Abraham Lincoln

by Thomas Keneally

  14

  FREDERICK DOUGLASS, the renowned black leader, came to the White House that summer to argue with Lincoln over black soldiers’ pay and conditions. They deserved, he said, pay equal to that of white soldiers, and to be promoted to officer rank on merit. And if the Confederacy executed Negro prisoners of war, as was believed to have happened at Fort Wagner, Lincoln would need to have Rebel soldiers executed in retaliation. Ever the gradualist, Lincoln pointed out that there was massive bias in the Union army against employing black troops. “We had to make some concession to prejudice,” he explained. Even though he had already drafted an order that Confederates would be killed in retaliation for atrocities against Union troops, particularly captured blacks, he explained to Douglass, “I can’t take men out and kill them in cold blood for what was done by others.” Apart from Lincoln’s sensitivity and gift for realpolitik, Douglass admired him—“The first great man that I talked with in the United States freely.”

  Amid all this Lincoln had a chance to write to the recuperating Mary at the Soldiers’ Home. “Tell dear Tad poor ‘Nanny Goat’ is lost, and Mrs. Cuthbert and I are in distress about it. The day you left, Nanny was found resting herself and chewing her little cud in the middle of Tad’s bed; and now she’s gone!”

  By the end of September that year, Meade’s army and Lee’s eyed each other in Virginia. Lincoln was outraged by Meade’s gradual approach:

  To avoid misunderstandings, let me say that to attempt to fight the enemy slowly back to his entrenchments at Richmond, and there to capture him, is an idea I’ve been trying to repudiate for quite a year. . . . My last attempt upon Richmond was to get McClellan, when he was nearer there than the enemy was, to run in ahead of him. Since then I have constantly desired the Army of the Potomac to take Lee’s army, and not Richmond. . . . If our army cannot fall upon the enemy and hurt him where he is, it is plain to me it can gain nothing by attempting to follow him over a succession of entrenched lines into a fortified city.

  “What can I do with such generals as we have?” Lincoln asked. “Who among them is any better than Meade?”

  Not all his correspondence with generals was on the macro business of strategy. Many of Lincoln’s letters indicate that no issue was too small for a presidential letter. On October 8, 1863, he wrote to General Meade, “I am appealed to on behalf of August Blittersdorf, at Mitchell’s Station, Va. To be shot tomorrow, as a deserter. I am unwilling for any boy under eighteen to be shot; and his father affirms he is yet under sixteen.”

  There were uncertain battles in Tennessee, and at Chickamauga Creek, General Rosecrans and the Union were defeated. It was essential that Chattanooga now be retained. Lincoln believed that General Rosecrans acted as one “confused and stunned, like a duck hit on the head.”

  Bad luck with generals was balanced out when the state elections in the fall of 1863 went massively back to the Republicans; and one of the most pleasing defeats of anti-administration figures was that of the Copperhead Clement Vallandigham, who lost the poll for the governorship of Ohio.

  That same November, Lincoln was to speak at the dedication of a new National Soldiers’ Cemetery on the battlefield at Gettysburg. Lincoln rarely traveled away from Washington to speak, but he accepted this invitation, since it might provide a context for an important message. The ceremonial orator for the occasion was to be Edward Everett, a classical scholar who had been president of Harvard, governor of Massachusetts, U.S. senator, ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, and secretary of state.

  On the way to Gettysburg, Lincoln traveled with Seward, Blair, his secretaries Hay and Nicolay, and John Usher, his new secretary of the interior. The circumstances were not right for his polishing his short speech on the train. Indeed, the myth would have us believe that his famous Gettysburg Address came spontaneously from a few notes written on envelopes. But a number of witnesses indicate that he already had a draft before he left Washington.

  Early the next morning, after chatting with Everett, on whom the chief work of the day would devolve, Lincoln and Seward went for a carriage ride around the battlefield. There were still signs of the battle everywhere, from shallow graves to a redolence of death from the Confederate corpses buried under rocks and drifts of leaves at Devil’s Den. Afterward a procession of which the president was part set out from town for Cemetery Ridge, on which a wooden platform stood. During his two-hour oration, designed to put the ghosts of the slaughtered to rest, Everett pointed out the various geographic aspects of the battle, from Culp’s Hill to the Round Tops. This speech was enormously successful, brilliant in the eyes of contemporaries, including Lincoln’s secretaries, Hay and Nicolay, who considered it the dominant oratory of the day. John Hay wrote that after Everett’s pyrotechnics, “The president, in a fine, free way, with more grace than is his wont, said his half dozen words of consecration.”

  Lincoln got up at last to deliver, in his notoriously shrill but highly audible voice, and with a skilled, informal, dramatic pacing, his brief dedicatory comment:

  Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field . . .

  Indeed, he had noticed the coffins at the railroad depot the night before, still awaiting their corpses; and freshly dug but empty graves, similarly waiting, were visible from where he stood. It is now known that the difficulties of identifying the contents of the shallowly dug battlefield graves meant that some Confederates, wearing remnants of captured Union uniforms, were buried among the Union troops, an accident of which Lincoln would probably have approved.

