Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2

by Michael Burlingame

  On July 6, the president wrote to Halleck: “I left the telegraph office a good deal dissatisfied. You know I did not like the phrase, in Orders, No. 68, I believe, ‘Drive the invaders from our soil.’ Since that, I see a dispatch from General [William H.] French, saying the enemy is crossing his wounded over the river in flats, without saying why he does not stop it, or even intimating a thought that it ought to be stopped. Still later, another dispatch from General [Alfred] Pleasonton, by direction of General Meade, to General French, stating that the main army is halted because it is believed the rebels are concentrating ‘on the road toward Hagerstown, beyond Fair-field,’ and is not to move until it is ascertained that the rebels intend to evacuate Cumberland Valley. These things all appear to me to be connected with a purpose to cover Baltimore and Washington, and to get the enemy across the river again without a further collision, and they do not appear connected with a purpose to prevent his crossing and to destroy him. I do fear the former purpose is acted upon and the latter is rejected. If you are satisfied the latter purpose is entertained and is judiciously pursued, I am content. If you are not so satisfied, please look to it.”256 Later the president asked Meade, “Do you know, General, what your attitude towards Lee after the battle of Gettysburg reminded me of?” “No, Mr. President—what is it?” “I’ll be hanged if I could think of anything else but an old woman trying to shoo her geese across a creek.”257

  Halleck promptly notified Meade that if the Confederates were in fact crossing the Potomac, he should engage the portion still on the north bank: “the importance of attacking the part on this side is incalculable. Such an opportunity may not occur again.” Even if Lee’s troops had not begun passing over the river, Meade should gather his forces and attack. After describing the units that were rushing to join the Army of the Potomac, Halleck told Meade: “You will have forces sufficient to render your victory certain. My only fear now is that the enemy may escape by crossing the river.”258 But with characteristic unwillingness to give a direct command, a failing that exasperated Lincoln, Halleck added: “Do not be influenced by any dispatch from here against your own judgment. Regard them as suggestions only.”259

  Meade replied that he would press on as soon as he could concentrate and supply his forces. But, he warned, “I expect to find the enemy in a strong position, well covered with artillery, and I do not desire to imitate his example at Gettysburg, and assault a position where the chances were so greatly against success. I wish in advance to moderate the expectations of those who, in ignorance of the difficulties to be encountered, may expect too much. All that I can do under the circumstances I pledge this army to do.”260

  Lincoln believed that Meade could deliver the coup de grâce to the Army of Northern Virginia before it escaped to Virginia. Thus, he thought, Meade would end the war, in conjunction with Grant’s capture of Vicksburg on July 4. At a White House fireworks display on Independence Day, Lincoln exclaimed to Elizabeth Blair Lee: “Meade would pursue Lee instantly but he has to stop to get food for his men!!”261 Heavy rains delayed Lee’s retreat to the Potomac.

  With mounting impatience, Lincoln followed the army’s slow progress, hoping Meade would attack but fearing he would not. He spent much time at the War Department, where telegrapher Albert B. Chandler observed him closely. Lincoln’s “anxiety seemed as great as it had been during the battle itself,” Chandler recalled; he “walked up and down the floor, his face grave and anxious, wringing his hands and showing every sign of deep solicitude. As the telegrams came in, he traced the positions of the two armies on the map, and several times called me up to point out their location, seeming to feel the need of talking to some one. Finally, a telegram came from Meade saying that under such and such circumstances he would engage the enemy at such and such a time. ‘Yes,’ said the president bitterly, ‘he will be ready to fight a magnificent battle when there is no enemy there to fight!’ ”262

  On July 7, the deeply discouraged president, wearing a sad, almost despondent look, told his cabinet “that Meade still lingered at Gettysburg, when he should have been at Hagerstown or near the Potomac, to cut off the retreating army of Lee. While unwilling to complain and willing and anxious to give all praise to the general for the great battle and victory, he feared the old idea of driving the Rebels out of Pennsylvania and Maryland, instead of capturing them, was still prevalent among the officers. He hoped this was not so” and “said he had spoken to Halleck and urged that the right tone and spirit should be infused into officers and men,” and that Meade “especially should be reminded of his … wishes.” When Halleck demurred curtly, Lincoln said: “I drop the subject.” He still felt that he must yield to Old Brains: “It being strictly a military question, it is proper I should defer to Halleck, whom I have called here to counsel, advise, and direct in these matters, where he is an expert.”263

