Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief

by James M. McPherson

  15. Lincoln to Burnside, Sept. 27 (two telegrams), 28, Oct. 12, 1863, Basler, Collected Works, 6:483, 484, 510–11.

  16. Burlingame and Ettlinger, Inside Lincoln’s White House, 85–86, entry of Sept. 27, 1863.

  17. John E. Clark, Jr., Railroads in the Civil War: The Impact of Management on Victory and Defeat (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 2001), 141–212; John Niven, ed., The Salmon P. Chase Papers, vol. 1, Journals, 1829–1872 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1993), 450–54, entry of Sept. 24, 1863.

  18. Burlingame and Ettlinger, Inside Lincoln’s White House, 99, entry of Oct. 24, 1863.

  19. Howard K. Beale, ed., Diary of Gideon Welles, 3 vols. (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1960), 1:470, entry of Oct. 14, 1863.

  20. Halleck to Grant, Oct. 16, 1863, Thomas to Grant, Oct. 19, 1863, O.R. 30, iv:404, 479.

  21. Lincoln to Stanton, Dec. 18, 21, 1863, Basler, Collected Works, 7:78–79, 84–85.

  22. Lincoln to Grant, Dec. 8, 1863, ibid., 7:53.

  23. Beale, Diary of Welles, 1:383, entry of July 26, 1863; Kenneth P. Williams, Lincoln Finds a General: A Military Study of the Civil War, 5 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1949–59), 5:99–101; Grant to Dana, Aug. 5, 1863, in John Y. Simon, ed., The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 28 vols. to date (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967–), 9:145–47.

  24. Beale, Diary of Welles, 1:439–40, entry of Sept. 21, 1863.

  25. Lincoln to Halleck, Sept. 19, 1863, Basler, Collected Works, 6:466–67.

  26. Lincoln to Halleck, Oct. 16, 1863, ibid., 6:518; Meade to his wife, Oct. 23, 1864, in George Gordon Meade III, ed., Life and Letters of George Gordon Meade, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913), 2:154.

  27. Meade to Hancock, Nov. 6, 1863, in Jeffry D. Wert, The Sword of Lincoln: The Army of the Potomac (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 318.

  28. Banks to Lincoln, Aug. 17, 1863, Lincoln Papers.

  29. Charles A. Dana, Recollections of the Civil War (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1898), 86.

  30. Lincoln to Grant, Aug. 9, 1863, Basler, Collected Works, 6:374; Grant to Lincoln, Aug. 23, 1863, Lincoln Papers.

  31. Lincoln to James Conkling, Aug. 26, 1863, Basler, Collected Works, 6:408–10.

  32. Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Hartford, Conn.: Park Publishing Co., 1882), 386–87; the final sentence is from Douglass’s article in Allen Thorndike Rice, ed., Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguished Men of His Time (New York: North American Publishing Co., 1886), 188.

  33. Dunbar Rowland, ed., Jefferson Davis, Constitutionalist: His Letters, Papers, and Speeches, 10 vols. (Jackson, Miss.: Mississippi Department of Archives and History, 1923), 5:409; O.R., series 2, vol. 5, pp. 797, 808, 940–41.

  34. O.R., series 2, vol. 5, pp. 128, 286.

  35. Basler, Collected Works, 6:357; Douglass, Life and Times, 387.

  36. O.R., series 2, vol. 6, pp. 441–42, 528, 556–57, 647–49, 226; Michael Burlingame, ed., Lincoln Observed: Civil War Dispatches of Noah Brooks (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 90, dispatch dated Nov. 11, 1863, in Sacramento Union, Dec. 12.

  37. Basler, Collected Works, 7:23.

  38. Ibid., 49–50; Illinois Daily State Journal, Dec. 1, 1863, quoted in V. Jacque Voegeli, Free but Not Equal: The Midwest and the Negro During the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 131.

