Gen. William Sherman devised a strategy intended to crush the Sioux and their allies in 1876. Three columns with a combined force of over five thousand cavalry and infantry would converge on the hostile Indians: General Crook’s from Fort Laramie to the south; Gen. Alfred Terry’s, with Custer second in command, from Fort Abraham Lincoln to the east; and finally, Col. John Gibbon’s from Fort Ellis to the west. The plan made perfect sense on paper but failed in the field. Under the brilliant leadership of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, the Indians took advantage of their central position to concentrate their warriors on first defeating Crook on the Rosebud River, then wiping out Custer and a third of his Seventh Cavalry along the Little Big Horn River, and finally evading Gibbon and other pursuing army columns.
Eventually the United States won that war as it had nearly every Indian war in its history. One by one the bands surrendered to the overwhelming power that the army massed against them. The last holdout was Sitting Bull and his Hunkpapa band, who fled to safety in Canada; he led the remnants of his people back to the reservation in 1881. But in 1876 most Americans could only mourn the “Custer massacre”; few sympathized with the Indians or regretted that imperialism and treaty breaking called into question the nation’s highest ideals.
Although the Republican Party was only twenty-two years old in 1876, it was undergoing a profound ideological transformation from liberalism to conservatism as policies increasingly promoted big business and finance rather than the common working man and civil rights. Unfairly or not, liberals condemned President Grant as leading and personifying this transformation. Grant had mulled a third term but decided against it after an embarrassing resolution passed the House of Representatives in December 1875; liberal Republicans joined the majority Democrats to vote 234 to 18 that Grant’s reelection would be “unwise, unpatriotic, and fraught with peril to our institutions.”2 The liberal Republican rebellion against conservatives peaked with a convention led by Carl Schurz, Charles Francis Adams, William Cullen Bryant, and Frederick Law Olmsted at New York on May 15. They agreed not to break away and form a third party but instead vowed to work within the Republican Party to pressure it to live up to the progressive ideals upon which it was founded. They would lose this crusade.
The Republican Party convention opened at Cincinnati on June 14. Corruption accusations tainted the front-runners, senators Roscoe Conklin and James Blaine. The delegates eventually turned to squeaky-clean candidate Rutherford Hayes, Ohio’s governor, who won on the seventh ballot by 384 votes to Blaine’s 351. Hayes was a good choice, having risen to the rank of general during the Civil War and afterward returned home to champion reform, first as a congressman, then as governor.
The Democratic Party also picked a reform candidate after it convened at St. Louis on June 27. Samuel Tilden, New York’s governor, won unanimously on the second ballot. Tilden was acclaimed by progressives for breaking up Boss Tweed’s political machine in New York City. He declared that “centralism in government and corruption in administration are the twin evils of our times. They threaten with swift destruction civil liberty and the whole fabric of our times.”3
Unfortunately, the presence of two progressives battling for the presidency did not prevent the 1876 election from becoming notorious as the second most disputed in American history.4 There were widespread stories of ballot box stuffing in northern cities and across swaths of the South. Conservative southerners asserted the full repertoire of means to intimidate blacks from voting. Nowhere was this more blatant than in South Carolina, where white supremacist Martin Gary popularized a “Plan of Campaign” for the election whereby each white man would “control the vote of at least one negro by intimidation, purchase, keeping him away or as each individual may determine,” since blacks “can only be influenced by their fears.”5 The result of such tactics was to intimidate perhaps as many as 250,000 black voters from participating in southern polls.6
When the votes were tallied after the November 7 election, Tilden led with three hundred thousand more popular votes and a total of 184 electoral votes, 1 vote short of victory, to Hayes’s 166 electoral votes. Republicans and Democrats disputed the election results in three states—Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina. Election commissions in these states had conflicting Republican and Democratic counts.
To resolve the impasse, Congress passed a bill that Grant signed into law on January 29, 1877. The Electoral Commission Act established a fifteen-member commission composed of five senators, five representatives, and five Supreme Court justices to determine who won the deadlocked election. With Republicans holding eight and Democrats seven of the seats, the Electoral Commission accepted the Republican counts in the three states and thus threw the election to Hayes by 185 to 184 electoral votes. The House of Representatives certified this result.
Before this decision, Hayes assumed that he would be found the loser and despaired that a Democratic president would turn a blind eye to whatever southern conservatives did, with catastrophic results. He confided to his diary that “I do care for the poor colored men of the south. . . . The result will be that the Southern people will practically treat the constitutional amendments as nullities and the colored man’s fate will be worse than when he was in slavery.”7 Yet as president, Hayes followed exactly the same policy. He did so because of an understanding reached between the party leaders whereby the Democrats would accept Hayes if he ended Reconstruction. A Kansas Republican leader captured his party’s new outlook: “I think the policy of the new administration will be to conciliate the white men of the South. Carpetbaggers to the rear, and niggers take care of themselves.”8
After being inaugurated on March 4, 1877, President Hayes’s first act was to order all federal troops withdrawn from the southern states. Actually the “Bargain of 1877” was not much of a concession. As a means of imposing liberal democracy and civil rights on the South, Reconstruction had died years earlier, killed off by the white supremacist counterrevolution spearheaded by terrorism. Pulling out the handful of remaining federal troops and officials from the South was no more than a symbolic gesture. Henry Adams, a black Louisiana politician, explained that by then the “whole South—every state in the South had got in the hands of the very men that held us as slaves.”9 In all, the South might have lost the Civil War, but it won Reconstruction.
