Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief

by James M. McPherson

  The principal strategic success after Gettysburg and Vicksburg in 1863 came in East Tennessee. Both the Union Army of the Cumberland and Confederate Army of Tennessee had been so badly cut up in the Battle of Stones River that neither could do much through the rest of the winter. Union infantry considerably exceeded the enemy’s in numbers, but Gen. Braxton Bragg’s Confederate cavalry carried out punishing raids against Gen. William S. Rosecrans’s communications. Northern cavalry trying to counter Rebel horsemen like Nathan Bedford Forrest and John Hunt Morgan always seemed to arrive at the scene of destruction too late. In February 1863 Lincoln had addressed Rosecrans on this subject. The president recognized that “in no other way does the enemy give us so much trouble” as with these raids. To have Union cavalry always acting on the defensive did little to stop them. Thus Lincoln urged Rosecrans to “organize proper forces, and make counter-raids” that would accomplish the dual objectives of disrupting enemy supplies and forcing Confederate cavalry to leave off their raids to combat Union horsemen.5

  Lincoln’s suggestion bore fruit. In April one of Rosecrans’s brigade commanders, Col. Abel Streight, led a raid by seventeen hundred men mounted on mules (supposedly hardier than horses and requiring less forage) against the railroad between Atlanta and Chattanooga. Forrest’s troopers finally caught up with and captured most of the raiders. But Streight’s effort had one beneficial if perhaps unintended consequence. Benjamin Grierson’s mounted raid through Mississippi took place at the same time, providing an essential diversion in aid of Grant’s movements against Vicksburg. Because Forrest was pursuing Streight, Grierson was unopposed by the Confederacy’s best cavalry commander.

  But cavalry raids, however spectacular, were not going to achieve Lincoln’s goal of liberating East Tennessee. That was the task of Rosecrans’s infantry. As the weeks of fine spring weather went by and Rosecrans did not advance against the enemy defenses twenty-five miles south of Murfreesboro, Lincoln again became impatient. In response to importunate telegrams from Halleck, Rosecrans stubbornly insisted that he could not move until everything was ready. On June 11 Halleck warned Rosecrans of the president’s “great dissatisfaction” with “your inactivity.” Five days later the general-in-chief demanded of Rosecrans: “Is it your intention to make an immediate movement forward? A definite answer, yes or no, is required.” In reply Rosecrans bristled: “If immediate means tonight or tomorrow, no. If it means as soon as all things are ready, say five days, yes.”6

  Rosecrans was almost as good as his word. Seven days later, on June 23, he moved. Once started, he maneuvered his sixty-three thousand men with speed and skill despite incessant rain. The forty-five thousand Confederates held a strong defensive position at four gaps in the foothills of the Cumberland Mountains. Feinting with his cavalry and one infantry corps toward the western gaps, Rosecrans sent three corps through and around the other gaps with such force and swiftness that the Confederates were knocked aside or flanked almost before they knew what had hit them. Driven back fifteen miles to Tullahoma, Bragg received another rude surprise when a Union brigade of mounted infantry, armed with new seven-shot Spencer rifles, which had led the advance through Hoover’s Gap, got around to the Confederate rear and threatened their rail lifeline. Once again Bragg fell back, this time all the way to Chattanooga.

  Lincoln could take some credit for the success of the brigade armed with Spencer repeaters. He had always been interested in new technologies. In 1849 Lincoln had patented a device for lifting steamboats over shoals.7 (He is the only president of the United States to have held a patent.) In the 1850s he occasionally delivered a lecture called “Discoveries and Inventions.” During the war Lincoln functioned at times as chief of ordnance, ordering the hidebound Brig. Gen. James Ripley, who officially held that position until the president forced his retirement in September 1863, to test new weapons offered by inventors. Some of the latter were crackpots, and some of Lincoln’s subordinates complained that he wasted too much time with these men. On the other hand the president helped pave the way for the navy’s contract with John Ericsson to build the Monitor and for the army to try Thaddeus Lowe’s observation balloons. Lincoln personally test-fired breech loading and repeating rifles on the open ground south of the White House. On more than one occasion he overrode General Ripley and ordered the Ordnance Bureau to purchase the best of these—especially the seven-shot repeating rifles and carbines invented by Connecticut Yankee Christopher Spencer. These guns turned out to be the best shoulder weapons of the war. The carbines gave Union cavalry a significant advantage in the last fifteen months of the war. Infantry regiments armed with Spencer rifles gained a fearsome reputation among enemy units.8