  39. Basler, Collected Works, 7:53–56.

  40. Lincoln to Banks, Nov. 5, 1863, ibid., 1; “Proclamation About Amnesty,” March 24, 1864, ibid., 269–70.

  41. Lincoln to Frederick Steele, June 29, 1864, ibid., 418; “Proclamation Concerning Reconstruction,” ibid., 433–34.

  CHAPTER 9: IF IT TAKES THREE YEARS MORE

  1. Halleck to Grant, Jan. 18, 1864, O.R. 32, ii:40–42.

  2. Grant to Halleck, Jan. 15, 1864, Halleck to Grant, Jan. 18, 1864, ibid., 90–91, 126–27.

  3. Grant to Halleck, Jan. 19, 1864, Halleck to Grant, Feb. 17, 1864, Halleck to Sherman, Feb. 16, 1864, ibid., 407–8, 411–13; ibid., 33, 394–95.

  4. Brooks D. Simpson, Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph over Adversity, 1822–1865 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 254–57.

  5. Halleck to Edwin M. Stanton, March 9, 1864, Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress; O.R. 32, iii:58, 33; ibid., 663.

  6. Memorandum by John G. Nicolay dated March 8, 1864, in Michael Burlingame, ed., With Lincoln in the White House: Letters, Memoranda, and Other Writings of John G. Nicolay, 1860–1865 (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), 130.

  7. The Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, 2 vols. (New York: Charles L. Webster and Company, 1885–86), 2:122–23.

  8. O.R. 46, i:11.

  9. Grant to Meade, April 9, 1864, O.R. 33, 827–28; Grant to Sherman, April 4, 1864, O.R. 32, iii:246.

  10. Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner Ettlinger, eds., Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), 193–94, entry of April 30, 1864; O.R. 32, iii:245–46.

  11. For some of the extensive documentation of these massacres, see Noah Andre Trudeau, Like Men of War: Black Troops in the Civil War 1862–1865 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1998), chaps. 5–7; Ira Berlin, ed., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation 1861–1867, series 2: The Black Military Experience (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 539–48, 588–89; Richard L. Fuchs, An Unerring Fire: The Massacre at Fort Pillow (Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 2002); John Cimprich, Fort Pillow, a Civil War Massacre, and Public Memory (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 2005); and Andrew Ward, River Run Red: The Fort Pillow Massacre in the American Civil War (New York: Viking, 2005).

  12. Speech in Baltimore on April 18, 1864, in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953–55), 7:302.

  13. Howard K. Beale, ed., Diary of Gideon Welles, 3 vols. (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1960), 2:24–25, entries of May 5 and 6, 1864; Lincoln “To Cabinet Members,” May 3, 1864, and Lincoln to Edwin M. Stanton, May 17, 1864, Basler, Collected Works, 7:328–29, 345–46; John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, 10 vols. (New York: The Century Co., 1890), 6:478–84.

  14. O.R., series 2, vol. 6, p. 171.

  15. Ludwell H. Johnson, Red River Campaign: Politics and Cotton in the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1958); Gary Dillard Joiner, One Damn Blunder from Beginning to End: The Red River Campaign of 1864 (Lanham, Md.: SR Books, 2003).

  16. Grant to Halleck, April 22, 25, 29, 30, 1864, Halleck to Grant, April 23, 26, 29, May 3, 1864, Halleck to Canby, May 7, 1864, O.R. 34, iii: 252–53, 331, 357, 293, 331–32, 409–10.

  17. Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, eds., The Diary of George Templeton Strong: The Civil War 1860–1865 (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 449, entry of May 20, 1864.

  18. Beale, Diary of Welles, 2:33, 25, entries of May 17 and 7; Francis B. Carpenter, Six Months at the White House with Abraham Lincoln (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1866), 30.

  19. Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 620; Grant to Halleck, May 11, 1864, O.R. 36, ii:627.

  20. Burlingame and Ettlinger, Inside Lincoln’s White House, diary entry of May 9, 1864; Carpenter, Six Months at the White House, 283.

