Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2

by Michael Burlingame

  During this visit to the front, Mrs. Lincoln became enraged when she heard that at a post-review collation which she had not attended, several generals’ wives, among them the beautiful spouse of General Felix Salm-Salm, had kissed her husband after obtaining permission to do so from General Daniel Sickles. The notoriously jealous First Lady blamed Sickles for that indiscretion, and for a quarter of an hour she berated the president, who replied: “But, mother, hear me.”

  “Don’t mother me, and as for General Sickles, he will hear what I think of him and his lady guests,” came the indignant reply. “It was well for him that I was not there at the time.”

  As the First Couple returned to Washington, escorted by Sickles, the president sought to reduce tension in the social atmosphere. “I never knew until last night that you were a very pious man,” Lincoln remarked to the general, who protested that he merited no such description. “Not at all,” quipped the president. “Mother says you are the greatest Psalmist in the army. She says you are more than a Psalmist, you are a Salm-Salmist.” The pun had the desired effect.157

  The Spring Offensive

  Although Lincoln had originally planned to stay at Falmouth for only one day, he enjoyed himself so much that he remained nearly a week in order to inspect each corps. He was relieved to escape from the capital and its clamorous politicians. Yet no matter what he did, he told Noah Brooks, “nothing could touch the tired spot within, which was all tired.”158 He expressed a wish to General Egbert Viele that “George Washington or some of those old patriots were here in my place so that I could have a little rest.”159

  But Lincoln did not visit Falmouth merely in quest of relaxation. He also went over plans for the upcoming campaign with Hooker and his corps commanders, and was disturbed by a discussion about whether to get to Richmond by going around Lee’s right flank or his left. So he penned a memorandum noting that the presence of Lee’s army on the opposite bank of the Rappahannock meant that there was “no eligible route for us into Richmond.” Therefore Hooker should consider that “our prime object is the enemies’ army in front of us, and not with, or about, Richmond—at all, unless it be incidental to the main object.” Since the Army of the Potomac had shorter supply lines than the enemy, “we can … fret him more than he can us.” So it was dedided that Hooker should not attack Lee frontally but rather “continually harrass and menace him, so that he shall have no leisure, no safety in sending away detachments. If he weakens himself, then pitch into him.”160 This advice was in keeping with Lincoln’s approach to the war in the eastern theater: the goal should be the destruction of the enemy’s army, not the conquest of territory.

  Anson G. Henry, who accompanied his old friend Lincoln to Falmouth, observed the generals and the president conferring, and was struck by Hooker’s “most exalted opinion of Mr Lincoln’s sound judgment & practical sense.” He predicted that Fighting Joe would “act in accordance with his suggestions in good faith for the reason that they meet his own views in the main.”161 The general, however, thought Lincoln was “not much of a soldier” and, referring to him, Halleck, and Stanton, said that it was “a preposterous irregularity” to have “three heads of military affairs at the Capital.” When that trio arrived at Falmouth, Hooker feared that they would make some last-minute suggestions just as he was completing his arrangements.162 The general told Lincoln that “he would not submit to being interfered with.”163

  Disturbed by Hooker’s statements which were prefaced by such remarks as “When I get to Richmond” and “After we have taken Richmond,” Lincoln said that the general’s overconfidence depressed him.164 When he learned of Hooker’s boast that after he had captured the Confederate capital he would publish Lincoln’s letter advising him to beware of rashness, the president exclaimed: “Poor Hooker! I am afraid he is incorrigible.”165

  Lincoln had observed evidence of this cockiness earlier. In the summer of 1861, Generals Scott and McClellan had thwarted his intention to give Hooker a regimental command. But shortly after First Bull Run, the president overruled them, for he admired a veteran like Hooker who had won three brevets in the Mexican War and who traveled all the way from California to offer his services. “I thought I’d take the responsibility, and try the fellow,” he said. He gave him a chance after Hooker, then a lieutenant colonel, called at the White House and tearfully declared: “I was at Bull Run the other day, Mr. President, and it is no vanity or boasting in me to say that I am a — sight better General than you, Sir, had on that field!” Lincoln recalled that Hooker’s “eye was steady and clear, his manner not half so confident as his words, and altogether he had the air of a man of sense and intelligence who thoroughly believed in himself, and who would at least try to make his words good. I was impressed with him, and rising out of my chair, walked up to him and putting my hand on his shoulder, said: ‘Colonel, not Lieut. Col. Hooker, stay! I have use for you, and a regiment for you to command!’ ” Hooker’s subsequent record won the president’s respect. “In every position in which he had been put,” Lincoln declared, “Gen. Hooker has equaled the expectations which his self-confidence excited.”166 Just before he launched his offensive in late April, that cocksure quality led Hooker to state, “My plans are perfect, and when I start to carry them out, may God have mercy on General Lee, for I will have none.”167

