoke for two hours.