17
Legacy
Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. . . . The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
It became necessary for me to choose whether . . . I should let the government fall into ruin, or whether, availing myself of the broader powers conferred by the Constitution I would make an effort to save it with all its blessings for the present age and posterity.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me. Now at the end of three years struggle the nation’s condition is not what either party or any man devised or expected. God alone can claim it.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
There was a right side and a wrong side in the late war, which no sentiment ought to cause us to forget, and while today we should have malice toward none, and charity toward all, it is no part of our duty to confound right with wrong.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS
Why will men believe a lie, an absurd lie, that could not [be] imposed upon a child, and cling to it and repeat it in defiance of all evidence to the contrary?
ORVILLE BROWNING
He now belongs to the ages.
EDWIN STANTON
During the Age of Lincoln, those with national power wielded it to protect or enhance American interests as they interpreted them across a spectrum of issues. No American interest was more vital than defeating the rebellion of the slave states and reunifying the nation.
So how did the North win?1 Of the array of explanations, Abraham Lincoln’s leadership was by far the most important. It was his brilliant leadership
that mobilized enough vital hard- and soft-power resources for the United States to crush the Confederacy. Ulysses Grant’s praise was unequivocal: “I have no doubt that Lincoln will be the conspicuous figure of the war. He was incontestably the greatest man I ever knew.”2
This was not at all evident when the war broke out. In comparing the resumes of the enemy presidents, Jefferson Davis’s was as impressive as Abraham Lincoln’s was skimpy. Davis was a West Point graduate and Mexican War veteran; Lincoln was a militia captain for three months and never saw action. Davis served as the secretary of war and ran his Mississippi plantation; Lincoln never administered anything other than his law partnership. Davis was a two-term U.S. senator; Lincoln’s congressional experience was confined to a term in the House of Representatives. Yet resumes can be deceptive.
Despite these glaring differences, Lincoln proved to be by far the greater leader.3 In some ways he benefited from his own inexperience. He was not bound by standard procedures and lacked the skills that might have tempted him to micromanage. Instead he continually thought and acted outside bureaucratic and political boxes.
Lincoln at once relished and reviled his role as commander in chief. He once asked a friend visiting him in the White House, “Doesn’t it strike you as queer that I, who couldn’t cut the head off of a chicken and who was sick at the sight of blood, should be cast into the middle of a great war with blood flowing all about me?”4 He grew steadily into his duties.5 At first he tended to yield too much to the experts. Lacking any significant military experience of his own, he felt genuine respect toward and perhaps was awed by those who had not only made the military their careers but had fought valiantly in many a battle. When the Committee on the Conduct of the War expressed its astonishment that the president did not know the army commander’s plans, Lincoln replied that he “did not think he had any right to know, but that, as he was not a military man, it was his duty to defer to General McClellan.”6 With no firm hand at the tiller during the first year of war, the armies tended to march or camp largely clueless of each other’s directions or locations. The Union was in desperate need of a grand strategy.
Lincoln eventually firmly grasped the military tiller. Typically, he alleviated his ignorance through study. He borrowed from the Library of Congress The Elements of Military Art and Science, written by Henry Halleck, whom he later tapped to be the commanding general. His secretaries John Hay and John Nicolay recalled that he “gave himself night and day to the study of the military situation. He read a large number of works on strategy. He pored over the reports from the various departments and districts of the field of war. He held long conferences with imminent generals and admirals, and astonished them by the extent of his special knowledge and keen intelligence of his questions.”7
With time Lincoln became an accomplished military strategist, superior to most of his generals. He grasped the war’s essence and what was necessary to win it. He succinctly explained to Gen. Henry Halleck his “general idea of this war,” which was “that we have the greater numbers and the enemy has the greater facility of concentrating forces upon points of collision; that we must fail unless we can find some way of making our advantage an overmatch for his; and that his can only be done by menacing him with superior forces at different points at the same time, so that we can safely attack, one, or both if he makes no change, and that if he weakens one to strengthen the other, forbear to attack the strengthened one, but seize and hold the weakened one, gaining so much.”8
Unlike many panicky generals, politicians, newspaper editors, and average Americans, Lincoln saw Confederate invasions of the North more as opportunities than threats. The rebel armies faced the same dilemma as their foes—ever-longer umbilical cords stretching back to supply sources. This gave a vigorous commander the chance to sidestep the invaders, sever their lifeline, and fight on ground of his choosing the hastily withdrawing enemy army. The trouble for Lincoln was finding generals who shared his strategic vision. Historian James McPherson noted that time after time timid Union generals let defeated foes escape, as in “Jackson’s Shenandoah campaign in spring of 1862; Lee’s invasion of Maryland in September 1862; Bragg’s and Kirby Smith’s simultaneous invasion of Kentucky [in fall 1862]; Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania in June 1863; and Jubal Early’s raid to the suburbs of Washington in July 1864.”9
