Lincoln urged Hooker to adopt the same plan that he had failed to inspire Burnside to follow, a turning movement around Lee’s western flank. To his relief, Hooker adopted this strategy, although the general did not credit its creator. In late April Hooker stole a march on Lee by marching seventy thousand troops up the Rappahannock River and crossing over at several fords. Then, inexplicably, rather than drive his corps against the rebels at Fredericksburg and pin them against the forty thousand troops he left there, he called a halt around a village named Chancellorsville.
Upon learning of Hooker’s position, Lee devised a bold plan. Leaving ten thousand men at Fredericksburg, he marched fifteen thousand straight at Hooker and sent Thomas Jackson and his thirty-thousand-man corps on a seventeen-mile trek around the Union’s right flank. The battle of Chancellorsville raged from May 1 to 4. Hooker finally withdrew his army back across the Rappahannock after suffering seventeen thousand casualties to Lee’s thirteen thousand; tragically for the rebel cause, Jackson was among those mortally wounded.
Hooker was the latest Army of the Potomac commander to violate the most basic principles of war, principles that the nation’s commander in chief understood and continually encouraged his generals to uphold. After having gained a march on the enemy, Hooker rested his troops rather than pushing them forward to assault the enemy’s rear. Once attacked, Hooker failed to commit all his forces to the fight—two of the army’s seven corps did not fire a shot in the entire battle. Then Hooker ordered a retreat even though his troops had fought the enemy to a standstill.
The question arose over what to do if Lee tried to sidestep Hooker westward, then circle to cut off the Army of the Potomac from Washington. Hooker promised to lead his troops against Lee’s rear. Lincoln instantly saw the folly in that and revealed what a clearheaded strategist he had become when he offered Hooker elementary but profound pieces of advice. First, he warned that “in case you find Lee coming to the north of the Rappahannock, I would by no means cross to the south of it. . . . I would not take any risk of being entangled on the river like an ox jumped half over a fence and liable to be torn by dogs from the rear without a fair chance to gore one way or kick the other. If Lee would come to my side of the river, I would keep on the same side, and fight him or act on the defense according” to “my estimate of his strength relative to my own.” He then explained that “Lee’s Army, and not Richmond, is your true objective point. If he comes toward the Upper Potomac, follow on his flank, and on the inside track, shortening your lines, whilst he lengthens his. Fight him when the opportunity offers.” As reports indicated that Lee’s army was strung out across northern Virginia, Lincoln fired off a curt message: “The animal must be very slim somewhere. Could you not break him?” He also offered the sound tactical advice that “in your next fight, put in all your men.”8
Lee, typically, did not rest on his laurels. Once again he led his army to another invasion of the North, to scour the landscape of desperately needed provisions and to prowl for a knockout blow against the Army of the Potomac. He screened his advance with Gen. J.E.B. Stuart and his cavalry. When Hooker sent his own cavalry across the Rappahannock to find Lee, it collided with Stuart at Brandy Station on June 9. The result was the war’s largest cavalry battle and the first hard evidence through rebel prisoners of Lee’s plan. Hooker marched his army north on a parallel route through northern Virginia, then Maryland, and finally Pennsylvania but refused the president’s repeated entreaties to drive straight at Lee and defeat him. Lincoln replaced Hooker with Gen. George Gordon Meade, a corps commander, on June 28.
The battle of Gettysburg opened on July 1, when a division of rebel troops approached this strategic crossroads where a dozen roads intersected. The town’s only defenders were Union cavalry that slowly gave way before the Confederate advance. Each side galloped off couriers to their respective commanders with word of the battle. Lee and Meade ordered their armies to converge on Gettysburg, with the Confederates marching from the west and north and the Federals from the south and east. Meade aligned his troops in a fishhook position along a low ridge with hills at each end.