  And then came the humble augustness of his second paragraph:

  But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it cannot forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

  And thus there must be a dedication to “the great task remaining before us,” to take “increased devotion” from the fallen, so “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

  One historian, Garry Wills, would much later argue that in its exalting of vernacular and biblical oratory over Everett’s Greek Revival tour de force, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address made the traditional rhetoric of its day suddenly obsolete: “[A]ll modern political prose descends from the Gettysburg Address.”

  That evening Lincoln went back to Washington by train, and arrived exhausted at the White House hours later. He felt ill—indeed, he was coming down with a mild form of smallpox. His illness required his beard to be shaved clean. As he recuperated, good news came to the presidential bedroom. Grant had attacked the Rebels near Chattanooga and defeated them at Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge. The Confederates had been driven away from Knoxville as well. Eastern Tennessee was safe. “Now if this Army of the Potomac was good for anything,” said Lincoln, “if the officers had anything in them—if the Army had any legs, they could move 30,000 men down to Lynchburg and catch Longstreet. Can anybody doubt, if Grant was here in command that he could catch him?”

  The Committee for the Conduct of the War had long since asked him to sack the ineffectual Meade, and for a variety of reasons, perhaps even stubbornness, Lincoln had refused. But plans were forming for bringing the effective Grant eastward.

  By the time Lincoln made his usual December address to Congress, which he had prepared in his sickbed, the war had advanced to a point where
the major issue was coming to be the reconstruction of the Union and of the beaten South. Lincoln called for an increase of immigration, since the United States had such a robust economy, and so many minerals were being discovered in the West. In terms that show that he was indeed a man of his time, he dealt with various recent Indian attacks on settlers in Minnesota and the West, unabashed in hailing treaties for “extinguishing the possessory rights of the Indians to large and valuable tracts of land,” and for driving them into reservations on less promising ground.

  For the liberated slaves, he held out the prospect of citizenship and voting rights, having by now ceased to emphasize the ultimate project of colonizing the black freedmen. Some members of his own party were uneasy about the idea—if former slaves could vote like citizens, they would end up in Congress.

  In a proclamation of amnesty and reconstruction, appended to his message to the Congress that December 8, he disqualified from voting and political office all men who had held Confederate civilian or diplomatic posts, all who had served as Confederate officers from the rank of colonel upward, all those who had resigned from the U.S. armed forces to serve the Confederacy, or left the Congress or the courts to go and ally themselves with the rebellion. The oath he devised for Southerners looking for office was one that declared before Almighty God that “I will, in like manner, abide by and faithfully support all proclamations of the President made during the existing rebellion having reference to slaves.”

  Mary, still recuperating, in many ways remained a figure of grief. Some of her dead she had not let herself formally mourn—three half-brothers, Sam, David, and Aleck Todd, had been killed in the Confederate army, David at Vicksburg. Now her half-sister, Emilie Todd Helm, had lost her husband, a Confederate general, in the battle at Chickamauga. Emilie sought a pass to come North to attend to business, and Mary, lonely in the executive mansion that autumn, looked forward to seeing her. No one was allowed to enter the Union from the Confederacy, however, unless he or she took an oath of allegiance to the president and Constitution of the United States. Typical of the stubborn Todds, Emilie refused to do so, and Lincoln had her brought up from Fort Monroe to the White House anyhow by military escort. It was a permitted visit so rash as to be politically unjustifiable, apart from the fact that it meant so much to Mary, whom Lincoln could never refuse.

  Tad soon found himself arguing with his aunt about who the real president was, the intractable Emilie Helm insisting that it was Jeff Davis. At least one senator, Ira Harris of New York, used the presence of the Rebel woman to argue not only with General Helm’s widow but with Mary over Robert’s avoidance of the army. The one-legged General Sickles asked Lincoln in outraged tones how he could tolerate a Rebel in the house.

  Emilie would have been welcome to stay at the White House indefinitely, since she provided such comfort to Mary. But at last she left to go back to Lexington, Kentucky. From there she sought a license to sell six hundred bales of cotton. Lincoln pointed out that such a license could be provided only if she took the oath of allegiance. When she refused, Lincoln felt he could not in honor budge. With that, Emilie wrote a savage letter blaming the deaths of her husband and other Confederate Todds on the Lincolns. Mary never forgave a sentence that ran, “I also remind you that your minié bullets have made us what we are.” Mary felt the accusation so profoundly that she would never speak to her sister again.

  By the time the sisters fell out so severely, it was an election year, 1864. Lincoln had grown hungry for reelection, since he wanted proof that his policies had the approval of the people. It had all—the war, the fiscal reforms, the emancipation—grown to be too much for one man to carry. He needed his fellow citizens to confirm that they could carry it with him. But the prospects remained unpromising. Salmon P. Chase himself was looking forward to being nominated by the Republicans, so that Lincoln’s very candidacy was not certain. Chase’s daughter, Kate, was quite sure that she would make a much better first lady than Mary. A letter was circulating among prominent Republicans accusing the president of being a compromiser, a man concerned with “temporary expediency of policy.” Even General Grant was touted by some as a potential candidate. “You think I don’t know I am going to be beaten,” Lincoln challenged a friend. “But I do, and unless some great change takes place, badly beaten.”

