Abraham Lincoln

by Thomas Keneally

  Now, free from that dead hand, Lincoln and Chase embarked on a scheme to raise money to fight the war. They authorized the aggressive marketing of government war bonds to ordinary citizens as well as to professional investors. Repaying them, Chase understood, would take more specie than the Treasury possessed, and so, with Lincoln’s approval, he introduced into Congress a Legal Tender Act, which permitted the issue of $150 million in paper money. Thus the greenback, that final insult to the old economy under which Lincoln had spent his boyhood, was born, and issued by the Treasury, receivable for all debts public and private. The Jeffersonian idyll, subsistence farmers trading with one another in happy kind, had already been rendered irrelevant by an increasing volume of specie in the country, a few pieces of which, thrown by passengers, had once landed on the boards of Lincoln’s cockboat and given him ideas. Now the American Eden was obliterated in a snowstorm of greenbacks. There were many complaints that this phenomenon was contrary to political, moral, and national honor. Greenbacks were condemned as unconstitutional, since the Constitution empowered the Federal government to issue coinage only, but Lincoln demanded the right to issue them under emergency war powers. Some financiers told Lincoln that he had wrecked the country, and that the greenback would cause huge inflation as the war became more expensive. But the war had to be paid for.

  Similarly, a flat 3 percent tax on all incomes over eight hundred dollars per year was introduced, and though it produced at first an insubstantial flow of revenue, it marked the beginning of the fiscal world twentieth-century Americans would inherit. A sales tax on a wide range of goods from tobacco to playing cards left people complaining that nothing was left untaxed except the air. Confiscated Southern capital also helped national revenue.

  In early 1863 Chase had framed a National Banking Act, for a series of national banks that would handle the issuing of greenbacks. “Finance will rule the country for the next fifty years,” declared Lincoln. He was skillful in choosing the right senators to guide the act through the Congress. States’ righters feared that the National Bank would centralize the economy and undermine state banks.

  Again, without the Southerners in the House to thwart his dream of “internal improvements,” Lincoln was able to initiate a transcontinental railroad to the Pacific. After the Pacific Railroad Act was passed, the Central Pacific began laying tracks eastward on January 8, 1863, with the intention of meeting the Union Pacific’s line running out of Omaha. Both companies were encouraged by huge land grants.

  Southerners had always opposed Homestead Acts for fear they would fill the West with antislavery Northerners. But Lincoln’s vision was, plainly stated by himself, “cutting up the wild lands into parcels, so that every poor man may have a home.” He didn’t account for the reality that speculators would buy out and accumulate land held by struggling freeholders. His Land Grant College Act provided for agricultural colleges—designed to teach the children of farmers “scientific husbandry,” how to implement the newest techniques of crop and livestock management, and how to connect the farmer to markets, knowledge that itself was an escape from a merely subsistence life—to be subsidized by the sale of federal lands.

  Most of this legislation, passed in 1862 or early 1863, would alter the United States as thoroughly as did Salmon Chase’s financial reforms. Other shocks to established norms abounded as well. Throughout the late winter and early spring, black soldiers were recruited by Union officers in the North and in the occupied South. Gen. George H. Thomas formed many black regiments along the Mississippi, thus employing the manpower of escaped slaves and keeping them out of the North. Lincoln wrote to his appointed governor of Tennessee, Andrew Johnson, “The bare sight of 50,000 armed, and drilled black soldiers on the banks of the Mississippi, would end the rebellion at once.”

  The cabinet was also considering a draft to fill the Union ranks. The use of the draft generated further antiwar rhetoric in the North, and perhaps most acutely in New York City. New York workers of a number of racial backgrounds—especially Irish, German, and Swedish—feared that a flood of liberated slaves would undermine further their already parlous wage conditions. The draft was also condemned as an intrusion by the nation on the desires of the citizen, and as a further violation of Democratic ideology. In fact only fifty thousand men would be drafted, and the wealthy could in any case evade the draft by paying a bounty of three hundred dollars, which was passed on to whoever substituted for them. But the process nevertheless acted as a spur to recruitment and a further sign that the Union intended to finish this war.

  Later, in the summer, there would be fierce antidraft riots in New York City; attacks on blacks and even on the downtown black orphanages; assaults on notable Republican households, businesses, and newspapers; and pitched battles between the Union army and working-class people who opposed the draft, a great number of them Irish. Lincoln was appalled to hear of these savage street and tenement confrontations between citizens and the army. But, depressed or not, he was unrelenting. Perhaps the depression and steadfastness were two faces of the one being, and one entailed the other. He had learned from his youth how to endure debilitating self-doubt.

  Interestingly, however, there was one young man who for Mary’s sake was exempt both from the draft and from moral pressure to join the crusade. Robert Lincoln remained at Harvard, his mother pleading a slight astigmatism as the reason he could not yet serve. Her husband could see clearly enough that the loss of Robert would send Mary Todd Lincoln over the edge. There was, however, inevitable muttering about the fact that a man so keen to deploy other people’s sons was not willing to deploy his own.

