The Battles that Made Abraham Lincoln
Page 73
Port Republic, Battle of, 274
Porter, Gen. Fitz-John, 322
Powell, Lazarus, 215
“Prayer of Twenty Millions,” 301, 374
Prentiss, George, 181
Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, 385-386
Provost Marchals Bureau, 363
Qunicy, Josiah, 344
Radical Democracy Party, 398
Radical Reconstruction, 386
Radical Republicans, 207, 212-213, 216-218, 220, 226, 228, 233-234, 235-236, 237-239, 240-243, 259-260, 263, 265, 267-268, 297, 306, 310, 313, 333, 337, 340, 385-386, 388, 390, 393, 396-397, 401, 406, 408, 411-412, 422, 425, 429, 440, 443-445, 452, 454, 462-465, 472
Randall, James R., 197
Ray, Charles H., 59, 137, 238, 240, 411
Raymond, Henry J., 163, 414, 416-417, 419-420, 422
Reconstruction, 385-386, 388, 390, 406-407, 442, 444-445, 456, 460, 464-465, 470
Rector, Henry M., 183
Reid, Whitelaw, 413
Republican National Convention, 51, 59-62, 64-65, 68, 74
Republican National Executive Committee, 392
Republican Party, 21, 26, 52-53, 55-56, 69, 75-76, 89, 95, 101, 149, 152, 158, 166, 179, 212, 240, 289, 291, 385, 391, 401, 436
Reynolds, Edwin, 108
Rhett, Robert Barnwell, 73, 77, 81-83, 87
Richmond Dispatch, 325, 442
Richmond Enquirer, 49, 73, 145, 208, 317
Richmond Examiner, 111, 187, 415
Richmond Sentinel, 443
Richmond Whig, 187, 189-190, 469
Richmond, Virginia, 452, 460
Riddle, A.G., 353, 413
River Queen, 451-452
Robinson, Governor James F., 346
Roman, A.B., 169
Ropes, John Chipman, 329
Rosecrans, Gen. Williams S., 436
Russell, William, 116, 121-122, 124, 127, 131, 145, 188, 206-207, 229, 231
Saint Louis Daily Missouri Republican, 108
Saulsbury, Senator Willard, 293
Savannah, Georgia, 442
Schleiden, Rudolph, 218
Schurz, Gen. Carl, 122, 127, 130, 134, 173, 193, 331, 389, 414, 417, 439
Scott, Thomas, 256
Scott, Gen. Winfield, 139, 153-154, 168, 202, 205-206, 208-209, 447; Lincoln sneaks into Washington, 2; first call for volunteers, 169; Fort Sumter, 170, 175; Lincoln’s disillusionment with, 175; Baltimore riots, 189, 191-194; “Anaconda Plan,” 203; recommends blockade of Southern ports, 203; McClellan, 228; resigns, 230-231
Secession Winter, 101-102, 104, 169, 212, 257, 355
Second Great Awakening, 42
Second Inaugural Address, 446-451
Seven Days’ Battles, 281-282
Seward, Frederick, 192, 253, 460
Seward, William H., 29, 59-60, 67, 70, 99, 106, 115, 136, 145, 157, 168, 170, 198-199, 210, 214, 222-233, 253, 256, 259-260, 337; spokesman for the Republican Party, 55-56; distinguished Republican leader, 56-57; anti-slavery rhetoric, 57; 1860 Republican Convention, 61-64, 66, 68-69, 71, 73, 146; first impression of Lincoln, 131; disappointed about nomination, 146; appraisal of the situation differs from Lincoln, 147-148; statesmanat-large, 147; background, 149; fate of the nation rested on, 149-150; Fort Sumter, 151, 173-176; Union Party, 151-153, 171; view about a confederacy, 151; Virginia Congressional elections, 152; nation-saver, 153; speaks to the Senate, 154-155; Peace Conference, 155-156; triumph of statecraft, 157; test of wills with Lincoln, 158; 1861 Inauguration Day, 159-160; changes Lincoln’s inaugural speech, 159; pressure on Lincoln, 163; aura of authority, 165; picked for Lincoln’s cabinet, 166-167; first call for volunteers, 169; Secession Winter, 169; secret expedition to reinforce Fort Pickets, 176; suggests Lincoln abdicate authority, 176-177; Lincoln’s call for volunteers, 186; Baltimore riots, 192; evil influence, 216; McClellan, 232; recommends Stanton as Sec. of War, 257; blacks as inferiors, 289; Emancipation Proclamation, 297, 304, 315, 328, 342-343, 346-347, 349; 1862 elections, 330; Fredericksburg, Battle of, 337; Committee of Nine meeting, 338-339; offers resignation, 338-339; Lincoln declines resignation, 340; Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, 386; 1864 Republican nomination, 419; election of 1864, 428, 438; assassination of Lincoln, 457