  Frustrated, Lincoln issued a desperate order. His son Robert recollected that he “summoned Gen. [Herman] Haupt, in whom he had great confidence as a bridge builder, and asked him how long in view of the materials which might be … available under Lee, would it take him to devise the means and get his army across the river.” Haupt estimated that it would require no more than twenty-four hours. The president “at once sent an order to Gen. Meade,” a document probably carried north by Vice-President Hannibal Hamlin, “directing him to attack Lee’s army with all his force immediately, and that if he was successful in the attack he might destroy the order, but if he was unsuccessful he might preserve it for his vindication.”264

  On July 12, Meade caught up with Lee at Williamsport, where he could have attacked that day or the next. When he said he would convene a council of war, Halleck telegraphed: “Call no council of war. It is proverbial that councils of war never fight.”265 Meade ignored that sage advice, and, as the general-in-chief had predicted, a majority of the corps commanders opposed an assault. On the night of July 13, the Confederates began crossing the river, and finished doing so the next day.

  On July 14, John Hay recorded in his diary: “This morning the Presdt. seemed depressed by Meade’s despatches of last night. They were so cautiously & almost timidly worded—talking about reconnoitering to find the enemy’s weak place and other such.” Lincoln “said he feared that he would do nothing.” Around midday, when Lee’s escape was confirmed, Lincoln was overcome with grief and anger. Profoundly dismayed, he said: “We only had to stretch forth our hands & they were ours. And nothing I could say or do could make the Army move.” His son Robert reported that Lincoln “grieved silently but deeply about the escape of Lee. He said, ‘If I had gone up there I could have whipped them myself.’ ” (In fact, some newspapers had been urging the president to take command of the army and lead it in the field.) For the only time in his life, Robert saw tears in his father’s eyes. Lincoln had justifiably feared that it would be a repeat of Antietam, with the Army of the Potomac failing to cut off the Confederates as they retreated.266

  Halleck sent Meade a stern telegram conveying Lincoln’s displeasure: “I need hardly say to you that the escape of Lee’s army without another battle has created great dissatisfaction in the mind of the President, and it will require an active and energetic pursuit on your part to remove the impression that it has not been sufficiently active heretofore.”267 Understandably stung by this rebuke, Meade offered to resign: “Having performed my duty conscientiously and to the best of my ability, the censure of the President conveyed in your dispatch of 1 P.M. this day, is, in my judgment, so undeserved that I feel compelled most respectfully to ask to be immediately relieved from the command of this army.” To soften the blow, Halleck replied: “My telegram, stating the disappointment of the President at the escape of Lee’s army, was not intended as a censure, but as a stimulus to an active pursuit. It is not deemed a sufficient cause for your application to be relieved.”268

  Lincoln himself tried to soften the blow further in an extraordinary letter to the aggrieved general. He began with an expression of sincere gra
titude: “I am very—very–grateful to you for the magnificent success you gave the cause of the country at Gettysburg; and I am sorry now to be the author of the slightest pain to you.” After this conciliatory opening, Lincoln became stern: “I was in such deep distress myself that I could not restrain some expression of it. I had been oppressed nearly ever since the battles at Gettysburg, by what appeared to be evidences that yourself, and Gen. Couch, and Gen. Smith, were not seeking a collision with the enemy, but were trying to get him across the river without another battle. What these evidences were, if you please, I hope to tell you at some time, when we shall both feel better. The case, summarily stated is this. You fought and beat the enemy at Gettysburg; and, of course, to say the least, his loss was as great as yours. He retreated; and you did not, as it seemed to me, pressingly pursue him; but a flood in the river detained him, till, by slow degrees, you were again upon him. You had at least twenty thousand veteran troops directly with you, and as many more raw ones within supporting distance, all in addition to those who fought with you at Gettysburg; while it was not possible that he had received a single recruit; and yet you stood and let the flood run down, bridges be built, and the enemy move away at his leisure, without attacking him.”