  The brigade of mounted infantry that rendered such good service in Rosecrans’s Tullahoma campaign was commanded by Col. John T. Wilder, a young iron manufacturer from Indiana who had used his personal credit to buy the Spencers for his brigade. (The government later reimbursed Wilder and his men.) They earned the name “the Lightning Brigade” in this campaign, and pioneered new tactics to make the best use of their new weapons. Without Lincoln’s earlier personal support for Spencer, however, there might not have been a Lightning Brigade and 85,000 Union soldiers equipped with Spencer carbines or rifles by the end of the war.

  In little more than a week the Army of the Cumberland forced Bragg’s Army of Tennessee back seventy miles almost into Georgia at the cost of only 560 Union casualties. On July 7 Secretary of War Stanton telegraphed Rosecrans news of the great victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, and added: “You and your noble army now have the chance to give the finishing blow to the rebellion. Will you neglect the chance?” A piqued Rosecrans wired back: “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.”9

  The Rebels had been driven from Middle Tennessee, to be sure. But the enemy still controlled East Tennessee. Lincoln urged the victorious Rosecrans to keep going. But the methodical general insisted that he must secure his communications back through Nashville to Louisville and bring up enough supplies to sustain a further advance over difficult terrain. Rosecrans also wanted his left flank protected by a simultaneous advance toward Knoxville by Ambrose Burnside’s small Army of the Ohio. These reasons for not moving immediately gave Lincoln another case of déjà vu. The second half of July and the first half of August went by as increasingly urgent orders from Halleck flew over the wires to Rosecrans and testy replies flew back. “The patience of the authorities here has been completely exhausted,” Halleck told the general. “It has been said that you are as inactive as was General Buell, and the pressure for your removal has been almost as strong.”10

  Rosecrans did not have to be a mind reader to know who was the principal one of “the authorities here” or where the pressure was coming from. On August 1 the general wrote directly to Lincoln explaining the necessity for his prolonged preparations. In reply Lincoln assured him of his continued “kind feeling and confidence in you.” The president said that Halleck had probably overstated his “dissatisfaction.” Nevertheless Lincoln asked Rosecrans a couple of pointed questions in response to the general’s explanations about getting up supplies and his shortage of horses. “Do you not consume supplies as fast as you get them forward” even when you are sitting still? And what happened to all those thousands of horses the quartermaster general sent you? “Do not misunderstand,” the president concluded. “I am not casting blame on you…. I am not watching you with an evil eye.”11

  Rosecrans was probably not convinced. He delayed another week but finally moved on August 16. As before, he advanced quickly and cleverly once he got started. He feinted with three brigades toward the Tennessee River crossings above Chattanooga, and then crossed most of the army at several places below the city. Bewildered by “the popping out of rats from so many holes,” Bragg discovered that his defense
s at Chattanooga had been turned by the appearance of Union divisions south of the city.12 As these divisions began to traverse the rugged mountains toward Bragg’s lifeline, the Western and Atlantic Railroad, the Confederates evacuated Chattanooga on September 9. Burnside’s army had advanced in tandem with Rosecrans and had captured Knoxville a week earlier. Two years after he had hoped his armies would come to the rescue of East Tennessee Unionists, Lincoln finally saw that hope fulfilled.

