Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief

by James M. McPherson

  Lincoln interpreted his reelection as evidence that “the purpose of the people” to “maintain the integrity of the Union, was never more firm, nor more nearly unanimous, than now.” Jefferson Davis had made it clear that no peace was possible without unconditional victory by one side or the other. “He does not attempt to deceive us. He affords us no excuse to deceive ourselves. He cannot voluntarily reaccept the Union; we cannot voluntarily yield it. Between him and us the issue is distinct, simple, and inflexible. It is an issue that can only be tried by war, and decided by victory.”50

  Davis accepted that challenge. He insisted that the Confederacy remained “as erect and defiant as ever. Nothing has changed in the purpose of its Government, in the indomitable valor of its troops, or in the unquenchable spirit of its people…. There is no military success of the enemy which can accomplish its destruction.”51 It was this last-ditch defiance that Gen. William T. Sherman set out to break in his famous march from Atlanta to the sea.

  SHERMAN’S FIRST VICTORY in that march was permission to make it. After losing Atlanta, Gen. John Bell Hood’s Army of Tennessee moved north along the Union army’s supply line, forcing Sherman to chase Hood with a large part of the army. The restless, voluble, impatient Union commander disliked this defensive role. He proposed a daring plan to cut loose from his supply line and march with sixty thousand veterans from Atlanta 285 miles to the coast, “smashing things to the sea.” To Grant’s objection that leaving Hood’s army in his rear would open Tennessee to invasion by the Rebels, Sherman responded that he would send George Thomas with sixty thousand men to Tennessee, more than enough to deal with Hood. “If I turn back now, the whole effect of my campaign will be lost,” Sherman wrote. “It will be a physical impossibility to protect the [rail]roads, now that Hood, Forrest, and Wheeler, and the whole batch of devils, are turned loose without home or habitation. By attempting to hold the roads, we will lose a thousand men monthly and will gain no result.”

  Sherman assured Grant that “I could cut a swath through Georgia to the sea, divide the Confederacy in two, and come up on the rear of Lee…. We cannot remain on the defensive…. I can make the march…. Instead of being on the defensive, I would be on the offensive.” In addition to destroying Confederate railroads and resources and consuming Southern food that would otherwise feed Confederate armies, the march would have a powerful psychological impact. “If we can march a well-appointed army right through [Jefferson Davis’s] territory it is a demonstration to the world, foreign and domestic, that we have a power which Davis cannot resist. This may not be war, but rather statesmanship.”52

  Lincoln appreciated the value of an offensive operation that was as much “statesmanship” as war. But the president was reluctant to approve the march so long as Hood’s army remained intact. And Lincoln also felt “much solicitude” about the potential danger to Sherman’s troops deep in enemy territory with no possibility of coming to their aid if they ran into trouble. “A misstep by General Sherman,” Lincoln feared, “might be fatal to his army.” Sherman finally persuaded Grant to approve the march, however, and Grant in turn assured Lincoln that Sherman’s veterans could handle anything the enemy could throw against them and that Thomas could handle Hood. Lincoln finally gave his approval, though still with misgivings. Grant then sent a brief message to Sherman: “Go as you propose.”53

  Sherman left Atlanta on November 15, and, as feared, Hood marched in the opposite direction into Tennessee. At the Battle of Franklin on November 30, part of Thomas’s army bloodied the invaders, killing or wounding no fewer than twelve Confederate generals and fifty-four regimental commanders. Hood kept right on going north, however, and arrived before Union defenses at Nashville on December 2. Six hundred miles away in Washington, the crippled condition of Hood’s army was not apparent. Instead his movements looked like Jubal Early’s raid to the outskirts of Washington the previous summer, which had had such a devastating effect on Northern opinion. Lincoln wondered why Thomas did not counterattack Hood. Stanton wired Grant that “the President feels solicitous about the disposition of General Thomas to [lie] in fortifications” instead of attacking. “This looks like the McClellan and Rosecrans strategy of do nothing and let the rebels raid the country.”54