  In one of the harshest passages Lincoln ever penned, he told Meade how much his failure to attack Lee would hurt the Union cause: “I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee’s escape. He was within your easy grasp, and to have closed upon him would, in connection with our other late successes, have ended the war. 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, when you can take with you very few more than two thirds of the force you then had in hand? It would be unreasonable to expect, and I do not expect you can now effect much. Your golden opportunity is gone, and I am distressed immeasureably because of it.” Lincoln filed away this stinging letter with the endorsement: “To Gen. Meade, never sent, or signed.”269 But he did tell the general, “The fruit seemed so ripe, so ready for plucking, that it was very hard to lose it.”270

  A week later, Lincoln was in a better mood. “I was deeply mortified by the escape of Lee,” he told one of Meade’s corps commanders. “A few days having passed,” he added, “I am now profoundly grateful for what was done, without criticism for what was not done.”271 As time went by, however, Lincoln continued to be exasperated by Meade’s habitual caution. On July 18, he moaned to Hay: “Our Army had the war in the hollow of their hand & they would not close it. … We had gone through all the labor of tilling & planting an enormous crop & when it was ripe we did not harvest it.”272 There was “bad faith somewhere,” he darkly speculated to Gideon Welles. “Meade has been pressed and urged, but only one of his generals was for an immediate attack. … What does it mean, Mr. Welles? Great God! what does it mean.”273 On July 26, he told the navy secretary: “I have no faith that Meade will attack Lee; nothing looks like it to me. I believe he can never have another as good opportunity as that which he trifled away. Everything since has dragged with him.”274 In September, when Welles asked what that general was doing, Lincoln replied: “It is the same old story of this Army of the Potomac. Imbecility, inefficiency—don’t want to do—is defending the Capital.” He then groaned, “Oh, it is terrible, terrible this weakness, this indifference of our Potomac generals, with such armies of good and brave men.”275

  Lincoln was not alone in his view that Meade could have ended the war with a vigorous pursuit. “Had Meade finished Lee before he had crossed the Potomac, as he might have done & he should have done, … we should now be at the end of the war,” wrote Charles A. Dana on July 29.276 Whitelaw Reid called Lee’s escape “the greatest blunder of the war,” and David Davis deemed it “one of the great disasters & humiliations of the war.”277 In fact, if Meade had begun pursuing the Army of Northern Virginia by July 8, Lee may well have been forced to surrender. (In fairness, it should be noted that Meade had been in charge of the army for only three days when the battle began and hardly knew the capabilities of any corps other than his own. His best corps commanders had been killed, along with over 3,000 other Union soldiers, among them many brigade colonels. Moreover, Lee’s position at Williamsport was strong, and it was easier for a defeated army to retreat than it was for a victorious army to pursue, especially after such an epic battle as Gettysburg. Still, if an aggressive commander like Grant or Philip Sheridan had been in charge, the Army of the Potomac would probably have hurt Lee badly before he managed to cross the Potomac.)

  For all his keen disappointment, Lincoln on July 19 felt cheerful enough to pen a bit of doggerel titled “Gen. Lee[’]s invasion of the North written by himself”:

  In eighteen sixty three, with pomp, and mighty swell,

  Me and Jeff’s Confederacy, went forth to sack Phil-del,

  The Yankees they got arter us, and giv us particular hell,

  And we skedaddled back again, and didn’t sack Phil-del.278

  In assessing credit for the victory at Gettysburg, Lincoln expressed reluctance to single out anyone in particular. “There was glory enough at Gettysburg to go all round, from Meade to the humblest enlisted man in the ranks,” he told Daniel Sickles.279

