The president wanted to place Hooker in command of the Army of the Potomac, for, as he told a friend, “Fremont, and some others … are uneasy and impatient, and make me trouble, but I like Joe, for when he has nothing to do, he does nothing!” Halleck and others, however, dissuaded Lincoln.187 The main obstacle to Hooker’s appointment was his reputation as a toper.
Instead of having the army go into winter quarters, Lincoln hoped it would fight once again before cold weather made an offensive impossible. He shared the opinion of George William Curtis, who predicted that if “we only strike earnestly, we shall destroy the enemy.” Curtis thought the “time has come to say, ‘Up Abe, and at ’em.’ ”188
Burnside promptly submitted a plan calling for an assault on Richmond via Fredericksburg. He would march the army southeast to Falmouth, opposite Fredericksburg, and cross the Rappahannock River over pontoon bridges which were to be in place before the Confederates realized that the army had left Warrenton. On November 14, the president approved this scheme, though he wanted Burnside to attack Richmond along the route he had ordered McClellan to follow, directly toward the city via the line of the Orange and Alexandria railroad.
Burnside moved quickly, but when his army began arriving at Falmouth on November 17, it found no pontoons. Halleck and his subordinates had fumbled the assignment to deliver those essential items; during the fateful week that passed before they arrived, Lee occupied Fredericksburg.
Alarmed by the delay, Lincoln sailed to Falmouth and on November 26–27 conferred at length with Burnside, who said that “he could take into battle now any day, about one hundred and ten thousand men, that his army is in good spirit[s], good condition, good moral[e], and that in all respects he is satisfied with officers and men; that he does not want more men with him, because he could not handle them to advantage; that he thinks he can cross the river in face of the enemy and drive him away, but that, to use his own expression, it is somewhat risky.” The president, who desired the army’s “crossing of the river to be nearly free from risk,” assured Burnside that the nation would patiently bear with him and that he should not feel pressured to attack before he felt ready. Lincoln also suggested that instead of a frontal assault against Fredericksburg, the army wait till a 25,000-man column could be assembled on the south bank of the Rappahannock, far downstream from Fredericksburg; at the same time, a force of similar size would gather on the Pamunkey. When those columns were in place, they could launch a simultaneous assault in coordination with Burnside and thus drive Lee from Fredericksburg and prevent him from falling back to the Richmond entrenchments. “I think the plan promises the best results, with the least hazzard, of any now conceiveable,” Lincoln told Halleck.189 Burnside argued that Lincoln’s plan, though sound in principle, would unreasonably postpone the operation. When Halleck concurred, the president shelved his scheme. Upon returning to Washington, he was profoundly depressed and discouraged.
Meanwhile, the Confederates dug into exceptionally strong positions behind Fredericksburg. Burnside therefore considered crossing the Rappahannock at a location several miles below the town, but Lee moved quickly to defend that site. Foul weather hindered Burnside’s preparations for assault, but finally, on December 11, some of his men managed to lay down pontoons, cross the river, and drive the enemy from the town. Upon learning of this accomplishment, Lincoln rejoiced. “The rebellion is now virtually at an end,” he exulted, predicting that Richmond would fall by New Year’s.190
Two days later, the president’s elation turned to despair as the army stormed the heights above the town and sustained a crushing defeat, taking over 12,000 casualties, while the Confederates lost less than half that number.
