This thinly veiled rebuke of both Grant and Halleck brought Grant to Washington on two hours’ notice. From there he went on to western Maryland to sort out the command relationship between Sheridan and Hunter. The latter resigned his post (whether with good or ill grace is not clear) in favor of Sheridan. That small, bandy-legged major general with his trademark porkpie hat thus became the sole commander of a powerful new army consisting of the Sixth Corps, Hunter’s Eighth Corps, two divisions of the Nineteenth Corps lately from Louisiana, and three divisions of cavalry. It was an imposing command for the thirty-three-year-old Sheridan, and many wondered whether he was equal to it. Lincoln shared that concern. Sheridan would soon assuage those doubts in spectacular fashion. Until then, however, the Union cause would endure a long night of despair before dawn finally came.
10
NO PEACE WITHOUT VICTORY
THE NORTHERN people and their president had endured other times of despondency during the war: the early winter of 1861–62, the summer of 1862, and the winter and spring of 1862–63. But at no time did their morale sink lower than in the summer of 1864. By the Fourth of July the two main Union armies seemed to be bogged down in front of Richmond/Petersburg and Atlanta after suffering a combined total of ninety-five thousand casualties in the worst carnage of the war. In the Army of the Potomac the number of battle casualties for the two months from May 5 to July 4 was nearly two-thirds of the total in the previous three years. Some people in the North—including Mary Lincoln—began calling Grant a “butcher.”
“Who shall revive the withered hopes that bloomed at the beginning of General Grant’s campaign?” asked an editorial in the New York World on July 12. The bloody stalemate had become “a national humiliation,” declared the World. “This war, as now conducted, is a failure without hope of other issue than the success of the rebellion.”1 With unfortunate timing Lincoln on July 18 issued a call for five hundred thousand more volunteers, with deficiencies in meeting quotas to be filled by a new draft. This call was “a cry of distress,” lamented the World. “Who is responsible for the terrible and unavailing loss of life which renders five hundred thousand new men necessary so soon after the opening of a campaign that promised to be triumphant?”2
The World was a Democratic newspaper; with the presidential election approaching, it left readers with no doubts that it considered the Republican commander in chief responsible for this humiliating failure. Many Republicans were dejected. “The immense slaughter of our brave men chills and sickens us all,” wrote Gideon Welles. “It is impossible for the country to bear up under these monstrous errors and wrongs.” A State Department translator visited Philadelphia in early August. “What a difference between now and last year!” he wrote in his diary. “No signs of any enthusiasm, no flags; most of the best men gloomy and despairing.”3 From New York City, George Templeton Strong could “see no bright spot anywhere.” Even Benjamin Butler’s wife, Sarah, wondered, “What is all this struggling and fighting for? This ruin and death to thousands of families?…What advancement of mankind to compensate for the present horrible calamities?”4
Sarah Butler’s plaintive question has surfaced in all wars, but it had a special force in that summer of discontent. As before in the war, the peace wing of the Democratic Party gained strength in proportion to the public perception of the war as a failure. The Copperheads looked forward to victory on a peace platform in the presidential election. “Stop the War!” demanded editorials in Copperhead newspapers. “If nothing else would impress upon the people the absolute necessity of stopping this war, its utter failure to accomplish any results…would be sufficient.” A Boston Democrat believed Northerners were coming to the conclusion that “the Confederacy perhaps can never really be beaten, that the attempts to win might after all be too heavy a load to carry, and that perhaps it is time to agree to a peace without victory.”5