  It was one thing for Union armies to get there; it was quite another to stay there in the face of a determined Confederate counterattack. Jefferson Davis decided to reinforce Bragg with two of Longstreet’s divisions from the Army of Northern Virginia. Part of these troops arrived over the South’s worn-out railroad system in time to take part in the crucial second day of the Battle of Chickamauga, September 20. Longstreet personally directed an attack through a gap in the Union line caused by a mistaken order. Wilder’s Lightning Brigade punished the attackers with its rapid-firing Spencers. The Confederate assault nevertheless burst through the Union right and sent one-third of the Army of the Cumberland—including Rosecrans—flying back to Chattanooga in an apparent rout. But Gen. George Thomas stayed on the field with the rest of the army, organized a new defense, and stopped the Confederate advance. For his superb battlefield leadership Thomas earned fame as “the Rock of Chickamauga.”

  Nevertheless it was a serious Union defeat. The army was virtually besieged in Chattanooga by the Confederates, who occupied Missionary Ridge on the east and Lookout Mountain to the southwest. The only supply route open to Rosecrans was an almost impassable road over rugged Walden’s Ridge to the north.

  On the morning of September 21 Lincoln walked into John Hay’s bedroom before the secretary was up, “& sitting down on my bed said ‘Well, Rosecrans has been whipped, as I feared. I have feared it for several days. I believe I feel trouble in the air before it comes.’”13 The question was what to do about it. Lincoln again haunted the telegraph office and fired off dispatches taking direct control of the situation. To Burnside at Knoxville he sent orders to reinforce Rosecrans in Chattanooga. When he learned that Burnside had earlier sent most of his force in the opposite direction to attack guerrillas at Jonesboro, Lincoln lost his temper. “Damn Jonesboro!” he exclaimed. He sent another telegram ordering Burnside to forget Jonesboro and go to Rosecrans. When he learned that Burnside had moved farther in the wrong direction on the twenty-third, the president composed an angry telegram to Burnside stating that the general’s “incomprehensible” action “makes me doubt whether I am awake or dreaming.”14

  After getting this outburst off his chest, Lincoln decided not to send the telegram. And when it became clear that Burnside could not take his whole force to Chattanooga without giving up Knoxville, Lincoln ordered him to hold Knoxville without fail and to send Rosecrans whatever troops he could spare. As matters turned out, Burnside could spare none, so reinforcements for Rosecrans would have to come from elsewhere.15

  On the evening of September 23 Lincoln rode out to his summer cottage at the Soldiers’ Home hoping for his first good sleep in several nights. After he went to bed he was awakened by John Hay, who had ridden out “through a splendid moonlight” with a message from Stanton asking Lincoln to come back to the War Department for an emergency midnight conference. A “considerably disturbed” president hurriedly dressed and returned with Hay.16 Attending the meeting were Lincoln, Stanton, Halleck, Seward, Chase, and two War Department officials. Stanton proposed that two corps be detached from the Army of the Potomac and sent by rail to reinforce Rosecrans. They were not doing anything worthwhile in Virginia, said Stanton, and might as well go where they would be useful. It would be a trip of 1,200 miles by the routes they would have to take. Stanton had consulted railroad officials and said that twenty thousand men could reach Nashville in five days and Chattanooga in a few more. Mindful of previous movements by the sluggish Army of the Potomac, Lincoln responded skeptically that they could hardly get from Culpeper to Washington in five days!

  In the end Stanton prevailed. The movement began September 24. It went like clockwork, a marvel of organization and coordination between the War Department and several railroads. Eleven days after the start, more than twenty thousand men of the Eleventh and Twelfth Corps arrived at the railhead near Chattanooga with their equipment, artillery, and horses after a trip of 1,233 miles through the Appalachians and across the unbridged Ohio River twice. It was the longest and fastest movement of such a large body of troops before the twentieth century.17

  Sherman was also heading toward Chattanooga from Vicksburg with four divisions, repairing the railroad as they went. But there was no point in putting these troops into Chattanooga when the soldiers and horses already there were on starvation rations. Rosecrans seemed incapable of coping with the situation. After reading Charles Dana’s dispatches from Chattanooga reporting Rosecrans’s erratic and apathetic behavior, Lincoln commented that the general was “confused and stunned like a duck hit on the head.”18

