Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief

by James M. McPherson

  That general soon justified the president’s faith in spectacular fashion. All the efforts to get at Vicksburg by tributary waterways having failed, Grant decided to have Porter’s gunboats and transports run the batteries on the big river itself. The soldiers would build roads and causeways down the west bank to rendezvous with the fleet and cross to the east bank somewhere below Vicksburg. Despite Sherman’s skepticism, it worked. The fleet ran the batteries on the night of April 17 with what Grant and Porter considered acceptable losses. While cavalry commander Benjamin Grierson led a diversionary raid through central Mississippi, and Sherman feinted another attack on the bluffs north of Vicksburg, Grant crossed two-thirds of his army (soon followed by Sherman’s corps) forty miles downriver on April 30.

  Halleck and Lincoln wanted Grant to unite his army with General Banks’s Army of the Gulf for a joint attack on Port Hudson, followed by a combined attack on Vicksburg, or vice versa. In such a case Banks would outrank Grant and take command. But the two hundred river miles between the two armies and the logistical nightmare of trying to unite and supply them—plus, probably, Grant’s disinclination to yield command of the enterprise to Banks—prevented any joint effort.22 After crossing the Mississippi, Grant cut loose from the river. His troops lived mainly off the land for the next three weeks until they could fight their way back to Vicksburg and make contact again with their riverborne supplies. During those three weeks, Grant’s men marched 130 miles, fought and won five battles against separate forces that, if combined, would have been nearly as large as Grant’s own, and penned the Confederates up in the Vicksburg defenses.

  Lincoln had finally found a general who could march his army as fast and light as the enemy. The president was delighted by a tongue-in-cheek letter he received from Elihu Washburne, who traveled with Grant for part of the campaign. “I am afraid Grant will have to be reproved for want of style,” wrote Washburne. “On this whole march for five days he has had neither a horse nor an orderly or servant, a blanket or overcoat or clean shirt, or even a sword…. His entire baggage consists of a tooth-brush.” After driving the enemy into the Vicksburg fortifications, Grant ordered attacks on May 19 and 22. They were repulsed, but the Federals tightened their grip and Vicksburg’s surrender seemed only a matter of time. “Whether Gen. Grant shall or shall not consummate the capture of Vicksburg,” wrote Lincoln on May 26, “his campaign from the beginning of this month up to the twenty second day of it, is one of the most brilliant in the world.”23

  LINCOLN NEEDED THIS good news from Mississippi because events on other fronts—especially the political front—were not encouraging. In January 1863 the president told Senator Charles Sumner that he feared “‘the fire in the rear’—meaning the Democracy, especially at the Northwest—more than our military chances.”24 The strength of the antiwar Copperheads varied in inverse ratio to Union military fortunes. Because military success was a scarce commodity in the first four months of 1863, Copperheads flourished as never before. Hostility to the Emancipation Proclamation fueled their opposition to the war. Enactment of a national conscription law in March 1863 gave the antiwar movement an added impulse.

  The leader of the Peace Democrats (as they preferred to call themselves) was Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio, who hoped to become governor of that third-largest Northern state in 1863. Vallandigham delivered a major antiwar address in the House of Representatives on January 14, 1863, and followed it with a speaking tour that set forth the principal Copperhead themes. The Lincoln administration was fighting not for Union, he charged, but for abolition. And what was the result? “Let the dead at Fredericksburg and Vicksburg answer.” The Confederacy could never be conquered; the only trophies of this unconstitutional war were “defeat, debt, taxation, sepulchres…the suspension of habeas corpus, the violation…of freedom of the press and of speech…which have made this country one of the worst despotisms on earth for the past twenty months.” What could be done? “Stop fighting. Make an armistice…. Withdraw your army from the seceded States.” Start negotiations for reunion on the basis of compromise with the South. Such a settlement would preserve slavery, of course, but Vallandigham had no sympathy for the “fanaticism and hypocrisy” of those who objected. “I see more of barbarism and sin, a thousand times, in the continuance of this war…and the enslavement of the white race by debt and taxes and arbitrary power” than in black slavery.25