Although outmanned by ninety thousand to seventy thousand troops, Lee typically took the initiative. Over the next three days, he launched a series of attacks to break the enemy line. He lacked two vital elements that might have brought him victory—Jackson was dead and Stuart was racing in a wide circle around the Union army. Without Stuart’s cavalry as scouts, Lee had little idea of the enemy’s exact numbers and deployment. Without Jackson, he lacked the general best able to quick-march his corps around the enemy, then launch a devastating assault. Instead the rebel attacks were late, uncoordinated, and ill chosen. The battle’s climax came with a charge of fourteen thousand led by Gen. George Pickett against the Union army’s center on the afternoon of July 3. The Union troops repelled the assault, killing, wounding, or capturing half of the attackers. As the survivors streamed back, Lee rode among them and apologized for his folly. That night Lee ordered his army to withdraw on the long road to Virginia and relative safety.
In all, Gettysburg cost the Confederates 28,063 casualties and the Union 23,049. Yet the rebels were lucky to get away with just those devastating losses. The Fourth of July brought a deluge so severe that it turned the roads into quagmires and swelled the Potomac to flood level; a Union cavalry raid had earlier destroyed the pontoon bridges linking Lee’s army with Virginia. Once again the Army of Virginia was stranded north of the Potomac River after losing a battle to an enemy with overwhelming strength. And once again a Union general had Lee on the ropes and refused to administer the coup de grace that would have sharply shortened the war and its destruction.
If Meade did not pursue Lee as soon as the skies cleared and roads dried, he did inform his troops that he would eventually get around to it. In one of the war’s great understatements he admitted, “Our task is not yet accomplished, and the commanding general looks to the army for greater efforts to drive from our soil every vestige of the presence of the invader.” This provoked a perplexed remark from Lincoln to his secretary John Hay: “This is a dreadful reminiscence of McClellan. . . . Will our Generals never get that idea out of their heads? The whole country is our soil.”9 Eventually Meade began a timid advance but ignored a series of ever-curter orders from Lincoln via Halleck to attack the enemy.10 Lee was finally able to get his army across the swollen Potomac over a rickety bridge hastily built at Williamsport on July 14.
Lincoln despaired when he got that news. He wrote Meade lauding his “magnificent success” at Gettysburg but castigated him for failing to “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. . . . Your golden opportunity is gone, and I am distressed immeasurably because of it.”11 But in the end Lincoln did not send this letter. He reasoned that Meade had commanded the army for only four days before the titanic three-day battle erupted and left him exhausted, stunned, and uncertain over what to do.
Instead Lincoln had Halleck inform Meade of his displeasure. When Meade offered to resign, Lincoln refused to accept.12 Yet Meade did little more than slowly follow Lee at a great distance into Virginia, where each army largely resumed its lines north and south of the Rappahannock River. The next great battle in the east would not occur until ten months after Gettysburg.
Lincoln’s key strategy west of the Appalachians in early 1863 was to capture Port Hudson and Vicksburg, the last two strongholds, 240 miles apart on the Mississippi River. Ulysses Grant led seventy thousand troops downriver from Memphis to Vicksburg, while Nathaniel Banks brought his twenty thousand troops upriver from Baton Rouge to Port Hudson. Grant’s mission was by far the more daunting.
Vicksburg was located on bluffs above a horseshoe bend in the Mississippi River that for scores of miles up- and downstream was lined by virtually impenetrable swamps and sha
llow serpentine bayous. The rebels had ringed the town with entrenchments, forts, and batteries of heavy cannons. Sherman had failed in an attack on Chickasaw Bluffs northeast of Vicksburg the previous December. Gen. John Pemberton commanded thirty thousand rebel troops in and around Vicksburg, while Gen. Joe Johnston eventually massed another thirty thousand at Jackson, fifty miles east.