Seymour, Horatio, 101, 327-328, 346, 367, 369, 371
Shaw, Joseph, 467
Shenandoah Valley, 273, 408, 430, 437
Sheridan, Gen. Philip H., 430, 436-437
Sherman, Gen. William T., 164-165, 350, 428, 436, 439, 452, 460, 469
Sherman, Senator John, 164, 299, 311, 350, 355, 359
Shields, Gen. James, 273-274
Shiloh, Battle of, 271
Slave Kingdom, 76
Slave Power, 77, 97, 151
Slavery Debate, 36, 45-49, 93, 98
Slidell, John, 238
Smith, Arabella, 129
Smith, Caleb B., 166-167, 169, 292, 309, 315, 338, 358
Smith, Gerritt, 74
Smith, Richard, 414
Snethen, Worthington G., 248
Soldiers’ Home, 377, 409, 457, 459
South Carolina, secession of, 89, 103
Southern Democrats, 212
Southern Quarterly Review, 28
Speed, Joshua, 338, 451, 460
Spirit of the Times, 395, 416
Spotsylvania, Battle of, 405
Springfield Register, 68
Springfield (Mass) Republican, 29, 68, 110, 127, 144-145, 383, 396
St. Louis Democrat, 144
St. Paul Pioneer, 68, 71
Stanton, Edwin M., 153, 178, 264, 268, 322; first impression of Lincoln, 126, 131; pressure on Lincoln, 162; picked for Lincoln’s cabinet, 166; Baltimore riots, 188-190; painful imbecility of Lincoln, 205, 208; McClellan, 232; Lincoln appoints Secretary of War, 257; effect on the War Department, 258; poor opinion of Lincoln, 258; courts Radical Republicans, 259; watershed meeting with Lincoln, 260; McClellan reveals his plans, 261; calls on Ethan Allen Hitchcock, 267; not informed of McClellan’s plans, 268; McClellan’s bitterness toward, 269; sees victory, stops recruiting, 272, 276; Hunter’s emancipation proclamation, 295; plotting coup against Lincoln, 308-309; Second Bull Run, 308; McClellan restored to command, 309, 310; Emancipation Proclamation, 314, 327; 1862 elections, 330; Committee of Nine meeting, 338; Early’s assault on Washington, 409; election of 1864, 437-438; Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, 447; potential assassination of Lincoln, 458-460; Lincoln’s assassination, 463
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 430, 444
Star of the West, 179
“State Suicide” theory, 385
Staunton (Virginia) Vindicator, 111
Stephens, Alexander, 103, 286
Stevens, Thaddeus, 155, 213-214, 217-218, 240, 244, 293, 387, 389, 406, 413, 446
Stoddard, William O., 321
Stone, Charles P., 2, 140
Stone, Kay, 468
Stone, Melville, 466
Storey, Wilbur F., 357, 382
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 344, 376-377
Strong, George Templeton, 28, 43, 79, 123, 128-132, 135, 171, 278, 308, 330, 336, 341, 370-371, 467
Stuart, James E.B., 182
Summers, George, 171
Sumner, Charles, 75, 130, 135, 163, 196, 210, 213, 218, 224, 226
Sumner, Gen. Edwin V., 263
Sumner, Senator Charles, 278, 294, 296, 336, 340, 376, 383, 396, 455-456, 459; 1862 elections, 331; Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, 385; 1864 Republican nomination, 388, 411, 416; Wade-Davis Bill, 407; election of 1864, 429; Reconstruction, 445
Swett, Leonard, 226, 327-328, 414, 428
Taney, Chief Justice Roger, 140, 200
Taylor, Benjamin O., 169
Taylor, President Zachary, 29, 41, 56, 149
Taylor, Tom, 470
Tenniel, John, 440, 470
Thirteenth Amendment, 444-445
Thompson, Jacob, 49
Thoreau, Henry David, 40, 43
Tilton, Theodore, 416
Tod, Governor David, 362
Todd, John Stuart, 327
Toombs, Robert, 32, 480n
Townsend, John, 34
treason in the Old Northwest, 354-356, 368
Treaty of Guadelupe-Hidalgo, 98
Trent Affair, 238
Trollope, Anthony, 237
Trollope, Frances, 23
Troy (New York) Whig, 68
Trumbull, Senator Lyman, 95-96, 98, 115, 172, 201, 208, 237, 240-241, 295, 310, 339, 360, 374, 390
Tyler, President John, 38, 145
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 376