  In any event, it might have become a moot point, since Fighting Joe Hooker had a wonderful strategic plan to end the war. He would, in the manner of the Confederate Stonewall Jackson, secretly move eighty thousand of his men from in front of Fredericksburg far to the west, leaving half that number in front of the town to create an impression that the whole Union host was still in place. False campfires were lit and maintained by a skeleton force, as Hooker transferred his main army far up the Rappahannock.

  Hooker’s men arrived at Rappahannock fords far upriver, crossed over, and got into position around the little village of Chancellorsville, on the edge of the so-called Wilderness, a huge mass of thickets and forest to the west. Hooker was well placed to crush Lee from the rear and the flank. The Confederates would be caught between the troops left in front of Fredericksburg and the six corps stationed around Chancellorsville. But now Hooker was overwhelmed by the same indecisiveness that seemed to attack all those who held command of the Army of the Potomac. He expected Lee to “ingloriously fly,” and even if not, to leave his defenses and come out and fight the Union forces “on our own ground.” Lee, realizing Hooker’s elegant plan, sent the dour Stonewall Jackson on a secret march around Hooker’s position, thus outpincering the pincer movement. Hooker gave up his advantage by pulling his more numerous army back into a tight defensive perimeter.

  Dispatches that turned up in the telegraph office at the War Department, where Lincoln waited for the best of news, his feet propped on a desk, indicated that the Confederates were now attacking Hooker from both sides, instead of his attacking them in the same manner. Lincoln felt that a curse had descended on the Union leadership. By May 6, Lincoln discovered, it was all over—Hooker had retreated after high losses, some of his wounded burned alive when shells began forest fires. Lincoln confided in a young journalist, “My God! What will the country say! What will the country say!” The president seemed to have run out of options, and urged Hooker to renew the attack, but only if such an action was not “in desperation or rashness. An early movement would also help to supersede the bad moral effect of the recent one.”

  At least, a few days after this most “injurious” defeat, Lincoln got good news from U. S. Grant, who had fought so well along the Cumberland and Mississippi. Grant was a man who, unlike McClellan and Hooker, never criticized government policy and considered it his job t
o make do with the forces at his disposal. He had captured Jackson, Mississippi, and was now engaged in a new attempt, by land and river forces, on Vicksburg. When his assaults on Vicksburg failed, however, he settled in for a businesslike siege. Lincoln did not doubt that, unlike more vocal officers, he would do what he said, and wear Vicksburg down.

  After the Battle of Chancellorsville, there were early indications that Lee would move north again. If Washington could be threatened or captured, the powers of Europe would feel justified in stepping in to force a settlement. Lee had seventy-five thousand men to take with him into the North. One big battle, somewhere up there, on the roads that led to Harrisburg or Lancaster or Philadelphia, could save the Confederacy and put an end to Lincoln’s war to redeem the Union and free the slaves.

  Criticized as a naive military thinker, with an undue regard for the offensive and a lack of awareness of the impact of terrain on the outcome of battles, Lincoln nonetheless offered advice to Joe Hooker that sounds eminently sensible to a layman’s ear.

  In case you find Lee coming to the North of the Rappahannock, I would by no means cross to the South of it. If he should leave a rear force at Fredericksburg, tempting you to fall upon it, it would fight in entrenchments, and have you at disadvantage, and so, man for man, worst you at that point, while his main force would in some way be getting an advantage of you Northward. In one word, I would not take any risk of being entangled upon the river, like an ox jumped half over a fence, and liable to be torn by dogs, front and rear, without a fair chance to gall one way or kick the other.

  As always Lincoln was anxious to assure his generals that his remarks were mere suggestions, but the imagery of a cow stuck on a fence must surely have lodged in Hooker’s fevered mind.

  As the Confederates marched north, Lincoln watched Hooker’s progress on a vast military map at the War Department, and analyzed telegrams and dispatches with Halleck and Secretary Stanton. Hooker was intimidated by the dangerous possibilities of the Rebel movement, and Lincoln was enthusiastic about the positive ones, the chance the Union had been offered to cut the Rebels adrift. Early in the advance he wrote to Hooker, “If the head of Lee’s army is at Martinsburg, and the tail of it on the Plank road between Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, the animal must be very slim somewhere. Could you not break him?” He wanted a fellow who could see Lee’s great movement for what it was, as offering an excellent chance to finish the Rebels off. “I’d always believed,” Lincoln would say later, “that the main Rebel army going North of the Potomac, could never return, if well attended to.” But not all Lincoln’s pithy imagery got a response from Fighting Joe.

  The bulletin board outside Willard’s Hotel, where Washington’s powerful and fashionable had always gathered to read the casualty lists and the latest bulletins, drew great attention. Not since July and August 1861 had the capital been so consumed with invasion anxiety. Hooker fell back until all his corps was stationed west of Washington, but it became apparent from cavalry scouts that Lee had already crossed the Potomac near the former battlefield of Antietam, and was rampaging out of western Maryland into the farmlands of Pennsylvania.

