Tried by War

by James M. McPherson

  Recognizing the inconsistency of these sentiments with his “let Jefferson Davis try me” challenge, Lincoln filed that letter away unsent. When he did so, he and everyone else expected that he would be defeated for reelection on the peace issue. “I am going to be beaten,” he told a visitor, “and unless some great change takes place badly beaten.” On August 23 Lincoln wrote his famous “blind memorandum” and asked cabinet members to sign it sight unseen (probably to prevent a leak): “This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he can not possibly save it afterwards.”24

  This memorandum may have been prompted by a letter the president received that day from Henry Raymond, who was both editor of the New York Times and chairman of the National Executive Committee managing Lincoln’s reelection campaign. “The tide is setting strongly against us,” wrote Raymond. “Two special causes are assigned to this great reaction in public sentiment,—the want of military success, and the impression…that we can have peace with Union if we would…[but] that we are not to have peace in any event under this Administration until Slavery is abandoned.” To correct this impression, Raymond urged Lincoln to appoint a commissioner to “make distinct proffers of peace to Davis…on the sole condition” of reunion, leaving “all the other questions to be settled in a convention of all the people of all the States.” Of course, Raymond added, Davis would reject such a proffer, and this rejection would “dispel all the delusions about peace that prevail in the North…[and] reconcile public sentiment to the War, the draft, & the tax as inevitable necessities.”25

  Once again Lincoln seemed to yield to such pressure. On August 24 he drafted instructions for Raymond to go to Richmond and “propose, on behalf [of] this government, that upon the restoration of the Union and national authority, the war shall cease at once, all remaining questions to be left for adjustment by peaceful modes.” Lincoln’s private secretaries and later biographers, John G. Nicolay and John Hay, maintained that Lincoln never had any intention of sending Raymond to Richmond. His purpose in drafting this document, they asserted, was to make Raymond “a witness of its absurdity.”26

  In any event Raymond and the rest of the National Executive Committee met with Lincoln and three cabinet members on August 25. The committeemen, according to Nicolay, were “laboring under a severe fit of despondency and discouragement…almost the condition of a disastrous panic.” Lincoln convinced them that the proposed mission to Richmond “would be utter ruination…worse than losing the Presidential contest—it would be ignominiously surrendering it in advance.”27 To back away from emancipation would not only betray a promise; it would also give the impression of an administration floundering in impotence and would alienate the radical wing of the Republican Party.28 Lincoln may have been aware of closed-door meetings among some Republicans to plan a maneuver to get both Lincoln and Frémont to withdraw their candidacies and to hold a new convention to name another candidate—Chase, Butler, or even Grant! Whether or not Lincoln knew anything of these desperate intrigues, he did know that he had been renominated on a platform calling for the “unconditional surrender” of the Rebels and pledging a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery. For weal or woe the president intended to stand on that platform.29

  DURING ALL THESE complicated transactions about peace, Lincoln also had to continue managing the war. Republican politicians were not the only people pushing the panic button that August. With a new draft lottery imminent, General Halleck feared a repeat of the previous summer’s riots. He suggested that Grant should send part of his army north to suppress these outbreaks. Grant responded that to do so would not only loosen his grip on the enemy at Petersburg but would also endanger Sherman in Georgia by enabling Lee to detach troops to reinforce the Confederate army defending Atlanta. Northern governors should call out the militia if necessary to enforce the draft, Grant told Halleck. “If we are to draw troops from the field to keep the loyal States in harness it will prove difficult to suppress the rebellion in the disloyal States.”30

  Lincoln read this exchange of telegrams and immediately wired Grant: “I have seen your despatch expressing your unwillingness to break your hold where you are. Neither am I willing. Hold on with a bull-dog grip, and chew & choke, as much as possible.” When Grant read this message “he broke into a hearty laugh” and told his aides: “The President has more nerve than any of his advisors.”31

  Grant’s bulldog grip was just what the Democratic Party resolved could never restore the Union. That party remained divided between its peace and war wings, but the pessimistic mood of the North seemed to have catapulted the peace faction into the majority. Clement Vallandigham returned from his exile in Canada, in violation of Lincoln’s order banishing him for the rest of the war. Not wanting to make him a martyr again, the president ignored his return—perhaps also hoping that if he gave Vallandigham enough rope he might hang his party as well as himself. That is just what happened—with an assist from William T. Sherman.

  Meeting in Chicago at the end of August, the Democratic national convention adopted a platform plank written by Vallandigham: “After four years of failure to restore the Union by the experiment of war…[we] demand that immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities, with a view to an ultimate convention of the states, or other peaceable means, to the end that, at the earliest practicable moment, peace may be restored on the basis of the Federal Union.”32

  This last phrase was little more than window dressing. Almost everyone recognized that an appeal by the United States for an armistice without agreement on any prior conditions would be tantamount to confessing defeat. In effect, “ultimate” and “the earliest practicable moment” meant never. The convention did give the presidential nomination to McClellan, who represented the prowar wing of the party. But the vice-presidential nomination went to Representative George Pendleton of Ohio, a Vallandigham ally, which reinforced the Copperhead image of the convention’s work. McClellan tried to overcome that image with his letter accepting the nomination, in which he pledged to make peace negotiations dependent on Southern acceptance of reunion. His effort to shed the party’s copper tinge, however, proved to be an uphill struggle. Nevertheless, if the election had been held two days after his nomination, McClellan would undoubtedly have won.