  Rosecrans would have to go. The commander in chief, however, did not want to remove him before the Ohio gubernatorial election on October 13. Rosecrans remained popular in his home state, especially among War Democrats, whose support for the Union candidate against Clement L. Vallandigham Lincoln considered essential. The president was nervous about this election and a similar contest in Pennsylvania, where a Peace Democrat also challenged the Republican incumbent. Military strategy for dealing with the crisis in Chattanooga would have to take a temporary backseat to the national strategy of electing war candidates in two of the nation’s three largest states. Lincoln told Gideon Welles that “he had more anxiety in regard to the election results” than “he had in 1860 when he was elected.”19 He need not have worried. The Union/Republican candidates in both states were elected, though the outcome in Pennsylvania was close. In Ohio, however, Vallandigham was buried by a one-hundred-thousand-vote majority for his opponent, who won 94 percent of the soldier vote.

  Three days later Lincoln took decisive action. He combined all military departments between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River into a new Military Division of the Mississippi and placed Grant in command of it. He ordered Grant to Chattanooga to sort out the situation there and authorized him to replace Rosecrans with George Thomas if he judged it necessary. Grant did; Thomas became commander of the Army of the Cumberland on October 18 and vowed to “hold the town until we starve.”20 It did not come to that, however. Five days later Grant arrived in Chattanooga and put in motion an operation planned by Thomas to open a supply line from a secure railhead and steamboat landing west of Chattanooga across a pontoon bridge out of range of Confederate artillery on Lookout Mountain.

  Lincoln dealt with the potential political fallout from Rosecrans’s removal with a deftness that demonstrated the benefits of having a commander in chief who was also a canny politician. The Union commander in Missouri, Brig. Gen. John Schofield, had made himself persona non grata with the radical faction in the savage internecine political conflicts in that state. Lincoln worked out a deal with Missouri’s two senators whereby they would support Senate confirmation of Schofield’s promotion to major general and corps command in a different theater to make room for Rosecrans as department commander in Missouri. This move “will go far to heal the Missouri difficulty,” said Lincoln. Equally important, “I find it scarcely less than indispensable for me to do something for Gen. Rosecrans…. In a purely military point of view it may be that none of these things is indispensable; but in another aspect, scarcely less important, they would give great relief.”21

  During the month after Grant’s arrival in Chattanooga on October 23, the rejuvenated Army of the Cumberland was reinforced by the twenty thousand soldiers transferred from the Army of the Potomac and by seventeen thousand with Sherman from the Army of the Tennessee. For the first time in the war, troops from the three principal Union armies fought together. In a notable series of attacks on November 23–25
in which the Army of the Cumberland avenged Chickamauga, Grant’s army group routed the Army of Tennessee and drove it twenty miles into Georgia. Four days later Burnside’s Army of the Ohio decisively beat back a Confederate effort to recapture Knoxville. East Tennessee remained secure for the Union. “I wish to tender you,” Lincoln wrote to Grant, “and all under your command, my more than thanks—my profoundest gratitude—for the skill, courage, and perseverance, with which you and they, over so great difficulties, have effected that important object. God bless you all.”22

  WHILE GRANT, Thomas, and Burnside were achieving this “important object,” the Army of the Potomac had accomplished little since Gettysburg. By the last week of July, Meade and Lee confronted each other across the Rappahannock River not far from where the Army of Northern Virginia had started north seven weeks earlier. Despite Lincoln’s statement to Gen. Oliver O. Howard on July 21 that Meade “has my confidence as a brave and skillful officer,” the president unburdened himself to Gideon Welles only five days later: “I have no faith that Meade will attack Lee…. I believe he can never have another as good opportunity as he has trifled away. Everything since has dragged with him. No I don’t believe he is going to fight.” Lincoln even considered appointing Grant to command the Army of the Potomac, but was dissuaded by Halleck and Charles A. Dana—with an assist from Grant, who did not want the job. “It would cause me more sadness than satisfaction to be ordered to the command of the Army of the Potomac,” wrote Grant on August 5. “Dissatisfaction would necessarily be produced by importing a General to Command an Army already supplied with those who have grown up, and been promoted, with it…. While I would disobey no order I should beg very hard to be excused before accepting that command.”23