  Ironically, on that fateful July 4, Confederate Vice-President Alexander H. Stephens arrived at Fort Monroe with a letter from Jefferson Davis regarding prisoner exchanges. When Stephens asked permission to proceed to Washington, Lincoln flatly refused. Davis then issued a proclamation designed to bolster Confederate morale; it alleged that the Lincoln administration’s “malignant rage aims at nothing less than the extermination of yourselves, your wives, and children. They seek to destroy what they cannot plunder. They propose as the spoils of victory that your homes shall be partitioned among the wretches whose atrocious cruelties have stamped infamy on their Government. They design to incite servile insurrection and light the fires of incendiarism wherever they can reach your homes, and they debauch the inferior race, hitherto docile and contented, by promising indulgence of the vilest passions as the price of treachery. Conscious of their inability to prevail by legitimate warfare, not daring to make peace lest they should be hurled from their seats of power, the men who now rule in Washington refuse even to confer on the subject of putting an end to outrages which disgrace our age, or to listen to a suggestion for conducting the war according to the usages of civilization.”280

  Opening the Mississippi

  While generals in the Army of the Potomac disappointed Lincoln badly, their counterparts in the western theater, especially Ulysses S. Grant, gladdened his heart. Lincoln had not always been sanguine about Grant’s campaign against Vicksburg, which had received a severe check in December 1862. In March 1863, the president complained that Union forces “were doing nothing at Vicksburg,” even though Grant promised that “I will have Vicksburg this month, or fail in the attempt.”281 The general had made several unsuccessful bayou expeditions against the Confederate citadel. The first was an effort to dig a canal across the peninsula fronting the city, an enterprise which Lincoln thought “of no account.” He expressed wonder “that a sensible man would do it” and thought “that all these side expeditions thro[ugh] the country [were] dangerous” because “if the Rebels can blockade us on the Mississippi, which is a mile wide, they can certainly stop us on the little streams not much wider than our gunboats; & shut us up so we can’t get back again.” He added that his “only hope about the matter is that the Military commanders on the ground know prospects and possibilities better than he can.”282 He predicted the failure of the canal scheme and said that the expedition up the Yazoo “would do no good” and might even prove harmful, for “we run a great risk of losing all our transports & steamers.”283 Gustavus Fox reported that Lincoln “is rather disgusted with the flanking expeditions and predicted their failure from the first.”284 The president told Lorenzo Thomas, adjutant general of the army, that he feared Grant was not taking the
proper steps to capture Vicksburg and that he lacked the necessary energy. In April, his Illinois friends Jesse K. Dubois, Ozias M. Hatch, and David L. Phillips visited the Vicksburg front and reported that Grant was not fit for his position, for he seemed to be drifting without any plan.

  To learn more about Grant, Lincoln sent General Thomas to investigate conditions in the Army of the Tennessee. For the same purpose, he also dispatched Assistant Secretary of War Charles A. Dana, former managing editor of the New York Tribune. Officially, Dana went merely as a “special commissioner of the War Department to investigate and report upon the condition of the pay service in the Western Armies.” In April, he began regularly sending favorable dispatches from Grant’s headquarters describing the general’s plans and the state of the army. “I never knew such transparent sincerity combined with such mental resources,” Dana wrote of Grant.285

  In the autumn of 1862, Lincoln had created a problem for Grant by authorizing John A. McClernand, a prominent Illinois Democrat, to recruit an army and march down the Mississippi toward Vicksburg. The vague orders made it unclear whether he or Grant would be in control. In addition, General N. P. Banks, in charge of the Department of the Gulf and headquartered in New Orleans, was ordered to move up the Mississippi toward Vicksburg. Lines of authority and jurisdiction were indistinct. When the president finally put Grant in charge, the hyperambitious and arrogant McClernand protested bitterly and urged that Halleck be fired. Lincoln pleaded with him to stop complaining: “I have too many family controversies, (so to speak) already on my hands, to voluntarily, or so long as I can avoid it, take up another. You are now doing well—well for the country, and well for yourself—much better than you could possibly be, if engaged in open war with Gen. Halleck. Allow me to beg, that for your sake, for my sake, & for the country’s sake, you give your whole attention to the better work.”286 Demoted to a corps command, McClernand remained so querulous and insubordinate that eventually Grant dismissed him.