  Copperhead newspapers denounced the conscription act and urged resistance to the enrollment of those who were eligible for the draft. Enrollment officers in many localities were assaulted and several were murdered. Newspapers and some local Democratic leaders also encouraged desertion. “You perceive that it is to emancipate slaves…that you are used as soldiers,” declared an Iowa newspaper. “Are you, as soldiers, bound by patriotism, duty or loyalty to fight in such a cause?” A father wrote to his son in the Sixteenth Illinois Infantry a letter that found its way into newspapers: “Come home, if you have to desert, you will be protected—the people are so enraged that you need not be alarmed if you hear of the whole of our Northwest killing off the abolitionists.”26

  These events provided the context for the civil liberties cause célèbre of the war. After General Burnside’s departure from the Army of the Potomac, Lincoln appointed him commander of the Department of the Ohio, embracing states bordering that river. In April 1863 Burnside issued an order stating that anyone who committed “expressed or implied” treason would be subject to trial by a military tribunal (authorized by Lincoln’s executive order of September 24, 1862). Courting a martyrdom to advance his quest for Ohio’s governorship, Clement Vallandigham lost no time in testing Burnside’s order. On May 1 he made a speech at Mount Vernon, Ohio, that rang all the changes on the unconstitutionality of the war, emancipation, the draft, suspension of habeas corpus, and the tyranny of the administration. Burnside promptly had Vallandigham arrested. A military court convicted him and sentenced him to prison for the rest of the war.

  These proceedings produced cries of outrage from Northern Democrats and expressions of anxiety even among Republicans. Though surprised and embarrassed by Vallandigham’s arrest, Lincoln felt he had no choice but to back Burnside. “All the cabinet regretted the necessity of arresting” the Ohio Democrat, Lincoln wired Burnside, “some perhaps, doubting, that there was a real necessity for it—but, being done, all were for seeing you through with it.”27 In an effort to quell the uproar and tarnish Vallandigham’s martyrdom, the president commuted his sentence from imprisonment to banishment to the Confederacy. Federal troops escorted Vallandigham under flag of truce to Confederate lines in Tennessee. Ohio Democrats nominated him in absentia for governor. Vallandigham slipped out of the Confederacy on a blockade-runner and settled in Windsor, Ontario, from where he conducted his campaign for governor.

  Democratic leaders in Ohio and New York addressed protests to the president in the form of resolutions accusing him of upholding the conviction of Vallandigham “for no other reason than words addressed to a public meeting, in criticism of the course of the Administration.” Such action was “a palpable violation of the Constitution,” which “abrogates the right of the people to assemble and discuss the affairs of government, the liberty of speech and of the press, the right of trial by jury and the privilege of habeas corpus…aimed at the rights of every citizen of the North.”28

  These resolutions gave Lincoln an opening to take his case to the Northern people. On several occasions during the war he used the medium of public letters for this purpose, as a modern president uses a prime-time speech or news conference. On June 12 and 28 Lincoln wrote such letters to the New York and Ohio Democrats. He denied that Vallandigham had been arrested “for no other reason than words addressed to a public meeting.” On the contrary, it was “because he was laboring, with some effect, to prevent the raising of troops [and] to encourage desertions…. He was damaging the army, upon the existence and vigor of which the life of the nation depends.” As commander in chief Lincoln had
the constitutional power and duty to preserve that life. Suspension of the writ of habeas corpus was a vital weapon in that effort. The commander in chief also had the authority to order military trials in war zones, he claimed. Although Vallandigham had been arrested in Ohio, not in the South, Lincoln insisted that the whole country was a war zone. Draft resistance and murders of enrollment officers took place in the North. Civil courts were “utterly incompetent” to stop these activities, said Lincoln. In some places Copperhead influence was so strong that no jury would convict those who tried to sabotage the war effort. This “clear, flagrant, and giant rebellion,” wrote Lincoln, reached into all corners of the country, where “under cover of ‘liberty of speech,’ ‘liberty of the press,’ and ‘habeas corpus,’” the enemy “hoped to keep on foot amongst us a most efficient corps of spies, informers, suppliers, and aiders and abettors of their cause.”