  Grant reacted more emphatically than Lincoln expected. The general-in-chief had never fully appreciated Thomas’s qualities. The tall, portly general, whose nickname in the prewar army had been “Old Slow-Trot,” was a superb defensive commander—the Rock of Chickamauga. But Sherman had been critical of Thomas’s alleged sluggishness on the offense in the Atlanta campaign, and Grant had picked up on that criticism. In response to Lincoln’s expression of concern, Grant sent a series of increasingly urgent dispatches to Nashville ordering Thomas to attack. That general promised to do so as soon as his cavalry was remounted. Both Grant and Stanton expressed frustration. “Thomas seems unwilling to attack because it is ‘hazardous,’” wrote Stanton on December 7, “as if all war was anything but hazardous. If he waits for Wilson [James Wilson, the cavalry commander] to get ready, Gabriel will be blowing his last horn.”55

  Grant suggested that Thomas be replaced by Gen. John Schofield, his senior corps commander.56 Lincoln was taken aback. He had wanted Thomas to be energized, not relieved. The president admired Thomas for his steadfastness at Chickamauga and on other battlefields. He also appreciated the sacrifices that Thomas, a Virginian, had made to remain loyal to the Union—including ostracism by his family. Halleck conveyed to Grant the president’s hesitancy about removing Thomas, and Grant backed off. But when two more days went by without an attack, and then an ice storm delayed it further, Grant completely lost patience. He sent Gen. John Logan to Nashville to relieve Thomas unless he had launched his attack by the time Logan arrived. Upon further reflection Grant decided to follow Logan to Nashville himself. He stopped on the way in Washington to see Lincoln, who tried to talk him out of relieving Thomas. Grant insisted on going ahead, but before he could leave for Nashville a telegram arrived from Thomas stating that he had attacked and had the enemy on the run. Stanton rushed to the White House at midnight on December 15 with the news, which a “highly delighted” Lincoln, holding a candle, received in his nightshirt.57

  The next morning the president wired Thomas congratulations “for a magnificent beginning” and urged him to finish the job.58 Thomas did so with a crushing attack on December 16 that sent the enemy into headlong retreat. The Battle of Nashville was an even more decisive victory than Sheridan’s at Cedar Creek two months earlier. Having started his invasion of Tennessee with forty thousand men, Hood counted fewer than fifteen thousand by the time his retreat fetched up at Tupelo, Mississippi, in January. As a fighting force the Army of Tennessee had virtually ceased to exist.

  While the drama of General Thomas at Nashville was taking place, Sherman’s sixty thousand soldiers were cutting a swath of destruction fifty miles wide through the heart of Georgia. Once he left Atlanta, Sherman was not in telegraphic contact with the North for more than a month. The only information that reached Washington came from fragmentary and partisan reports in Southern newspapers that found their way across the lines. Lincoln continued to worry about Sherman. He told the general’s brother John that “I know what hole he went in at, but I can’t tell what hole he will come out of.” General Sherman emerged from his hole near Savannah in mid-December. The city’s Confederate defenders evacuated it before Sherman could attack them. The general sent Lincoln a jaunty telegram on December 22 (carried by ship to Fort Monroe for transmittal to Washington): “I beg to present to you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah with 150 heavy guns & plenty of ammunition & also about 25,000 bales of cotton.”59

  Lincoln received this message on Christmas Day. He sent Sherman a congratulatory letter similar to the one he had sent Grant after the capture of Vicksburg. “When you were about leaving Atlanta for the Atlantic coast, I was anxious, if not fearful,” the president confessed, “but feeling that you were the better judge, a
nd remembering that ‘nothing risked, nothing gained’ I did not interfere. Now, the undertaking being a success, the honor is all yours; for I believe none of us went farther than to acquiesce.” In conjunction with Thomas’s victory at Nashville, Sherman’s march “brings those who sat in darkness, to see a great light.”60

  Much of that light was shed by the destruction that Sherman’s “bummers” wreaked in Georgia. The general estimated the damage “at $100,000,000; at least $20,000,000 of which has inured to our advantage, and the remainder is simple waste and destruction.”61 When Sherman’s army marched north through South Carolina in February 1865, they destroyed even more property than in Georgia. Lincoln was a compassionate man, but like Sherman and Sheridan he had concluded that the devastation of Southern resources, even at the cost of civilian suffering, was necessary to overcome the rebellion. After all, he had warned Southerners back in July 1862 that he no longer intended to fight this war “with elder-stalk squirts charged with rose water.” In another metaphor he had pointed out that the longer the Confederates fought, the more eggs would be broken. Now, in early 1865, he switched metaphors again, telling a visitor to the White House that “Grant has the bear by the hind leg while Sherman takes off the hide.”62