  21. New York Times, May 9, 1864; New York Herald, May 14, 1864; New York Tribune, May 14, 1864.

  22. Michael Burlingame, ed., Lincoln Observed: Civil War Dispatches of Noah Brooks (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 113, dispatch of June 14, 1864, in Sacramento Union, July 9.

  23. O.R. 46, i:20.

  24. Howard K. Beale, ed., The Diary of Edward Bates, 1859–1866 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1933), 366, entry of May 15, 1864; Elizabeth Blair Lee to Samuel P. Lee, May 20, 1864, in Virginia Jeans Laas, ed., Wartime Washington: The Civil Wa
r Letters of Elizabeth Blair Lee (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 386.

  25. Nevins and Thomas, Diary of George Templeton Strong, 447, entry of May 17, 1864.

  26. Basler, Collected Works, 7:395.

  27. These paragraphs are based on the voluminous correspondence in Private and Official Correspondence of General Benjamin F. Butler During the Period of the Civil War, 5 vols. (Norwood, Mass.: Plimpton Press, 1917), vols. 2, 3, and 4; and on Hans L. Trefousse, Ben Butler: The South Called Him Beast! (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1957).

  28. Thaddeus Lyman to his wife, July 20, 1864, in George R. Agassiz, ed., Meade’s Headquarters, 1863–1865 (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1922), 192–93. The sources on which these paragraphs are based include many letters and telegrams in O.R. 40, ii and iii; vol. 4 of the Private and Official Correspondence of Butler; Edward G. Longacre, Army of Amateurs: General Benjamin F. Butler and the Army of the James, 1863–1865 (Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 1997); William D. Mallam, “The Grant-Butler Relationship,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 41 (1954), 259–76; and Lewis Taylor Merrill, “General Benjamin F. Butler in the Presidential Campaign of 1864,” ibid., 33 (1947), 537–70. Much of the evidence about this contretemps is ambiguous or contradictory, and Lincoln’s precise role in the whole matter is obscure.

  29. Halleck to Grant, July 6, 1864, O.R. 40, iii:31–32; Lincoln to Grant, July 10, 1864, Basler, Collected Works, 7:437.

  30. Burlingame and Ettlinger, Inside Lincoln’s White House, 221, diary entry of July 11, 1864.

  31. For summaries of the evidence and legends connected with this incident, see Frederick C. Hicks, “Lincoln, Wright, and Holmes at Fort Stevens,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 39 (1946), 323–32; and John H. Cramer, Lincoln Under Enemy Fire (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1948).

  32. Burlingame and Ettlinger, Inside Lincoln’s White House, 221–23, diary entries of July 11, 13, 14, 1864.

  33. Ibid., 222, entry of July 13, 1864; Beale, Diary of Bates, 384–85, entries of July 14 and 15, 1864.

  34. Grant to Halleck, July 18, 1864, Halleck to Grant, July 21, 1864, Grant to Lincoln, July 25, 1864, Stanton to Halleck, July 27, 1864, O.R. 37, ii:374, 408, 433–34; Meade to his wife, July 29, Aug. 3, 1864, in George Gordon Meade III, ed., Life and Letters of George Gordon Meade, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913), 2:216, 218–19; Lincoln to Grant, July 28, 29, 1864, Basler, Collected Works, 7:469–70.

  35. Grant to Halleck, Aug. 1, 1864, O.R. 40, i:17.

  36. The leading Grant scholar, John Y. Simon, editor of The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, suggests that Lincoln may have rebuked Grant. The general’s foremost biographer, however, rejects this interpretation. Simon, “Grant, Lincoln, and Unconditional Surrender,” in Gabor Boritt, ed., Lincoln’s Generals (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 178–83; Simpson, Ulysses S. Grant, 367, 510–11n.52.