Several Democratic district conventions passed resolutions calling for a cease-fire and peace negotiations. Confederate agents in Canada, who were subsidizing several Democratic newspapers and politicians across the border, encouraged the idea that such negotiations might pave the way to eventual reunion. First might come “a treaty of amity and commerce,” suggested one of the Confederate agents, Clement C. Clay, followed “possibly” by “an alliance defensive, or even, for some purposes, both defensive and offensive.” If Peace Democrats were taken in by such double-talk, wrote Clay to Confederate secretary of state Judah Benjamin, who oversaw these Canadian operations, he was careful not to dispel their “fond delusion.”6
Confederate hopes in 1864 were based on a military strategy of holding out until the Northern elections and inflicting heavy casualties on attacking Union forces to turn the electorate against Lincoln. A War Department official in Richmond said that “if we can only subsist” until the Northern elections, “giving an opportunity for the Democrats to elect a President…we may have peace.” Gen. James Longstreet predicted that “if we can break up the enemy’s arrangements early, and throw him back, he will not be able to recover his position or his morale until the Presidential election is over, and then we shall have a new President to treat with.”7
By July 1864 that strategy seemed to be working. The peace contagion had spread well beyond the Copperheads. The observation by the Richmond Dispatch, the Confederacy’s largest newspaper, that a majority of Northerners would accept peace even at the price of Confederate independence may not have been far wrong. “They are sick at heart of the senseless waste of life,” declared the Dispatch. In New York, George Templeton Strong was “most seriously perturbed” by the “increasing prevalence” of “aspirations for ‘peace at any price.’” The astute Republican politico Thurlow Weed wrote to William H. Seward in August that Lincoln’s reelection was “an impossibility” because “the people are wild for peace.”8
Horace Greeley agreed with this assessment. In early July he set in motion a bizarre, failed peace initiative that nevertheless had important consequences. From a self-styled “intermediary” Greeley received word that two of the Confederate agents in Canada were accredited by Jefferson Davis to negotiate a peace settlement. The credulous editor enclosed this information in a letter to Lincoln on July 7. “Our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying country,” Greeley declaimed, “longs for peace—shudders at the prospect of fresh conscriptions, of further wholesale devastations, and of new rivers of human blood.” Therefore “I entreat you to submit overtures for pacification to the Southern insurgents.”9
Lincoln did not believe for a moment that the Confederate agents had genuine negotiating powers. And even if they did, the president knew that Jefferson Davis’s inflexible condition for peace was Confederate independence. Yet, given the political context in July, Lincoln could not appear to rebuff any peace overture, however spurious. He also understood that the job of commander in chief was not only to conduct the war but also to shape the conditions for peace. In this case, moreover, he thought he saw a chance to rally flagging Northern spirits by demonstrating that any peace short of military victory was unacceptable. So Lincoln immediately sent Greeley a telegram authorizing him to bring to Washington under a safe-conduct pass “any person anywhere professing to have any proposition of Jefferson Davis in writing, for peace, embracing the restoration of the Union and abandonment of slavery.”10
Lincoln’s response put Greeley on the spot by making him a guarantor of the agents’ credentials and a witness to the president’s apparent willingness to negotiate. Greeley balked, but Lincoln prodded him into action by sending John Hay to join Greeley at Niagara Falls, Canada, to meet with the Confederates. The president was willing to compromise his principle of refusing to acknowledge officially the existence of the Confederate government by insisting on the agents’ acceptance of restoration of the Union as a prerequisite for negotiations. Hay carried to Niagara Falls a letter from Lincoln addressed “To Whom It May Concern,” stating that “any proposition which embraces the restoration of peace, the integrity
of the whole Union, and the abandonment of slavery, and which comes by and with an authority that can control the armies now at war with the United States will be received and considered by the Executive government of the United States, and will be met by liberal terms on other substantial and collateral points.”11