Grant intended to get his army and flotilla of gunboats and transports below Vicksburg. He first tried to do so by putting most of his men to work digging a canal across a loop in the Mississippi River. As the weeks turned to months, Grant’s enemies claimed that he was an inept drunkard who should be replaced. Lincoln paid the critics little heed, retorting that “I have had stronger influence brought against Grant . . . than for any other object. . . . If I had done as my Washington friends, who fight battles with their tongues instead of swords far from the enemy, demanded of me, Grant . . . would never have been heard from again.”13 One reason for the president’s confidence was that he had War Secretary Stanton send Charles Dana, a trusted aide, to Grant’s headquarters to determine whether the rumors were true. Under cover of investigating the paymaster service, Dana observed Grant for weeks and had nothing but praise for him.14
Lincoln and Halleck, however, did encourage Grant to change his objective. Once he got his army and flotilla below Vicksburg, they wanted him to unite with Banks and take Port Hudson. For both strategic and political reasons, Grant ignored these wishes. Each general’s army was powerful enough to take his respective objective independent of the other. Combining their forces against Port Hudson was not just unnecessary, it would let Pemberton mass more troops and supplies for Vicksburg’s defense. Besides, Banks was a professional politician rather than soldier and owed his command to connections. Grant was determined to not to subject himself to Banks’s seniority and proven incompetence.
By early April Grant abandoned the canal effort as impossible with the primitive technology then available. Instead he marched his army west of the Mississippi as Commodore David Porter steamed parts of his flotilla past Vicksburg during several dark nights. Although most of the vessels slipped past, rebel gunners were able to sink two transports and six barges carrying vital supplies. On April 27 the army and fleet reunited at a town, appropriately named Hard Times, on the river’s west bank twenty-two miles downriver of Vicksburg.
Grant crossed his troops over the river to Bruinsburg, Mississippi, on May 1, then quick-marched them to Port Gibson, where they routed the defenders. Rather than head north to Vicksburg, he led his troops northeast to Jackson, Mississippi’s capital, where he intended to cut off Vicksburg and destroy a rebel army massing there led by Gen. Joe Johnston. William Sherman’s corps spearheaded the army’s advance and scattered a rebel force at Raymond on May 12. There Grant split his forces. Sherman marched on to Jackson, routed Johnston’s troops on May 14, and captured vast amounts of supplies. After having his troops tear up miles of train tracks heading north, east, and south, he led them back to the main army. Meanwhile Grant led the corps of John McClernand and James McPherson west toward Pemberton, who had deployed twenty thousand troops along a ridgeline called Champion Hill midway between Jackson and Vicksburg. Grant tried a double envelopment with his twenty-nine thousand troops by sending each corps around an enemy flank. Had McClernand displayed the same drive and tactical skill as McPherson, they might have destroyed the rebel army. Instead, while McPherson’s troops crushed the enemy left, McClernand’s corps was mostly still on the march. This let Pemberton extract most of his men and retreat, having suffered 3,840 casualties to the Union’s 2,441. Grant raced his troops after the rebels and caught up the next day at Big Black River. Once again the Union troops routed the defenders, inflicting 1,750 casualties while losing only 200 of their own. Pemberton led his men back into the safety of Vicksburg’s ring of trenches and forts, studded with hundreds of cannons.
Grant had conceived and implemented an astonishing campaign—in seventeen days, his army marched 180 miles, captured and burned Jackson, routed the enemy in five battles, inflicted seventy-two hundred casualties while losing forty-three hundred, and now massed around Vicksburg. With soaring adulation Lincoln read the military and newspaper accounts of Grant’s campaign and remarked that whether or not Grant took Vicksburg, “his campaign . . . is one of the most brilliant in the world.”15
After most of his army reached Vicksburg’s outskirts on May 19, Grant ordered an attack. In doing so, he gambled that the rebels were too demoralized from their string of defeats and long retreat to put up much of a fight. He was wrong. The defenders repelled that attack and another two days later. Grant had entrenching equipment and 220 cannons brought up for a prolonged siege.
The symbolism was as rich as the substance when Pemberton surrendered 29,396 troops and 172 cannons on the Fourth of July. Lincoln lauded Grant for his victory while admitting his own weakness. Having wanted Grant to join Banks at Port Hudson, he “feared it was a mistake” when Grant headed eastward toward Jackson. “I now wish to make the personal acknowledgement that you were right and I was wrong.”16 It is through such gestures that a leader nurtures the esteem, confidence, and above all, unrelenting efforts of those below him.