Union National Committee, 395
Union Party, 151-155, 168, 171, 181, 377, 379
United States Military Academy, 140, 228, 230, 234-235, 242-243, 426
Uprising of the North, 185, 247
Urbanna Plan, 261, 265
Vallandigham, Clement L., 215, 365-369, 374-375, 377-379, 412, 427, 467
Valley Spirit, 327-328
Van Buren, President Martin, 20-22, 27, 44, 56, 425
Vanity Fair, 4, 7, 110, 257
Vicksburg, Mississippi, 366, 373-375, 404
Villard, Henry, 85, 90, 113, 123, 129, 132, 137, 144, 162, 171, 192-193
Wade, Senator Benjamin, 154, 204, 208, 212-213, 218, 223, 235, 237, 243-245, 255, 257, 260, 262, 265, 289, 298, 391, 407, 412-413, 416, 418, 429-430, 445, 462
Wade-Davis Bill, 406-407
Wade-Davis Manifesto, 412, 416
Wadsworth, Gen. James, 263, 267-268, 304, 314
Wadsworth, William H., 293
Wainwright, Charles, 323, 332
Walker, Francis A., 332
Walker, Henry N., 357
Walker, William, 75, 99
Wallace, W.H.L., 104
War Democrats, 387, 427, 445
Ward, Artemus, 312
Warne, Kate, 2
Warren, Fitz-Henry, 62
Washburne, Elihu, 99, 349, 356, 360, 413, 419
Washington Chronicle, 410
Washington Constitution, 69, 80, 83, 94, 96, 106
Washington Constitution Union, 392
Washington, D.C., 1, 252, 294-295
Washington Globe, 179
Washington National Intelligencer, 303
Washington, President George, 11, 13, 17-18, 36, 41, 143, 153, 235, 404
Webb, Gen. Alexander, 278
Webster, Daniel, 12, 121, 129
Weed, Thurlow, 56-57, 70, 99, 115, 147, 150, 347, 349, 394, 413-416, 419, 428, 449, 486n
Welles, Gideon, 158, 169, 213, 221, 309, 316, 367, 373, 379, 414; Inauguration Day, 160; picked for Lincoln’s cabinet, 166-167; Fort Sumter, 167; Baltimore riots, 191; McClellan, 232; Lincoln talks of emancipation, 282; Emancipation Proclamation, 297, 314; Committee of Nine meeting, 338-339; Chase wants to run for President, 392, 395; Pomeroy Circular, 393; Early’s assault on Washington, 409; Hampton Roads Conference, 446; Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, 447; Lincoln meets Grant at City Point, 451
Whig Party, 22-23, 26, 32, 58, 102, 166, 217
Whiskey Rebellion, 11
White, Clifton, 363
White, Horace, 129, 222
Whitman, Walt, 29, 114
Whitney, Eli, 37
Whitney, Henry Clay, 85, 124, 126, 163, 277
Whittier, John Greenleaf, 344
Wigfall, Thomas T., 143
Wilderness, Battle of, 405
Wilkes, George, 389, 395, 415-416
Willard’s Hotel, 3, 118, 121, 140, 157-158, 162, 188, 192, 454
Williamsburg, Virginia, 271
Willis, N.P., 256
Wills, David, 381
Wilmot Proviso, 47-48, 289
Wilmot, David, 47, 288
Wilson, Senator, 204
Winchester, Battle of, 437
Winthrop, Robert, 348
Wood, Fernando, 115, 117, 144
Wool, Gen. John, 273
Worth, Jonathan, 180
writ of habeas corpus, ix, 199-201, 249, 323-325, 329, 374
Yancey, William L., 77, 81
Yates, Governor Richard, 356, 361
Yorktown, Virginia, 265-266, 270-272
Young Men’s Central Republican Union of New York City, 55
Interview
An Interview with Larry Tagg, author of
The Battles That Made Abraham Lincoln
Larry Tagg’s book is the first study of its kind to concentrate on what Lincoln’s contemporaries actually thought of him during his lifetime.
Q: You were born in Lincoln, Illinois. Did that spark your interest in Lincoln?
LT: Not consciously, but perhaps something happens to a person growing up in the heart of Lincoln country, as I did until I was eight years old. My hometown was the only town in America named for Abraham Lincoln before he became president—in 1853, after he worked as counsel for the new railroad that led to the town’s founding. And from Lincoln, Illinois, my family moved to Decatur, where we lived on the Sangamon River, a few miles from the Lincoln family’s first Illinois home. People there still talked about Lincoln in a neighborly way, and I picked it up, even as a young kid.