While the battle raged, Lincoln visited the War Department and anxiously conned telegrams from the front, but they were quite vague. When Herman Haupt arrived from Falmouth, Lincoln eagerly quizzed him about the progress of the fighting. Once he understood the peril confronting Burnside, the president went to Halleck’s residence and instructed him to command the general to withdraw across the Rappahannock. “I will do no such thing,” the general-in-chief replied. “If such orders are issued you must take the responsibility of issuing them yourself. I hold that an officer in command of an army in the field ought to be more familiar with the details of the situation than parties at a distance and should be allowed to exercise his own discretion.” When Haupt predicted that Burnside would soon be able to retreat unmolested, the president sighed deeply and told him: “What you tell me gives me a great many grains of comfort.”191 Turning to Halleck, Lincoln “remarked that as far as his observation extended, our friend Haupt had always come up to time in his department better than almost any one else.” The general-in-chief agreed. After this interview, Haupt wrote his wife: “I pity the President very much. He is an honest and good man but never was poor mortal more harassed.”192
Upon his return to the White House, Lincoln received another eyewitness account of the slaughter from journalist Henry Villard, who described the grim battlefield and suggested that Burnside retreat. “I hope it is not so bad as all that,” Lincoln remarked.193
But it was, and so the president despaired. “I wonder if the damned in hell suffer less than I do,” he mused plaintively.194 Similarly, he declared that “[i]f there is a worse place than hell I am in it.”195 When Pennsylvania Governor Andrew G. Curtin depicted the carnage at Fredericksburg, Lincoln, his face “darkened with pain,” “moaned and groaned in anguish,” “showed great agony of spirit,” and “walked the floor, wringing his hands and uttering exclamations of grief,” repeatedly asking: “What has God put me in this place for?”196 Curtin led a delegation of Pennsylvanians who warned Lincoln that unless there was a shakeup in the cabinet, “the people in forty days would have his head.”197
Lincoln told a congressman that he would rather be a solider in the ranks than president: “There is not a man in the army with whom I would not willingly change places.”198 The president interrupted another congressman, freshly returned from Fredericksburg, who was recounting the battle: “I beg you not to tell me anything more of that kind. I have as much on me now as I can bear.”199 A War Department telegrapher reported that when news arrived that so many men had been killed, “the calamity seemed to crush Lincoln. He did not get over it for a long time and, all that winter of 1863, he was downcast and depressed. He felt that the loss was his fault.”200
Lincoln’s despair was so palpable that Noah Brooks expressed shock at his appearance. Comparing him with the vigorous campaigner he had known back in Illinois, Brooks wrote that the president’s “hair is grizzled, his gait more stooping, his countenance sallow, and there is a sunken, deathly look about the large cavernous eyes.” Philosophically Brooks remarked that it “is a lesson for human ambition to look upon that anxious and careworn face, prematurely aged by public labors and private griefs, and to remember that with the fleeting glory of his term of office have come responsibilities which make his life one long series of harassing cares.”201 Murat Halstead told readers of the Cincinnati Commercial that no one could observe the president’s face “and believe that he is insensible to the responsibilities pressing upon him. I know he always had a doleful sort of physiognomy, but his features had not, two years ago, the pale and pinched appearance that they now wear.”202 To Joshua Speed, Lincoln seemed “haggard and care-worn beyond what he expected to see in him.”203
David Davis, who also reported that Lincoln “looks weary & care worn” and that the “cares of this Government are very heavy on him,” thought it was “a good thing that he is fond of anecdotes & telling them, for it relieves his spirits very much.”204 The day after Fredericksburg, Davis and two other Illinoisans called at the White House, where Lincoln voiced his determination to press ahead no matter what reverses the Union suffered. He compared himself to a character made famous by the Rev. Mr. Sydney Smith in an 1831 speech: “I am sometimes reminded of old Mother Partington. You know the old lady lived on the sea beach, and