  By 1865 many of the essential supplies for the Army of Northern Virginia came through Wilmington, North Carolina, the last port of any significance still available to blockade-runners. Grant had been slow to perceive the value of capturing Fort Fisher, a huge earthwork that protected the entrance to the Cape Fear River below Wilmington and kept Union blockaders at bay. But in the fall of 1864 Grant planned a joint army-navy campaign to capture the fort. To Grant’s annoyance, Benjamin Butler took personal command of the expedition by virtue of his seniority as head of the Department of Virginia and North Carolina. On Christmas Eve the largest naval fleet of the war began a two-day bombardment of the fort. Butler landed part of his troops the next day but decided that the shelling had not sufficiently damaged the fort and reembarked them again. For Grant this was the last straw. He asked for Butler’s removal, and with the election over, Lincoln immediately complied.63 The president told Grant and Adm. David D. Porter, commander of the fleet, to renew the attack. Grant organized a new expedition with the army troops commanded by Brig. Gen. Alfred Terry. This time the fleet bombardment on January 13–15 did major damage, and the infantry assault captured the fort on January 15.

  CONFEDERATE VICE PRESIDENT Alexander Stephens considered the loss of Fort Fisher to be “one of the greatest disasters that had befallen our Cause from the beginning of the war.”64 The disaster brought to a head a growing peace movement in the Confederacy. Two weeks after the fall of Fort Fisher, Stephens participated in yet another effort for a negotiated peace. This one was set in motion by the venerable Francis Preston Blair, the old Jacksonian Democrat who became one of the founders of the Republican Party in the 1850s. Blair had maintained his ties across party lines, however, and even across the bloody chasm of war. With Lincoln’s tacit consent, Blair traveled to Richmond under flag of truce in January 1865 to visit his former friend and political associate Jefferson Davis. Although the content of their conversations remained secret, Blair’s presence in Richmond gave rise to endless speculation in the press in both the North and the South. Blair’s purpose was to see whether there might be some way to reunite the country and put an end to this seemingly interminable war.

  Signs abounded that the Southern people, if not Jefferson Davis, were ready to give up. Desertions from Confederate armies soared. The previously indefatigable chief of Confederate ordnance, Josiah Gorgas, made despairing entries in his diary during January: “Where is this to end? No money in the Treasury, no food to feed Gen. Lee’s Army, no troops to oppose Gen. Sherman. There is a strong disposition among members of congress to come to terms with the enemy…. Wife & I sit talking of going to Mexico to live out the remnant of our days.”65

  Mexico was also on Blair’s mind. He seemed obsessed with the idea that a joint campaign of Union and Confederate armies to throw the French and their puppet emperor Ferdinand Maximilian out of Mexico would pave the way to reunion. Davis returned a cool response to this notion, but he did give Blair a letter for Lincoln’s eyes, offering to appoint commissioners to “enter into conference with a view to secure peace to the two countries.” Lincoln wanted nothing to do with Blair’s proposed Mexican adventure. But the president thought he saw an opportunity to end the war on his own terms without compromising his refusal to recognize the legitimacy of the Confederacy. He authorized Blair to return to Richmond with an offer to receive any commissioner whom Davis “may informally send to me with the view of securing peace to the people of our one common country.”66

  Davis overlooked the discrepancy between “two countries” and “one common country.” He appointed a commission composed of Vice President Stephens, President Pro Tem of the Senate Robert M. T. Hunter, and Assistant Secretary of War John A. Campbell, a former U.S. Supreme Court justice. Davis expected their efforts to fail because he knew that Lincoln would stick to his terms of Union and freedom. That was the outcome Davis wanted, for it would enable him to rouse flagging Southern spirits to keep up the fight as the only alternative to a humiliating defeat.67