  A significant part of the impact of these letters came from two colloquial illustrations that demonstrated Lincoln’s gift for explaining complex issues in easily understood terms. The official army punishment for desertion was death. (Lincoln spent many hours reviewing such cases and finding reasons to commute death sentences.) Referring to Vallandigham’s alleged encouragement of desertion, Lincoln asked: “Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, whilst I must not touch the hair of a wily agitator who induces him to desert?” Almost as widely quoted was a piquant metaphor that challenged the protesters’ assertion that wartime restrictions on civil liberties would create a fatal precedent for similar restrictions in peacetime. He could no more believe this, wrote Lincoln, “than I am able to believe that a man could contract so strong an appetite for emetics during temporary illness, as to persist in feeding upon them during the remainder of his healthy life.”29

  These letters, published in hundreds of Northern newspapers, were enormously effective. Half a million copies of the letter to New York Democrats were also published as a pamphlet. The “wily agitator” image did much to discredit Vallandigham and his fellows in the court of public opinion. An official judicial body also vindicated the president. Vallandigham’s lawyers had appealed to the federal circuit court in Cincinnati for his release on a writ of habeas corpus. The judge refused and endorsed Lincoln’s understanding of his constitutional powers as commander in chief. “It is not claimed that in time of war the President is above the Constitution,” ruled the court. “His acts in this capacity must be limited to such as are deemed essential to the protection of the Government and the Constitution.” And who was to decide what was essential? “The President is guided solely by his own judgment, and is amenable only for an abuse of his authority by impeachment.”30

  THE TIMING OF Lincoln’s public letters turned out to be fortuitous. Within a few days of their publication Union victories at Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Port Hudson lifted the pall of Northern gloom and demoralization that had fueled protests against the president’s “despotism.”

  When Lincoln visited the Army of the Potomac in the second week of April, he discussed with General Hooker various operational options for a campaign against the Army of Northern Virginia lying across the Rappahannock River. The president wrote a memorandum embodying the main point he wanted Hooker to keep in mind: “Our prime object is the enemies’ army in front of us, and is not with, or about Richmond.”31 They had not decided whether Hooker should cross the river beyond the Confederate left or right flank before Lincoln returned to Washington. On April 11, however, Hooker sent the president a detailed plan of operations. His cavalry would raid Lee’s communications between Fredericksburg and Richmond. At the same time part of the infantry would feint an attack just below Fredericksburg, while the rest marched upriver to cross at fords to come in on the enemy rear. If all went well Lee would either be crushed between the two wings of Union infantry—each almost equal in number to the Confederate infantry—or have to retreat toward the raiding Union cavalry, enabling Hooker to pitch into the enemy rear as the cavalry delayed them in front.32

  Before he had left the army on April 11, Lincoln had given Hooker one other piece of advice. Well aware that at Antietam and Fredericksburg at least two corps had scarcely fired a shot, the president said: “In your next fight, put in all your men.”33 If Hooker had done so, events in the next few weeks might have been quite different.