one time a big storm came up and the waves began to rise till the water began to come in under her cabin door. She got a broom and went to sweeping it out. But the water rose higher and higher; to her knees; to her waist; at last to her chin. But she kept on sweeping and exclaiming, ‘I’ll keep on sweeping as long as the broom lasts and we will see whether the storm or the broom will last the longest!’ And that is the way with me.”205
Not everyone shared Davis’s positive view of the president’s humor. A soldier complained that “while Old Abe tells outsiders that something reminds him of an anecdote … thousands of lives are sacrificed & our beloved country [is] still sinking to disgrace & ruin.”206 Others contemptuously deemed Lincoln “the Border State Joking Machine” and called his administration “a huge untimely joke.”207 To such criticism, Lincoln replied: “if I could not get momentary respite from the crushing burden I am constantly carrying I should die.”208
Lincoln’s humor inspired good-natured jests in others. A Southern clergyman reportedly speculated that God would favor the Confederacy because Jefferson Davis prayed so fervently for His blessing. When it was pointed out that Lincoln was a religious man and had probably prayed for the same thing, the minister replied: “If he has, the Lord undoubtedly thought he was joking!”209
Downcast as he was by the Fredericksburg debacle, Lincoln extended the nation’s gratitude to the army: “Although you were not successful, the attempt was not an error, nor the failure other than an accident.” (The “accident” was the tardy arrival of the pontoons.) “The courage with which you, in an open field, maintained the contest against an entrenched foe, and the consummate skill and success with which you crossed and re-crossed the river, in face of the enemy, show that you possess all the qualities of a great army, which will yet give victory to the cause of the country and of popular government. Condoling with the mourners for the dead, and sympathizing with the severely wounded, I congratulate you that the number of both is comparatively so small.”210 These words struck some as ironic. Colonel Charles S. Wainwright of the Army of the Potomac remarked: “Mr. Lincoln is more flattering to this army when defeated than when victorious. He had not a word to say to it after South Mountain and Antietam.” Puzzled by the president’s reference to “comparatively small” casualties, Wainwright asked: “Compared with what, I wonder; with the loss of the enemy? Or with the advantages gained? Or with our losses in previous battles?”211
The president was doubtless referring to the Confederate losses, which though much smaller than the Union’s, could not be replaced so easily. White House secretary William O. Stoddard recalled that soon after the battle, Lincoln analyzed the North’s comparative advantage: “if the same battle were to be fought over again, every day, through a week of days, with the same relative results, the army under Lee would be wiped out to its last man, the Army of the Potomac would still be a mighty host, the war would be over, the Confederacy gone, and peace would be won at a smaller cost of life than it will be if the week of lost battles must be dragged out through yet another year of camps and marches, and of deaths in hospitals rather than upon the field. No general yet found can face the arithmetic, but the end of the war will be at hand when he shall be discovered.”212 On December 21, the president told General William K. Strong that the army was “not as bad off as he apprehended,” that it “is not demoralized, but no onward movement can take place very soon where they are.”213
Lincoln did not blame Burnside for the defeat. “In my opinion Mr. Lee caused this trouble,” he said.214 He also compared Burnside favorably to his predecessor: “Had Burnside had the same chances of success that McClellan wantonly cast away, to-day he would have been hailed as the saviour of his country. A golden opportunity was lost by the latter General at Antietam.”215 Returning the favor, Burnside promised Lincoln that he would publish a letter accepting sole responsibility for the reverse. The grateful president told him that he “was the first man he had found who was willing to relieve him of a particle of responsibility.”216 True to his word, Burnside wrote Halleck on December 17: “For the failure in the attack I am responsible. … The fact that I decided to move from Warrenton onto this line rather against the opinion of the President, Secretary, and yourself, and that you have left the whole management in my hands, without giving me orders, makes me the more responsible.”217 Burnside submitted this document to the newspapers, which circulated it widely.