  Mary, too, harbored secret fears about reelection. The extent of her spending on what her husband called “flub-dubs” for the White House had run up her own personal debts to twenty-seven thousand dollars, and if Lincoln lost, these bills would be sent to him for settlement.

  Though many friends advised him to, Lincoln refused to remove Chase from office. It was essential that the party be given its chance to choose between the two men. In March the Republicans in Ohio, Salmon Chase’s home ground, would vote in caucus as to which candidate they wanted to see run for the presidency. That would be the great test.

  But when March came, the Ohio caucus, outraged by some of the unfair anti-Lincoln letters that had been circulated, chose Lincoln.

  He may have been helped, too, by the fact that he had brought Grant to Washington. Meade would retain command of the Army of the Potomac, but under Grant’s overarching authority as general in chief. In the White House people greeted Grant as a dour savior. He stood on a chaise, shaking hands with processions of citizens by the hour. Grant had no airs; he spoke quietly and did not fulminate about the fall of Richmond. After such showy but ineffectual generals as McClellan and Hooker, people trusted him, and so did Lincoln.

  Yet Grant’s plans did not offer a glib or unbloody end to things. His scheme was to harry Lee as he had not been harried before, and try to force him into a climactic battle. The fall of Richmond would be the by-product of that, helped along by the Federal forces at Fort Monroe in Virginia, who would cut the railroads leading from the Southern hinterland into Richmond. In the southwest, General Sherman, with an army of more than one hundred thousand men, would strike into Georgia, seize Atlanta, and cut the South in two. Lincoln was delighted at the concerted nature of the plan. “As we say out west, if a man can’t skin, he must hold a leg while somebody else does.”

  In May, a little over a year after the previous battle on the edge of the Wilderness at Chancellorsville, a frightful engagement occurred in the same area. In indication of his future intentions, Lee had dug his men in there—the war in Virginia was in a way evolving, under the necessity placed on Lee by his smaller reserves of men, from a war of movement to one of fortification. But Grant sent a telegram to the War Department that read, “I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.” Lincoln was delighted to read this dogged cable to a crowd in Washington. From then on, however, Lincoln would have a terrible lesson in the fact that mere aggressiveness, and a gift for the offense, would not necessarily bring success against prepared positions.

  Casualties from the battles that brought Grant close to Richmond were more than fifty thousand, and they caused an even greater weariness and outrage in the North. Within the Republican Party, there was a good atmosphere for a challenger, and indeed another candidate for the Republican nomination emerged. At the end of May a group of Gen. John Charles Frémont’s supporters came together in Cleveland and nominated him for the candidacy, just in time, for the Republican convention was due to take place in Baltimore on June 7. Lincoln accepted Frémont’s emergence with weary amusement. He told, apropos of Frémont, the story of a character back in Illinois, Jim Jett. “Jim used to say his brother was the damnedest scoundrel that ever lived, but in the infinite mercy of Providence he was also the damnedest fool.”

  The convention went smoothly, John Nicolay and others watching Lincoln’s interests on the floor. A majority of the party still, it now became apparent, supported Lincoln. His chief platform was to enshrine emancipation by amending the Constitution to outlaw slavery everywhere in the land. Thus no future administration would be able to overthrow his chief reform by slave legislation.

  The convention chose
Andrew Johnson, a Union Democrat and Lincoln’s Union governor of reoccupied Tennessee, as the vice presidential candidate. Johnson was a self-taught tailor and former farm boy, edgy about his lack of formal education, rather severe in his attitudes toward the Southern ruling class, but genial toward ordinary farmers, from among whom he had sprung.

  15

  BUT STILL THE PROSPECTS for Lincoln’s reelection were not good. Many leading Northerners had given way to war weariness and began trying to establish negotiations with the South. Wistful desire for an end to the business and a sense of the scale of losses were apparent even in the songs people sang: “When This Cruel War Is Over,” “Tenting Tonight on the Old Camp Ground,” “Bear This Gently to My Mother,” and “Yes, I Would the War Were Over” were some of the songs played by sisters and wives at pianos throughout the North. An earnest supporter like Horace Greeley of the New-York Tribune, a devout Lincoln man, initiated his own peace talks with three Confederate delegates on neutral ground in Canada, at Niagara Falls. Greeley spoke of the United States as “our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying nation.” Henry Raymond of the New York Times, another loyal Lincoln man, begged Lincoln to open peace negotiations. The South still hoped that it could achieve independence with the retention of slavery, or at least could reenter the Union and retain the slaves. When the latter proposal, reunion with slavery, reached Lincoln’s ears, he made clear that it was not acceptable. “There have been men who have proposed to me to return to slavery the black warriors of Port Hudson,” Lincoln complained. “I should be damned in time and eternity for so doing.”