Q: How did you come up with the idea to write this book?
LT: I initially began to gather material for a history of the Army of the Potomac. But early on in that project, I bumped into an amazing amount of anti-Lincoln references by its generals. The intensity and personal nature of their animosity was remarkable. I thought, “Now here’s a story!” I had only glimpsed a tiny part of the story, as it turned out.
Q: I know you used a wide variety of primary source material. Tell our readers what some of those sources were and how you conducted your research.
LT: For a couple of years, I read everything I could get my hands on about Lincoln, focusing on his contemporaries’ comments on his presidency. I spent lots and lots of time at the California State University at Sacramento library, which has an excellent Civil War section. Then I started sending away for complete archives of Democratic newspapers of the Civil War, especially the Chicago Times, the New York World, and The (Columbus, OH) Crisis. I read every Civil War issue of those papers on microfilm. (Laughing.) My eyeballs were rolling around like searchlights after a few hours of that, but it was worth it to have done the original research.
Whenever I spotted a book I had to have that wasn’t at Sac State, I bought it online. I bought so many of the important primary sources that it finally got so that most of the time, if I saw an important reference that I had to check, I already had the book in my bookcase. In the latter stages of my research, I was helped tremendously by the fact that Civil War references and primary sources were coming online due to the Googlebooks digitization project. Increasingly, if I found a promising reference, no matter how obscure, I could read it online.
Q: What surprised you the most during your research?
LT: I was astonished at what a hole Lincoln was in even as he took up the presidency. So much of that was due to the low prestige of the presidency itself, as a result of the eccentricities of the Jacksonian Period: the weak central government, the weak president, the disrepute of government itself in the wake of years of rigged nominating conventions and the spoils system, the power of the partisan press, and, of course, the torsions of the slavery argument. For this reason, the context of Lincoln’s appearance in 1860 dominates the first part of my book, and I think that it is crucial to understanding Lincoln’s lack of popularity during his term.
Also, the level of animosity toward Lincoln is astounding. It appears to have been a country with a no-holds-barred brawler, a Rush Limbaugh or Keith Olbermann, at the editorial desk of every newspaper in the country. I found so many over-the-top disparagements of Lincoln—even out-and-out threats!—that I only needed include the most outrageous of them to fill up a book.
Q: Why do you think that Lincoln was so hated during his presidency?
LT: Americans were suspicious that they had been robbed of the government that the Founding Fathers intended, especially when Lincoln, an anonymous rustic, was produced as a candidate by a sectional party, a
nd was assured of election by the suicide of the only national party, the Democrats. That he was dedicated to re-defining property to exclude slaves was the most explosive issue in American history—to get something of the fury Lincoln’s candidacy produced, it is necessary to imagine a modern-day candidate who would make one-third of the country fear losing the entire value of their homes. Then, once the war started, he presided over a centralization of power that was terrifying in a country so dedicated to the decentralization of power that a civil war had just broken out over it. Finally, he was a centrist in a country whose citizens had been driven to extremes in the heat of the national convulsion over slavery—whatever he did, citizens thought he had either gone too far, or failed to go far enough.
Q: Walk us through some of the high and low points of Lincoln’s presidency.
LT: Lincoln’s presidency started at a low point—his election by less than 40% of the voters, which was an electoral mandate against him—and proceeded to an even lower point—his secret entry by night train, which produced derision and laughter across the nation—even before he was sworn in. The whole while he appeared to be indecisive and drifting during the Secession Winter. His first “high point” in the North was produced by his Proclamation calling for 75,000 men to put down the rebellion after Fort Sumter, but at the same time it produced a disastrous “low point” in the Border States, four of which promptly seceded and doubled the size of the Confederacy, and made it a credible nation for the first time.
During the first eighteen months of the war, the success of his presidency sank with the misfortunes of the Union armies. There was failure after failure in the East: First Bull Run, Ball’s Bluff, the Peninsula Campaign, and Second Bull Run. (He did, however, have one period, from February to May of 1862, where there was swift success in the West and the Northern mood was briefly buoyant.)
Q: How did the Northern victory at Antietam change things?
LT: It allowed Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, which immediately prompted a strong Northern rebuke at the polls in the mid-term elections in the fall of 1862. That was certainly a low point, and things got worse and worse, with the Northwest threatening to secede and Copperheadism everywhere ascendant, until the double victory of Gettysburg and Vicksburg turned the tide at the beginning of July 1863.