Not everyone was willing to exonerate the president. Ohio journalist Whitelaw Reid said that either Halleck or Burnside might be blamed, “but ABRAHAM LINCOLN was Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy! From that sad fact, and from its logical sequences, there was no escape!”218 Moncure Conway declared that the “disasters have root in the White House.”219 After speaking with numerous members of Congress, military men, Radicals, and Conservatives, William M. Dickson reported that “all united in ascribing to the President the honor of being the author of all our calamities. His imbecility, vacillation, meddling interference with everything, his frivolity and total incapacity of receiving or appreciating [advice] make him the most incorrigible stumbling block that God ever afflicted any nation with.”220 The people of the North “have borne, silently and grimly, imbecility, treachery, failure, privation, loss of friends and means, almost every suffering which can afflict a brave people,” observed Harper’s Weekly. “But they cannot be expected to suffer that such massacres as this at Fredericksburg shall be repeated.”221 Benjamin Brown French gave voice to the widespread pessimism: “Unless something occurs very soon to brighten up affairs, I shall begin to look upon our whole Nation as on its way to destruction.”222
As if the Fredericksburg disaster had not generated enough criticism, Lincoln’s decision to send Nathaniel P. Banks to Louisiana rather than to Burnside’s army was widely condemned. “The Banks diversion south has disappointed the whole country,” the president observed.223
Senatorial Putsch Attempt: The Cabinet Crisis of December
In the wake of the Fredericksburg defeat, Lincoln’s popularity reached a low ebb. “A year ago we laughed at the Honest Old Abe’s grotesque genial Western jocosities, but they nauseate us now,” remarked George Templeton Strong. He predicted that if things continued to go as they had been going, pressure would mount to have the president “resign and make way for Hamlin, as for one about whom nobody knows anything and who may therefore be a change for the better, none for the worse being conceivable.”224 Charles Eliot Norton lamented that while the nation required the leadership of “a Bengal tiger,” it had only a “domestic cat” in the White House.225 Constituents told Pennsylvania Representative Edward McPherson that “almost everybody is dissatisfied with the administration. President Lincoln is denounced by many of his most devoted friends in former times.” The public was “utterly disgusted,” believing “that the present administration is utterly incompetent.” Ominously McPherson was warned that “if things are not more successfully managed the President will be generally deserted.”226 Orestes A. Brownson lost all patience with Lincoln, whom he derided as a “petty politician,” “thick-headed,” “ignorant,” “tricky,” “astute in a small way,” “obstinate as a mule,” “wrong-headed,” and “ill-deserving the sobriquet of Honest.”227 Lincoln was “not equal to his position,” Brownson argued; “he is not the right man in the right place. … It had been better for the nation if a better man had been elected President.”228 William Cullen Bryant indignantly asked: “How long is such intolerable and wicked blundering to continue?”229 A correspondent for an abolitionist journal complained that Lincoln was not moved “by the yawning, bleeding wounds of the devoted, noble people—unmoved by the prayers and supplications of patriots of his once friends,” and instead resists with “all his might … any change of the mephistic influences surrounding him.”230
Lincoln might be honest and patriotic, an Indiana Republican conceded, “but I fear he is not courageous.” The administration’s “policy of ‘no policy’ … emboldens our southern as w
ell as our domestic foes.” Not long ago, he said, “men would not venture to suggest openly a possible alliance with the south on the part of the northwest,” but nowadays “the advantages of such an alliance are unblushingly discussed.” Secret groups plotted to overthrow the government. “Denunciation of New England is indulged in, and an open avowal that a union leaving her out, would be preferable to the ‘old union.’ ” It was “unaccountable that a government possessed of the resources that ours is, with loyal and patriotic local governments in the union states, should have made so little progress in putting down this rebellion.”231
A Bostonian predicted that Lincoln’s resignation “would be received with great satisfaction” and might “avert what … will otherwise come, viz, a violent and bloody revolution at the North.”232 The president was aware of such threats. When told that a Pennsylvanian expressed the hope that he would be hanged from a lamppost outside the White House, Lincoln remarked to Congressman William D. Kelley: “You need not be surprised to find that that suggestion has been executed any morning; the violent preliminaries to such an event would not surprise me. I have done things lately that must be incomprehensible to the people, and which cannot now be explained.”233
Congress, too, was growing disenchanted with the president. Zachariah Chandler, who regarded Lincoln as “a weak man, too weak for the occasion,” told his wife that “the country is gone unless something is done at once. Folly, folly, folly reigns supreme.”234 Another Republican senator said that his colleagues would ask Lincoln “to resign if they supposed he would take the advice.” Yet another declared that the president “has fewer positive vices than most men but is strikingly without a high positive good quality.”235 In January, William P. Fessenden jeered that he had recently perused a letter by the King of Siam to Admiral Foote “which had more good sense in it, & a better comprehension of our troubles, … than Abe has had from the beginning.” In Washington, “every thing wears a most gloomy aspect,” the Maine senator reported. “Our financial troubles are thickening every day.” The Army of the Potomac “is almost ruined, & melting away rapidly.” He condemned the administration roundly: “there never was such a shambling, half & half, set of incapables collected in one government before, since the world began.”236
Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2 Page 80