This letter was a crucial document that framed all discussions of peace from then on. Lincoln intended it not only to lay out his own conditions for peace but also to elicit the Confederacy’s unacceptable counteroffer. On this occasion, however, the Southern agents outmaneuvered Lincoln. They admitted to Greeley and Hay that they had no authority to negotiate peace. Then they released to the press a letter addressed to Greeley that accused Lincoln of sabotaging the possibility of negotiations by prescribing conditions he knew to be unacceptable to the Confederacy. Shedding crocodile tears, they expressed “profound regret” that the South’s genuine desire for a peace “mutually just, honorable, and advantageous to the North and South” had not been met with equal “moderation and equity” by Lincoln. Instead, his “To Whom It May Concern” letter meant “no bargaining, no negotiations, no truces with rebels except to bury their dead…. If there be any citizen of the Confederate States who has clung to the hope that peace is possible,” Lincoln’s draconian terms “will strip from their eyes the last film of such delusion.” The Confederate agents urged “patriots and Christians” in the North “who shrink appalled from the illimitable vistas of private misery and public calamity” presented by Lincoln’s policy of perpetual war to “recall the abused authority and vindicate the outraged civilization of their country” by voting Lincoln out of office in November.12
This letter was, as the New York Times recognized, “an electioneering dodge on a grand scale” to damage Lincoln “by making him figure as an obstacle to peace.” It worked. As Clement C. Clay reported with satisfaction to Judah Benjamin, Northern Democratic newspapers “denounce Mr. Lincoln’s manifesto in strong terms, and many Republican presses (among them the New York Tribune) admit it was a blunder…. From all I can see or hear, I am satisfied that this correspondence has tended strongly toward consolidating the Democracy and dividing the Republicans.”13
Greeley did indeed criticize Lincoln both publicly and privately. The president, he wrote in an editorial, made “a very grave mistake” by announcing his own terms instead of asking the rebels to state their terms first. In a remarkable letter to Lincoln on August 9, Greeley chastised the commander in chief for giving the impression that his policy was “No truce! No armistice! No negotiation! No mediation! Nothing but [Confederate] surrender at discretion! I never heard of such fatuity before.”14
Greeley may have had in mind an editorial in the New York Times, which spoke for the administration. “Peace is a consummation devoutly to be wished,” declared the Times, but not peace at the price of the Union. “War alone can save the Republic…. If the Southern people will not give us peace as their fellow-countrymen, we shall secure it as their conquerors. We know this is not gracious language. But it is native fact.” Greeley deplored such language, he told Lincoln, because “to the general eye, it now seems the rebels are anxious to negotiate and that we repulse their advances…. If this impression be not removed we shall be beaten out of sight next November.”15
Greeley was right about the potential political consequences of this affair. The Confederates had scored a propaganda triumph and given the Democrats a boost. Lincoln sought to neutralize the setback by sanctioning the publicizing of another and almost simultaneous peace contact. On July 17 two Northerners met under flag of truce with Jefferson Davis and Judah Benjamin in Richmond. They were James R. Gilmore, a journalist, and Col. James Jaquess of the Seventy-third Illinois, on furlough and temporarily resuming his peacetime vocation as a Methodist clergyman who wished to stop fellow Christians from slaughtering one another. Lincoln had given them a pass through Union lines in Virginia with the understanding that their mission was strictly unofficial—although they were well acquainted with Lincoln’s conditions for peace. Davis decided to meet with them because, like Lincoln, he had to consider the desire for peace among his own people and could not afford to spurn any apparent opportunity for negotiations.