  But three days after the nomination, on September 3, a telegram from General Sherman arrived in Washington: “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won.”33 The impact of this news was astounding. It turned around Northern opinion about the success or failure of the war by 180 degrees almost overnight. “Glorious news this morning—Atlanta taken at last!!!” wrote George Templeton Strong. “It is (coming at this political crisis) the greatest event of the war.” A Republican newspaper captured the meaning of this event:

  VICTORY

  Is the War a Failure?

  Old Abe’s Reply to the Chicago Convention34

  THE WAR WAS far from over, however. Atlanta had fallen, but the Confederate army defending it lived to fight another day. And so of course did the Army of Northern Virginia, including Jubal Early’s corps, which still controlled the Shenandoah Valley a month after Phil Sheridan had been ordered to go after Early and follow him to the death. No longer able to say that the whole war was a failure, Democratic newspapers switched to criticizing Sheridan as a failure.

  Lincoln was concerned. He telegraphed Grant on September 12 asking if something could be done to end the “dead lock” in the Shenandoah Valley by getting Sheridan “to make a strike.” This message brought Grant from his headquarters at City Point near Petersburg for the second time to prod Sheridan into action. He arrived at Sheridan’s headquarters on September 15 to learn that the general planned an imminent attack on Early’s army at Winchester. Grant had brought his own plan of campaign for Sher
idan, but he left it in his pocket and simply told him: “Go in!”35

  Once started, Sheridan proved to be one of the most energetic and aggressive Union commanders of the war. On September 19 he launched a two-pronged assault on Early’s army east and north of Winchester. A misunderstood order tangled one Union infantry corps in its own wagon train and caused the attack to falter. But with superb (and profane) battlefield leadership, Sheridan straightened out the mess. While his infantry slogged forward in a savage firefight, two divisions of Union cavalry thundered down on the Confederate left in an old-fashioned mounted charge. The Confederate infantry broke and fled southward. “We have just sent them whirling through Winchester,” wired Sheridan’s chief of staff, “and we are after them tomorrow.”36

  Lincoln telegraphed his congratulations to Sheridan for “your great victory. God bless you all, officers and men. Strongly inclined to come up and see you.”37 Whether Lincoln intended the final sentence seriously is impossible to say. He may have wondered if Sheridan would really go “after them tomorrow.” With so many of his previous commanders in Virginia, “tomorrow” had meant maybe in a few days, maybe never. The commander in chief may have wanted to “come up” in order to hold Sheridan to his promise. He did not go, and he need not have worried. Sheridan did go after them without letup and attacked again at Fisher’s Hill, twenty miles south of Winchester, on September 22. Once more the Federals—infantry this time—struck the Confederate left and sent the Rebels whirling south another sixty miles.

  Sheridan then proceeded to carry out Grant’s earlier orders to consume or destroy Confederate resources in the Shenandoah Valley so thoroughly “that crows flying over it for the balance of the season will have to carry their provender with them.” By October 7, Sheridan reported, “I have destroyed over 2,000 barns filled with wheat, hay, and farming implements; over seventy mills filled with flour and wheat; have driven in front of the army over 4,000 head of stock, and have killed and issued to the troops no less than 3,000 sheep.” This was just the beginning. By the time he was done, said Sheridan, “the Valley, from Winchester up to Staunton, ninety-two miles, will have little in it for man or beast.”38

  Before he could complete the task, however, Early struck back. In mid-October, Sheridan prepared to return the Sixth Corps to Grant and went personally to Washington to confer about future plans for his own army now that—as he thought—Early was no longer a threat. But even as Sheridan returned to Winchester on the evening of October 18, Early’s troops were moving into position for a surprise dawn attack at Cedar Creek, fifteen miles south of Winchester. The assault was an initial success, wrecking two Union corps and winning what appeared to be a smashing victory by noon. But when Sheridan in Winchester heard the guns he jumped on his famous horse, Rienzi, and galloped to the battlefield. His extraordinary energy and charisma enabled him to reorganize and inspire his broken divisions and to lead them in a devastating counterattack that all but destroyed Early’s army. An apparent Union defeat that might have neutralized Sheridan’s earlier victories and even jeopardized Lincoln’s reelection was turned into one of the most decisive victories of the war that virtually assured the president’s political triumph three weeks later. No one appreciated Sheridan’s achievements more than Lincoln himself, who again telegraphed the general “my own personal admiration and gratitude, for the month’s operations in the Shenandoah Valley; and especially for the splendid work of October 19.”39

  ELECTIONS ARE NEVER over until they are over, however. Despite the shot in the arm that Sherman’s and Sheridan’s victories gave Lincoln’s prospects, some potential dangers remained. The Democrats played every race card they could think of, including the charge that the “Black Republicans” were the party of “miscegenation” (a new word they invented for this campaign). They illustrated this canard with crude cartoons portraying black men kissing white women in the “millennium of abolitionism” to be ushered in by Lincoln’s reelection.