  On April 10, Lincoln’s last day at Falmouth, he spoke with Hooker and his senior corps commander, Darius N. Couch. Evidently fearing that they might repeat McClellan’s blunder at Antietam, Lincoln said: “I want to impress upon you two gentlemen, in your next fight, put in all of your men.”168 If the president feared that Hooker might be too timid, he also feared his recklessness. “They told me in Washington to hurry up General Hooker,” he remarked during this visit, “but when he once gets started there will be more necessity for treading on the tail of his coat to keep him from moving too rashly.”169

  Back at the White House, Lincoln was in high spirits, but he worried about the slow progress of George Stoneman’s cavalry, which had been ordered to cut Lee’s supply lines. On April 15, the president expressed “considerable uneasiness” to Hooker, who notified him that heavy rains had delayed Stoneman. “The rain and mud, of course, were to be calculated upon,” Lincoln sternly observed. “Gen. S. is not moving rapidly enough to make the expedition come to any thing. He has now been out three days, two of which were unusually fine weather, and all three without hindrance from the enemy, and yet he is not twentyfive miles from where he started. To reach his point, he still has sixty to go; another river, the Rapidan, to cross, and will be hindered by the enemy. By arithmetic, how many days will it take him to do it? I do not know that any better can be done, but I greatly fear it is another failure already. Write me often. I am very anxious.”170 When Hooker replied that the weather could not be controlled and that Stoneman had done nothing worthy of censure, Lincoln hastened to Falmouth with Halleck and conferred with the commander on April 19. (No record of their conference survives.)

  The rains continued, upsetting Hooker’s plans. At just that time, one Francis L. Capen called at the White House offering his services as a “Certified Meteorologist & Expert in Computing the Changes of the Weather.” On April 28, Lincoln scornfully endorsed Capen’s letter, in which the weatherman claimed to be able to save thousands of lives and millions of dollars: “It seems to me Mr. Capen knows nothing about the weather, in advance. He told me three days ago that it would not rain again till the 30th. of April or 1st. of May. It is raining now & has been for ten hours. I can not spare any more time to Mr. Capen.”171 (Crackpot inventors annoyed Lincoln regularly. One sought his assistance in persuading the War Department to use his “universal solvent,” which could dissolve anything. After patiently listening to this gentleman extol the virtues of his product, Lincoln deflated him with a simple question: “What do you propose to keep it in?”)172

  Another unwelcome caller in late April asked Lincoln for a pass to Richmond. “My dear sir,” replied the president,
“I would be most happy to oblige you if my passes were respected; but the fact is I have within the last two years given passes to more than two hundred and fifty thousand men to go to Richmond, and not one of them has got there yet in any legitimate way.”173

  Hooker revised his plans ingeniously, proposing to send some troops against Fredericksburg as a feint, throw most of his forces across the river well above the town, and menace Lee’s communications. That would force the Confederates to abandon their strongly entrenched position and either retreat or fight in the open, where superior Union numbers and artillery could prevail. Upon receiving Hooker’s dispatch about this new strategy, Lincoln replied with characteristic modesty: “While I am anxious, please do not suppose I am impatient, or waste a moment’s thought on me, to your own hindrance, or discomfort.”174

  As Hooker poised to strike, Lincoln appeared optimistic and of good cheer. He told Robert C. Winthrop that “he had lost no flesh, notwithstanding all his cares, & that he weighed about 180 pounds still.”175 D. W. Bartlett reported that the president had “seen his hours of despondency” but now was “hopeful and courageous. This is worth half an army to the country and the cause. A bold courageous president at this crisis of our affairs is everything to us.”176