  Like McClellan, Hooker gave Lincoln nothing but wild overestimates of the enemy’s strength, and demands for reinforcements. Lincoln obviously did not want this attitude in the general. Hooker offered his resignation, thinking it would be refused, and was abashed to find it was not. An officer was sent out to tell Gen. George Meade, “Old Snapping-Turtle,” an upright, Christian West Pointer, that he was now to command the army against Lee. Meade, a Pennsylvanian, would “fight well on his own dunghill,” said Lincoln. The officer sent from Washington to find Meade managed to do so at 3:00 A.M. on June 28, at a farmhouse in northern Maryland. Shaking the general awake, the courier told him that he brought troublesome news. Meade thought he was under arrest on General Hooker’s orders. No, worse, said the officer, you’re the new commander.

  Meade was a cautious fellow anyhow, and from the time he took command, his chief concern seemed to be, in the spirit of his predecessors, to preserve the army from obliteration. A battle was there to be fought, either along Pipe Creek in northern Maryland or further north in Pennsylvania. The respective attitudes of president and general were a repeat of the relationship between the president and Hooker. As much as the moment exhilarated Abraham Lincoln, it terrified Meade.

  By the end of June the vanguard of the Union army was just a little northwest of the pleasant town of Gettysburg. Both armies converged on the place along rustic roads, the Confederates veering south along the Chambersburg Road. Lincoln heard of the opening gambits of July 1. Gen. John Reynolds—who would be shot dead that day—held a perimeter north of the town until midafternoon. His troops were then driven back through the streets to join other Union troops on Cemetery Ridge, south of the town. Some critics have said that Lee should have refused to fight the Union there, should have maneuvered around them and forced them to fight somewhere more favorable to him. But, as he lined his army out along the opposing Seminary Ridge, he knew that everything could be settled there, among the woods and farms along the Emmitsburg Road.

  On the second day Lee nearly got around Meade’s southern flank on Cemetery Ridge. This end of the Union line was commanded by Mary’s old friend-of-séances, Dan Sickles. The Union forces managed by a whisker to anchor their line on two hills, Little Round Top and Round Top.

  At the Soldiers’ Home in Washington that second day of Gettysburg, Mary came out of the pleasant villa reserved for the Lincolns’ use, and boarded her carriage. As it jolted away, the seat on which she sat came unstuck, and she fell heavily from the vehicle. Victorian delicacy prevented an accurate assessment of the first lady’s injuries, but her head wound became infected and she became so gravely ill that Lincoln summoned Robert from Harvard to be by her side. No one ever knew for certain whether it was an act of sabotage—the bolts that held the seat may have been deliberately loosened in the hope that the tall Lincoln would fall to the ground and break his skull.

  Lincoln himself could not leave the White House or the telegraph office. He received information on the inadequacy of the medical provision for the thousands of wounded, and of the huge artillery barrage that preceded Pickett’s charge against the Union center.

  By July 4 it was clear that the battle had ended, and the Union had held the ridge. To the relieved Meade, this was the job accomplished. To the joyful Lincoln, the major opportunity now presented itself. He was disappointed when Meade issued an order to his men congratulating them for driving “from our soil every vestige of the presence of the invader.” Reading the order, he cried out, “Drive the invader from our soil? My God! Is that all?” General Sickles, his leg torn off, had arrived in Washington on a mattress and, fevered and shocked, told Lincoln that Meade had not even wanted to fight the battle, that his generals had had to assure him that Cemetery Ridge was a “good battlefield.”

  Lincoln now daily expected Meade to pitch in to Lee’s shattered army before it could slip south and cross the Potomac. “You have given the enemy a stunning blow at Gettysburg,” he told his general in one message. “Follow it up and give him another before he can reach the Potomac.” For some days Lee’s army was held up at the river, which was flooded. Lincoln confided to Robert, who was visiting his sick mother, that he wanted to go up there and attend to Lee himself.

  By July 14 it was apparent to Lincoln that the Rebel army had crossed south again. Lincoln wrote Meade a summation of his feelings.

  Again, my dear general, I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee’s escape. He was within your easy grasp . . . as it is, the war will be prolonged indefinitely. If you could not safely attack Lee last Monday, how can you possibly do so south of the river . . . As you have learned that I was dissatisfied, I have thought it best to kindly tell you why.

  Wisely perhaps, he decided against sending Meade this message. As in the previous December, after Antietam, here too Lincoln had see
n a way to end the horror and the slaughter of young men, and his generals had not.

  There was considerable consolation, however, in the fact that Vicksburg had fallen to Grant. Gideon Welles brought Lincoln the news in his office on July 7. “What can we do for the Secretary of the Navy for this glorious intelligence?” asked Lincoln. “He is always bringing us good news.” If ever a man had an excuse for extreme elation and extreme despair, July 1863 provided Lincoln with one. “The Father of Waters again goes un-vexed to the sea,” the president declared with his usual felicity of phrase. In an unrehearsed but celebratory speech on the White House lawn, Lincoln sketched out a few ideas he would use on a later, holier occasion. “How long ago is it? Eighty-odd years—since on the 4th July for the first time in the history of the world, a nation by its representatives, assembled and declared as a self-evident truth that ‘all men are created equal.’ ”