  One race issue that directly involved Lincoln’s functions as commander in chief was the prisoner exchange controversy. The Democratic platform denounced the administration’s “shameful disregard” of “our fellow-citizens who now are, and long have been, prisoners of war in a suffering condition.”40 The breakdown in the prisoner exchange cartel had piled tens of thousands of captives into such prisons as Andersonville in Georgia, Elmira in New York, and dozens of others in almost every state. Overcrowding, disease, malnutrition, and mental depression caused the prisoner death toll to soar alarmingly, especially in Southern prisons.

  The Lincoln administration came under tremendous pressure to resume exchanges despite the Confederacy’s continued refusal to exchange black prisoners who had been slaves. Many Union prisoners at Andersonville and elsewhere signed petitions to Lincoln pleading for a renewal of exchanges. Sensing an opportunity for favorable propaganda, Confederate officials allowed delegations of prisoners to carry these petitions to Washington. Prisoner diaries at Andersonville included many entries expressing bitterness toward their own government: “What can the Government be thinking of to let soldiers die in this filthy place?” “We are losing all trust in old Abe.” “It appears that the federal government thinks more of a few hundred niggers than of the thirty thousand whites here in bondage.”41 Local Republican leaders warned the administration that many Union men “will work and vote against the President, because they think sympathy with a few negroes, also captured, is the cause of a refusal” to exchange.42

  Lincoln could have renewed the exchanges if he had been willing to accept Confederate conditions. But he was no more willing to do that than he was to drop emancipation as a condition of peace—for the same reason: “why should [black soldiers] give their lives for us, with full notice of our purpose to betray them?”43 On August 27 the Union exchange commissioner wrote to his Confederate counterpart that the United States was prepared to renew exchanges if the Confederates agreed to make no discrimination. The sufferings of prisoners, he declared, “would move me to consent to anything to procure their exchange, except to barter away the honor and the faith of the United States, which has been so solemnly pledged to the colored soldiers in its ranks. Consistently with national faith and justice we cannot relinquish that position.”44

  The Confederate answer came from General Lee a few weeks later. He proposed to Grant an exchange of prisoners captured by each side in a Union attack and Confederate counterattack ten miles southeast of Richmond on September 28–30. Several black regiments participated, and some of their men were captured. Grant agreed to the exchange so long as the black soldiers were included. But Lee replied that “negroes belonging to our citizens are not considered subjects of exchange and were not included in my proposition.” That was unfortunate, responded Grant, because the U.S. “Government is bound to secure to all persons received into her armies the rights due to soldiers.” Lee’s refusal to honor this obligation therefore “induces me to decline making the exchanges you ask.”45

  Union captives in Southern prison camps could not vote in the presidential election, of course, but most other soldiers could. By 1864 all Northern states except the three whose legislatures were controlled by Democrats—Illinois, Indiana, and New Jersey—had provided for soldiers to cast absentee ballots. Those three exceptions seemed to indicate that Democrats knew quite well which way most soldiers would vote. Nevertheless the nomination of McClellan encouraged many in the party to anticipate that his popularity might garner a majority of the soldier vote—at least in the Army of the Potomac. This turned out to be a false hope. By 1864, if not earlier, Lincoln was personally more popular with soldiers than McClellan—or indeed perhaps any general. The president’s common touch, his frequent visits (often with his wife) to sick and wounded soldiers in Washington hospitals, his empathy with these citizens in uniform that manifested itself by mitigating the severity of regular-army punitive discipline and commuting many court-martial death sentences for desertion, and his image as a father figure to ma
ny soldiers who called him, affectionately, Father Abraham or Old Abe, won him widespread respect among soldiers.46

  Even more important for many soldiers was what they thought the two parties stood for in 1864. The Republican policy was No Peace Without Victory. The War Failure plank of the Democratic platform seemed to mean peace at any price—even the price of a dishonorable peace. Were all their sacrifices to be in vain? asked many soldiers. “To ellect McClellan would be to undo all that we have don in the past four years,” wrote a Michigan corporal. “Old Abe is slow but sure, he will accept nothing but an unconditional surrender.” Another soldier insisted that “I can not vote for one thing and fight for another.”47 A New York officer could not see how “any soldier can vote for such a man, nominated on a platform which acknowledges that we are whipped.” A Connecticut soldier thought “there are a good many soldiers who would vote for McClellan but they cannot go Vallandigham.”48 A lieutenant from New York who had been a lifelong Democrat repudiated his party. “I had rather stay out here a lifetime (much as I dislike it),” he wrote to one of McClellan’s prominent supporters, “than consent to a division of our country…. We all want peace, but none any but an honorable one.”49

  When the votes were counted, Lincoln won 78 percent of the soldier votes in the states that tabulated them separately. The percentage was probably similar in states that lumped those votes with the civilian tally. The president’s civilian-vote majority was about 53 percent. He would have been reelected without the soldier vote. But the most impressive thing about the 1864 election was that the men who would have to do the fighting and dying had voted overwhelmingly for their commander in chief to help him finish the job.