  Hooker’s operation began flawlessly. Union cavalry tore up Confederate railroads, but the damage was limited and soon repaired. The flanking infantry successfully crossed the Rappahannock and was advancing on the Confederate rear at Fredericksburg by May 1. But Lee detached Jackson’s corps to block the advance, and Hooker inexplicably pulled back to a defensive position near the crossroads mansion and outbuildings called Chancellorsville. From then on he lost the initiative to Lee, who daringly sent Jackson on a flank march that crushed the Union right on May 2, drove into the center on May 3, and forced the left back across the river on May 4. Hooker gave up and recrossed the whole army to the north bank of the Rappahannock during a driving rainstorm on May 6. Although the Battle of Chancellorsville cost Lee Stonewall Jackson from a friendly fire wound that proved fatal, it was nevertheless a decisive Confederate victory—and a defeat not so much of the Army of the Potomac as of Hooker, who lost control of the battle. And contrary to Lincoln’s advice, he had not put in all of his men. Two of his seven corps and part of another stood virtually idle during the fighting.34

  Lincoln spent many anxious hours in the War Department telegraph office receiving fragmentary and contradictory information about the course of the battle. When word finally came on May 6 that the army had retreated across the river, the president’s face turned “ashen,” according to journalist Noah Brooks, who had become close to Lincoln. “Had a thunderbolt fallen upon the President he could not have been more overwhelmed…. Clasping his hands behind his back, he walked up and down the room, saying, ‘My God! my God! What will the country say! What will the country say!’”35

  Lincoln departed immediately to confer with Hooker at army headquarters. That general blamed others for his failure: Gen. Oliver Howard and his Eleventh Corps, which had been routed by Jackson’s May 2 flank attack; Gen. John Sedgwick, commander of the Sixth Corps, which Hooker said had failed to fight its way through from Fredericksburg to join the main army at Chancellorsville; and cavalry commander George Stoneman, whose raid, said Hooker, had been feeble and ineffective. Most of the corps commanders, by contrast, considered Hooker responsible, but they evidently conveyed little of their disillusionment directly to Lincoln during his May 7 visit. The president, according to Fifth Corps commander George Meade, said that while the battle’s outcome was “more serious and injurious than any previous act of the war,” he nevertheless added that “he did not blame anyone.” Lincoln wanted Hooker to begin a new movement against the enemy as soon as possible, “to supersede the bad moral effect of the recent one.” Hooker had been deeply depressed after the battle; he told Meade that he “almost wished he had never been born.” But “since seeing the President…he seems in better spirits,” wrote Meade, “and I suppose, unless some strong pressure is brought to bear from external sources, he will not be disturbed.”36

  Strong pressure, however, was brought during the following week. The senior corps commander, Gen. Darius Couch, said he would no longer serve under Hooker and requested a transfer. Other generals made their dissatisfaction known indirectly to Lincoln. Pennsylvania governor Andrew Curtin talked with the three corps commanders from his state, who told him they had lost confidence in Hooker. Curtin passed this information along to Lincoln. By May 13 the president was aware that the brewing discontent might fatally undermine any new offensive by Hooker. He summoned the general to Washington and told him bluntly, in person and in writing, that “it does not now appear probable to me that you can gain any thing by an early renewal of the attempt to cross the Rappahannock. I therefore shall not complain, if you do no more, for a time, than to keep the enemy at bay.” Lincoln also informed Hooker th
at “I have some painful intimations that some of your corps and Division Commanders are not giving you their entire confidence.” If he wanted to continue commanding the army, Lincoln implied, he must rebuild that confidence.37

  A consensus among the anti-Hooker generals favored sending a petition to Lincoln to appoint Meade as Hooker’s replacement. Meade refused to go along with the idea, so it died. But the pressure on Lincoln to change the command continued. Halleck had never liked Hooker, and Stanton now apparently sided with Halleck in urging Hooker’s removal. The president evidently spoke with Couch and with Gen. John Reynolds, two of Hooker’s strongest critics, and asked them if they would accept the command. They declined. Lincoln seems to have been irritated by his conversations with these generals, who were free with their criticism but did not wish to follow through by accepting the responsibility of command. If that was the case, said Lincoln, he would stick with Hooker: “The President said he was not disposed to throw away a gun because it missed fire once; that he would pick the lock and try again.”38 Even more irritating to Lincoln was pressure from several quarters to restore McClellan to command. More than anything else, perhaps, this lobbying for McClellan put the president’s back up and made him determined to give Hooker another chance.39