  Lincoln’s hopes were soon dashed, for Lee did not cooperate with Hooker’s plans. Instead of waiting on the defensive, he boldly attacked, dividing his numerically inferior force and smashed the Army of the Potomac between May 2 and 6 at Chancellorsville. As the fighting raged, Lincoln told Welles that “he had a feverish anxiety to get the facts” and “was constantly up and down, for nothing reliable came from the front.”177 On May 3, Hooker received a concussion when a shell struck a column of the Chancellor House as he leaned against it. When informed of this injury, the anxious president wired Hooker’s chief of staff, Daniel Butterfield, asking: “Where is Gen. Hooker? Where is Sedgwick? where is Stoneman?” Butterfield replied vaguely that Lee was between Hooker and Sedgwick and that Stoneman had not been heard from.178 Impatiently, the president asked about the generals: “Was Sickles in it? Was Couch in it? Was Reynolds in it? Where is Reynolds? Is Sedgwick fighting Lee’s rear? or fighting in the entrenchments around Fredericksburg?”179 Butterfield could not say. “We know very little as yet as to what was attempted, or what has been accomplished,” Nicolay reported that day. “For the present we are obliged to content ourselves in patience, with a silent prayer for the success of our arms.”180

  Nicolay’s prayer went unanswered. As the fighting continued, Lincoln had to rely on newspapers for information. After his concussion, Hooker halted and allowed Lee to seize the initiative. On May 6, the Union army retreated back across the Rappahannock, having taken 17,000 casualties to Lee’s 13,000. The only consolation to Union forces was the death of Stonewall Jackson, who was accidentally shot by his own men. (When John W. Forney published kind remarks about the fallen Confederate chieftain, Lincoln wrote the journalist: “I honor you for your generosity to one who, though contending against us in a guilty cause, was, nevertheless, a gallant man. Let us forget his sins over his fresh made grave.”)181

  When Lincoln finally received a dispatch reporting the defeat, he was stunned and turned pale as a corpse. “Had a thunderbolt fallen upon the President he could not have been more overwhelmed,” Noah Brooks told the readers of the Sacramento Union. “One newly risen from the dead could not have looked more ghostlike.” At the president’s request, Brooks read the fateful document aloud. With tears streaming down his ashen face, Lincoln paced the room exclaiming: “My God! my God! What will the country say! What will the country say!” To Brooks, Lincoln never seemed “so broken, so dispirited.” He was inconsolable.182 On May 7, John Sherman reported that Lincoln “is subject to the deepest depression of spirits amounting to Monomania. He looked upon Hooker as his ‘last card.’ ”183 To Bishop Charles Gordon Ames, Lincoln sadly confessed: “I am the loneliest man in America.”184

  As Lincoln anticipated, the country had a lot to say about the defeat. Along with Hooker, Stanton, and Halleck, the president received harsh criticism. Wendell Phillips told a New York audience: “Lincoln and Halleck,—they sit in Washington, commanders-in-chief, exercising that disastrous influence which even a Bonaparte would exercise on a battle, if he tried to fight it by telegraph a hundred miles distant.”185 Phillips’s contempt for Lincoln shone through his assertion that a “man for President would have put down the rebellion in six months!”186 (After reading that speech, Henry W. Bellows asked a friend: “Don[’]t such loose talk, however eloquent & true on general principles, do a great deal of harm, by preventing people from seeing that it is government of law & usage, not an ideal kingdom, we live in?”)187 Joseph Medill called Halleck “the most detested and odious man in the Administration,” an “inveterate, proslavery, westpoint fogy—universally hated in and out of the army.” According to Medill, it was “the daily wonder of the whole country” that Lincoln “clings to that odious old Blunderhead.”188 When told that Halleck “is universally execrated by the lay people,” Lincoln replied: “Well, I guess that’s about so. I don’t know that he has any friends, and so I think that a man who has no friends needs to be taken care of.”189

  Lincoln was particularly upset because Hooker had not committed all his men to the fight. The president believed that if Fighting Joe had reinforced General John Sedgwick when Lee dangerously split his army, he might have won a great victory and ended the war. Lincoln also opined that if Hooker “had been killed by the shot which knocked over the pillar that stunned him, we should have been successful.”190