  This peace effort almost foundered before it could float. Lincoln sent word to military officers that the Confederate commissioners should not be allowed through the lines for an “informal conference” with Secretary of State Seward, whom he had sent to Virginia, unless they agreed in advance to Lincoln’s “one common country” formula as the basis for talks. The commissioners instead showed to the army major whom Lincoln dispatched to meet them their “two countries” instructions from Davis. The major therefore barred them from crossing Union lines.68

  That would seem to have ended the matter. But this affair had generated huge coverage in the press—more even than the peace flurries of the previous summer—and had raised hopes that this cruel war might soon be over. On the morning of February 2 Lincoln read a telegram from General Grant: “I am convinced, upon conversation with Messrs Stephens & Hunter that their intentions are good and their desire sincere to restore peace and union…. I am sorry however that Mr. Lincoln cannot have an interview with [them]…. I fear now their going back without any expression from anyone in authority will have a bad influence.”69

  Grant’s intervention was decisive. On the spur of the moment, Lincoln decided to go to Virginia personally to join Seward for a meeting with the Confederate commissioners. This extraordinary “informal” four-hour meeting of the five men took place February 3 on the Union steamer River Queen, anchored in Hampton Roads. No aides were present and no formal record was kept, although Seward and Campbell wrote brief summaries and Stephens later penned a lengthy account, which must be used with caution.70 Despite an underlying tension, the mood was relaxed. Lincoln and Stephens had been fellow Whigs in Congress nearly two decades earlier, providing the basis for a cordial atmosphere.

  Lincoln nevertheless stuck to the terms he had written out for Seward before the president decided to join him: “1 The restoration of the National authority throughout all the States. 2 No receding by the Executive of the United States, on the Slavery question…. 3 No cessation of hostilities short of an end of the war, and the disbanding of all forces hostile to the government.”71 Stephens tried to change the subject by alluding to Blair’s Mexican project; Lincoln promptly disavowed it. What about an armistice while peace negotiations took place? No armistice, replied Lincoln, reiterating his third condition. Well then, said Hunter, would it be possible to hold official negotiations while the war went on? After all, he noted, even King Charles I had entered into agreements with rebels in arms during the English civil war. “I do not profess to be posted in history,” replied Lincoln—one imagines with a twinkle in his eye. “All I distinctly recollect about the case of Charles I is, that he lost his head.”72

  On questions of punishing Confederate leaders and confiscating Southern property,
Lincoln promised generous treatment based on his power of pardon. With respect to slavery Lincoln even suggested that if Confederate states abolished it themselves as part of a peace settlement, he would ask Congress to appropriate funds for partial compensation (an unlikely prospect). In any event the U.S. House of Representatives had passed the Thirteenth Amendment three days earlier (the Senate had done so the previous year) and several states, including Lincoln’s Illinois as the first, had already ratified it.73 Slavery was dead, Lincoln made clear, and to avoid further bloodshed the Southern leaders should face the reality that the Confederacy would soon be in the same condition.

  Whatever their personal convictions, the commissioners had no authority to concede the death of their nation. They returned sadly to Richmond and admitted their failure. Davis was neither surprised nor disappointed. He reported to the Confederate Congress that Lincoln’s terms required “degrading submission” and “humiliating surrender.” Davis addressed a large rally in Richmond and predicted that Seward and “His Majesty Abraham the First” would find “they had been speaking to their masters,” for Southern armies would yet “compel the Yankees, in less than twelve months, to petition us for peace on our own terms.”74

  Confederate military leaders did not share Davis’s fantasy. At a meeting under flag of truce between Gen. James Longstreet and Union general Edward Ord to arrange an exchange of civilian prisoners at the end of February, the two generals discussed “the possibility of arriving at a satisfactory adjustment of the present unhappy difficulties, by means of a military convention.” They thought that Lee and Grant might be able to conclude some kind of agreement. So Lee wrote to Grant proposing a meeting. Grant properly forwarded this letter to Stanton, who took it to Lincoln. The president wrote out a response, which Stanton telegraphed to Grant: The commander in chief “wishes you to have no conference with General Lee unless it be for the capitulation of Gen. Lee’s army, or on some minor, and purely military, matter…. You are not to decide, discuss, or confer upon any political question. Such questions the President holds in his own hands; and will submit them to no military conferences or conventions.”75