Among Lincoln’s worst frustrations was getting generals to grasp and assert the essential strategy for winning the war:
To avoid misunderstanding, let me say that to attempt to fight the enemy slowly back to his entrenchments at Richmond, and then to capture him, is an idea I have been trying to repudiate for quite a year. . . . My last attempt upon Richmond was to get McClellan, when he was nearer there than the enemy was, to run in ahead of him. Since then I have constantly desired the Army of the Potomac to make Lee’s army, and not Richmond, its objective point. If our army cannot fall upon the enemy and hurt him where he is, it is plain to me it can gain nothing by attempting to follow him over a succession of entrenched lines into a fortified city.10
Of course, this was the strategy by which Gen. Ulysses Grant eventually won the war in Virginia. Destroying Lee’s army and capturing Richmond came to be inseparable. Lee was able to block Grant’s attempts to sidestep him and blunt his subsequent attacks all the way back to the entrenchments of Petersburg and Richmond. It did not have to come to that. Had Grant commanded the Army of the Potomac at Antietam or Gettysburg, he would have destroyed Lee’s army, whose retreat each time was blocked by the rain-swollen Potomac River.
Victory depended on sound campaign strategies and battlefield tactics backed by a ruthless killer instinct. Lincoln did not find generals with such skills and instincts until 1864, with Grant commanding in the east and Sherman in the west. Until then generals like McClellan, Halleck, Buell, Rosecrans, and Meade actually tried to avoid a decisive victory. Halleck, whose Elements of Military Art and Science was a key textbook at West Point, believed that battles were only a last resort. McClellan and Meade fought reluctantly at Antietam and Gettysburg, respectively, then failed to follow up their tactical victories and destroy Lee’s army when they had the chance. Buell explained that the “object is not to fight a great battle but by demonstrations and maneuvering to prevent the enemy from concentrating his forces.”11
These attitudes disgusted generals like Ulysses Grant and William Sherman, the North’s greatest generals.12 Indeed, of the many reasons why the United States won the Civil War when and how it did, the leadership of these two men was the most essential after Lincoln’s. Grant was stunned by the belief that “the mere occupation of places was to close the war while large and effective rebel armies existed.”13 For him and his like-minded brothers in arms, the whole point of war was to destroy the enemy as swiftly and decisively as possible. Ideally this meant destroying enemy armies. If this was not possible, it meant destroying the enemy’s economic and psychological means of waging war.
There was a curious symmetry when comparing the truly outstanding generals of both sides, with Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Phil Sheridan balanced by Robert E. Lee, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, and Bedford Forest. What they shared was a killer instinct for destroying the enemy and the skills for doing so.
It is often said that generals are made, not born. Of the war’s six greatest generals, only Forrest did not attend the West Point military academy. This may have been to his advantage. West Point transformed young men into educated, professional soldiers. The emphasis, however, was on discipline, conformity, and engineering skills rather than the practice of war. The academy’s approach to war was a methodical, chess-like, eighteenth-century approach that emphasized taking strategic cities rather than fighting decisive battles that destroyed enemy armies.
West Point graduates supplied officers to both armies with a rough ratio of two Union to one Confederate. But the rebels’ military leadership was boosted by the eight military schools located across the South, with the Virginia Mili
tary Institute at Lexington and the Citadel at Charleston the most famous. The Virginia Military Institute supplied one of three officers in Virginia regiments, while 1,781 of its 1,902 graduates fought for the Confederacy.14
Professional officers filled less than half the posts of either army. Volunteer regiments elected their officers. As for generals, of the 583 that Lincoln commissioned, two-thirds had some military experience and many others were promoted because of the courage and skills they displayed in the war.15 Yet being a veteran or West Point graduate was no guarantee against ineptness, as George McClellan, Don Buell, Ambrose Burnside, and Joe Hooker amply proved. McClellan and Buell were timid, indecisive leaders who together may have delayed the rebel defeat by a year or more. Burnside and Hooker were aggressive but also murderously inept. Lincoln based his promotions on the candidate’s performance. The trouble was that a man might be proficient at one level of command and disastrous at the next. Or luck and overwhelming forces rather than leadership may have helped him win a battle or two. As if trying to figure out which professional officers were fit for high command was not challenging enough, Lincoln was pressured to commission some generals because of their political power. Not surprisingly, many prominent politicians who wrangled generalships made a mess of things, with Benjamin Butler, Dan Sickles, Nathaniel Banks, and John McClernand among the more egregious examples. Nonetheless, here again inexperience did not necessarily always end in disaster—John Logan was a first-rate general.
The Age of Lincoln and the Art of American Power, 1848-1876 Page 34