  Immediately on hearing the bad news, Lincoln hurried to visit the Army of the Potomac. There he was charitable to Hooker, remarking “that the result was in his judgment most unfortunate” but “that he did not blame anyone,” for he “believed everyone had done all in his power” and “that the disaster was one that could not be helped.” Yet he “thought its effect, both at home and abroad, would be more serious and injurious than any previous act of the war.”191 Upon arriving at Hooker’s headquarters on May 7, Lincoln handed the general a letter asking: “What next? If possible I would be very glad of another movement early enough to give us some benefit from the fact of the enemies communications being broken, but neither for this reason or any other, do I wish anything done in desperation or rashness. An early movement would also help to supersede the bad moral effect of the recent one, which is sure to be considerably injurious. Have you already in your mind a plan wholly, or partially formed? If you have, prossecute it without interference from me. If you have not, please inform me, so that I, incompetent as I may be, can try [to] assist in the formation of some plan for the Army.”192 Fighting Joe promptly replied that he wanted to stay on the Rappahannock and renew the campaign once his army was again prepared to advance. Lincoln returned to Washington, satisfied that the troops had “suffered no defeat or loss of esprit du corps, but have made a change in the programme (a forced one, to be sure) which promises just as well as did the opening of the campaign.”193

  On May 13, Hooker wrote the president that even though the enemy now outnumbered him, he would attack the next day. Lincoln, doubtless reminded of McClellan’s overestimate of Confederate troop strength, summoned the general to Washington where he handed him yet another letter, this time pointing out that the Confederates were no longer as vulnerable as they had been a week earlier and that therefore it “does not now appear probable to me that you can gain any thing by an early renewal of the attempt to cross the Rappahannock. I therefore shall not complain, if you do no more, for a time, than to keep the enemy at bay, and out of other mischief, by menaces and occasional cavalry raids, if practicable; and to put your own army in good condition again. Still, if in your own clear judgment, you can renew the attack successfully, I do not mean to restrain you. Bearing upon this last point, I must tell you I have some painful intimations that some of your corps and Division Commanders are not giving you their entire confidence. This would b
e ruinous, if true; and you should therefore, first of all, ascertain the real facts beyond all possibility of doubt.”194

  Hooker’s immediate subordinates were indeed complaining about him just as he had complained about Burnside. Lincoln’s prediction that “the spirit which you have aided to infuse into the Army, of criticising their Commander, and withholding confidence from him, will now turn upon you” was proving accurate. The commander of the Twelfth Corps, Henry W. Slocum, and Darius N. Couch of the Second Corps (who thought Hooker lacked the “weight of character” necessary in an army commander) organized a revolt against Fighting Joe which failed when Meade of the Fifth Corps, their choice to head the army, refused to cooperate. Daniel Sickles, an old friend of Hooker’s, was the only corps commander still loyal to him.

  Despite these complaints, Lincoln hesitated to replace Hooker, for he liked him personally and thought it only fair to give him another chance. When General John Reynolds denounced Fighting Joe, Lincoln replied “that he was not disposed to throw away a gun because it missed fire once” and that “he would pick the lock and try it again.”195 Hooker begged the president not to shelve him as he had McClellan. “I am satisfied with your conduct,” Lincoln assured him. “I tried McClellan twenty times; I see no reason why I can’t try you at least twice.”196 In fairness to Hooker, it must be said that the corps commanders of the Army of the Potomac were as responsible as their commander for the defeat at Chancellorsville.

  Nevertheless, Lincoln made a mistake in not replacing Hooker immediately after Chancellorsville. Evidence suggests that the president may have decided to choose a new commander, in consultation with Halleck and Stanton, but for some reason hesitated. Perhaps he feared that public confidence would be shaken if he seemed inordinately hasty in selecting the fifth man within a year to head the Army of the Potomac. That rapid turnover disturbed some Republicans, including an official in the Pacific Northwest who reported that many of the “truest and staunchest Union-men hereabouts, begin to doubt Mr Lincolns capacity. … How can he suffer himself to be made a perfect weather cock, in the hands of others, is more than I can account for, but certain it is, he makes too many changes in our commanding Generals. … The Union cause receives a stub every time Mr Lincoln shows his vacillating disposition, by the removal of a Commanding General.”197 A Pennsylvanian also found that “this frequent changing of commanders has destroyed confidence.”198