In contrast to Grant’s dazzling, elaborate Vicksburg campaign, Banks’s effort against Port Hudson was straightforward and methodical. He faced no large rebel forces hovering in the region so he could simply steam up the Mississippi River to just beyond cannon shot of Port Hudson and its seven thousand defenders, disembark his twenty thousand troops, envelop the defenses, and batter and starve the enemy into surrender. The siege was among the first in which black troops proved that they could fight just as valiantly as white troops. The surrender of Port Hudson, the rebels’ last stronghold on the Mississippi River, on July 8 inspired one of Lincoln’s most evocative remarks: “The Father of Waters again flows unvexed to the sea.”17
Grant sought to follow up Vicksburg by marching southeast to capture Montgomery and Mobile, Alabama. Lincoln and Halleck rejected that plan, but not on its impeccable strategic merits. They had succumbed to political pressure for a campaign up the Red River into northwestern Louisiana and northeastern Texas. While moving in this direction made no strategic sense, it served New England textile manufacturers whose factories were idled for want of cotton. Grant was ordered to transfer several divisions to Banks, who would lead the venture. But Banks was incapable of readying his army for this campaign until the following year and after finally launching it typically made a mess of it.
For nearly all of 1863’s first half, Gen. William Rosecrans had sat tight at his Nashville headquarters and ignored all instructions to march against Gen. Braxton Bragg’s army. His only act was to launch a raid led by Col. Abel Streight to tear up stretches of the railroad linking Chattanooga and Atlanta in April 1863. In what may have been a first for such a large-scale operation, the colonel and his 1,466 men were mounted on mules. The reasoning was that mules could endure over greater distances with less fodder than horses. The downside was that they were slower and bulkier. Learning of the raid, Bragg dispatched Gen. Bedford Forrest in pursuit. Forrest and his six hundred hardened troopers caught up to Streight and his men on May 3. Being outnumbered more than two to one, Forrest knew he would probably lose a direct fight with the Yankees. So under a truce flag he sent Streight a letter demanding surrender “to stop the further and useless effusion of blood.” Meanwhile he had his men ride two horse artillery pieces through a clearing, then circle back through the woods to pass in sight again. When Streight expressed his astonishment that he had counted fifteen guns so far and wondered how many more were in reserve, Forrest laconically replied, “I reckon that’s all that has kept up.” Streight promptly surrendered.18
It was not until June 23 that Rosecrans finally hooked his sixty thousand troops toward the rear of Bragg’s forty thousand troops. The result was a nearly bloodless campaign as Bragg withdrew all the way to Chattanooga. On July 7 Stanton fired off a message to Rosecr
ans informing him of the victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, then insisted, “You and your noble army now have the chance to give the finishing blow to the rebellion. Will you neglect the chance?” The rebuke upset Rosecrans, who retorted, “You do not appear to observe the fact that this noble army has driven the rebels from Middle Tennessee. . . . I beg in behalf of this army that the War Department may not overlook so great an event because it is not written in showers of blood.”19
Once again Lincoln had to explain to a general that his objective was not to occupy territory but to destroy the enemy. When Rosecrans complained that he lacked enough provisions to move, Lincoln replied, “Do you not consume supplies as fast as you get them forward?”20 This shamed Rosecrans into his campaign’s second phase. He sent his army south of the Tennessee River downstream of Chattanooga. Meanwhile Gen. Ambrose Burnside led twenty-four thousand troops against ten thousand rebels holding Knoxville. Both Confederate forces withdrew. During September’s first week, Burnside and Rosecrans led their armies, respectively, into Knoxville and Chattanooga. Virtually all of Tennessee was now in Union hands.
Rosecrans then received his latest entreaties from the White House to seek out and destroy Bragg’s army. In mid-September Rosecrans led his army south into north Georgia. Bragg’s army now outnumbered Rosecrans by seventy thousand to sixty thousand, thanks to the arrival of Gen. James Longstreet’s twenty-thousand-man corps by train all the way from Virginia. Bragg unleashed his army against Rosecrans at Chickamauga Creek on September 19. The Union troops held the line until nightfall, then withdrew the next day to Chattanooga. Only the unyielding defense of Gen. George Thomas’s corps prevented the retreat from turning into a rout. In all the Union suffered 16,170 casualties to the Confederacy’s 18,450.
The Age of Lincoln and the Art of American Power, 1848-1876 Page 21