Gilmore and Jaquess informally repeated the terms Lincoln had offered in his Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction the previous December: reunion, emancipation, and amnesty. According to Gilmore’s account, Davis responded angrily: “Amnesty, Sir, applies to criminals. We have committed no crime. At your door lies all the misery and crime of this war…. We are fighting for Independence—and that, or extermination, we will have…. You may ‘emancipate’ every negro in the Confederacy, but we will be free. We will govern ourselves…if we have to see every Southern plantation sacked, and every Southern city in flames.”16
Upon his return north, Gilmore published a brief account of the meeting in a Boston newspaper and a subsequent detailed narrative in Atlantic Monthly. Lincoln approved these articles because they shifted part of the burden of refusing to negotiate from his shoulders to Davis’s. The New York Times immediately grasped this point. The Gilmore-Jaquess mission, declared the Times, “proved of extreme service…because it established that Jeff. Davis will listen to no proposals of peace that do not embrace disunion…. In view of the efforts now being made by the Peace Party of the North to delude our people into a belief that peace is now practicable without disunion,” Davis’s words were “peculiarly timely and valuable.”17
The publicity surrounding these peace overtures should have put to rest the Copperhead argument that the nation could have peace and reunion without military victory. But it did not. At the rock-bottom point of Northern morale in August 1864—when, as Thurlow Weed said, “the people are wild for peace”—Democrats were able to slide around the awkward problem of Davis’s conditions by pointing to Lincoln’s second condition—“abandonment of slavery”—as the real stumbling block to peace. From across the political spectrum, from Copperheads to War Democrats—and even beyond to some Republicans—came denunciations of the president for his “prostitution of the war into an abolition crusade.” Democratic newspapers proclaimed that “tens of thousands of white men must bite the dust to allay the negro mania of the President.” For that purpose “our soil is drenched in blood…the widows wail and the children hunger.” Emancipation was now Lincoln’s war aim; “the idea of restoring the Union no longer troubles the Executive brain.”18
The New York World was closely affiliated with Gen. George B. McClellan, the leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination. The World claimed that Lincoln “prefers to tear a half million more white men from their homes…to continue a war for the abolition of slavery rather than entertain a proposition for the return of the seceded states with their old rights.” No such proposition existed, of course, but Democratic newspapers convinced thousands of Northern voters that the Confederate government would have made such a proposition if Lincoln had not required abandonment of slavery as “a ne plus ultra in the terms of peace,” as the New York Herald put it.19
Even some Republican editors expressed “painful and perplexing surprise” that Lincoln had made “the abolition of slavery the principal object of prosecuting the war.”20 Horace Greeley, who two years earlier had criticized Lincoln’s slowness to act against slavery, now condemned him for insisting on what Greeley had then demanded. “We do not contend,” wrote Greeley in a widely reprinted Tribune editorial, “that reunion is possible or endurable only on the basis of Universal Freedom…. War has its exigencies which cannot be foreseen…and Peace is often desirable on other terms than those of our own choice.” George Templeton Strong sadly concluded that Lincoln’s emancipation condition was a “blunder” that “may cost him his election…. [It has] given the disaffected and discontented a weapon that doubles their power of mischief.”21
The enormous pressure on Lincoln to drop his “abandonment of slavery” condition for peace negotiations almost caused him to succumb. On August 1
7 he drafted a letter to a Wisconsin newspaper editor who had previously supported the administration but said he could no longer do so if the president intended the war to continue until slavery was abolished. “To me,” Lincoln began his letter, “it seems plain that saying re-union and abandonment of slavery would be considered, if offered, is not saying that nothing else or less would be considered.” Lincoln concluded the letter with these words: “If Jefferson Davis wishes…to know what I would do if he were to offer peace and re-union, saying nothing about slavery, let him try me.”22
In the same draft, however, and in an interview two days later with a pair of Wisconsin Republicans, the commander in chief explained forcefully and eloquently why he included abandonment of slavery as a necessary condition for a peace that restored the Union. “No human power can subdue this rebellion without using the emancipation lever as I have done,” he insisted. Lincoln pointed out that one hundred thousand or more black soldiers and sailors were fighting for the Union. “If they stake their lives for us they must be prompted by the strongest motive—even the promise of freedom. And the promise being made, must be kept.” To jettison emancipation as a condition, in such a public way, would “ruin the Union cause itself,” Lincoln insisted. “All recruiting of colored men would instantly cease, and all colored men in our service would instantly desert us. And rightfully too. Why should they give their lives for us, with full notice of our purpose to betray them?…I should be damned in time and eternity for so doing. The world shall know that I will keep my faith to friends and enemies, come what will.”23
Tried by War Page 24