  37. O.R. 37, ii:558.

  38. Lincoln to Grant, Aug. 3, 1864, Basler, Collected Works, 7:476.

  CHAPTER 10: NO PEACE WITHOUT VICTORY

  1. New York World, July 12, 30, Aug. 6, 1864.

  2. Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953–55), 7:448–49; New York World, July 19, 1864.

  3. Howard K. Beale, ed., Diary of Gideon Welles, 3 vols. (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1960), 2:44, 73, entries of June 2 and July 11, 1864; Adam Gurowski, Diary, 3 vols. (Boston, 1862–66), 3:254, entry of Aug. 19, 1864.

  4. Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, eds., The Diary of George Templeton Strong, vol. 3, The Civil War 1860–1865 (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 474, entry of Aug. 19, 1864; Sarah Butler to Benjamin Butler, June 19, 1864, in Jesse A. Marshall, ed., Private and Official Correspondence of General Benjamin F. Butler during the Period of the Civil War, 5 vols. (Norwood, Mass.: Plimpton Press, 1917), 4:418.

  5. Columbus Crisis, Aug. 24, 1864, in Wood Gray, The Hidden Civil War: The Story of the Copperheads (New York: The Viking Press, 1942), 174; Boston Pilot, quoted in Jennifer Weber, Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the North (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 144.

  6. Clement C. Clay to Judah P. Benjamin, Aug. 11, 1864, O.R., series 4, vol. 3, p. 585. For the activities of Confederate agents in Canada, see Oscar A. Kinchen, Confederate Operations in Canada and the North (North Quincy, Mass.: Christopher Pub. House, 1970), esp. 35–103.

  7. Henry Swiggett, ed., A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary at the Confederate States Capital (John B. Jones), 2 vols. (New York: Old Hickory Bookshop, 1935), 2:229, entry of June 11, 1864; Longstreet to Alexander R. Lawton, March 5, 1864, O.R. 32, iii:588.

  8. Richmond Dispatch, July 23, 1864; Nevins and Thomas, Diary of George Templeton Strong, 470, entry of Aug. 6, 1864; Weed to Seward, Aug. 22, 1864, Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress.

  9. Greeley to Lincoln, July 7, 1864, Lincoln Papers.

  10. Lincoln to Greeley, July 9, 1864, Basler, Collected Works, 7:435.

  11. Lincoln to Greeley (two telegrams), July 15, 1864; “Order for John Hay,” July 15, 1864; “To Whom It May Concern,” July 18, 1864, Basler, Collected Works, 7:440–42, 451.

  12. Clement C. Clay and James Holcombe to Greeley, July 21, 1864, in New York Times, July 22. This letter was published in many Northern newspapers on July 22 or 23 and appeared in Southern newspapers soon after, with extensive editorial commentary.

  13. New York Times, July 23, 1864; Clay to Benjamin, Aug. 11, 1864, O.R., series 4, vol. 3, pp. 585–86.

  14. Independent, July 26, 1864; New York Tribune, Aug. 5, 1864; Greeley to Lincoln, Aug. 9, 1864, Lincoln Papers.

  15. New York Times, July 25, 1864; Greeley to Lincoln, Aug. 9, 1864, Lincoln Papers.

  16. No official record of this meeting was kept. This account and the quotation are taken from Gilmore’s article in the Atlantic Monthly 8 (Sept. 1864), 372–83. Gilmore wrote a briefer version describing the meeting in the Boston Transcript, July 22, 1864, and a longer one in his memoirs many years later. These versions vary slightly in detail but agree in substance, as does Judah Benjamin’s account in a circular sent to Confederate envoys abroad after Gilmore’s article was published in the Atlantic Monthly. Benjamin to James M. Mason, Aug. 25, 1864, in Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies, 30 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1894–1922), series 2, vol. 3, pp. 1190–94.

  17. New York Times, Aug. 20, 1864.

  18. New York World, Aug. 15, 1864; Columbus Crisis, Aug. 3, 1864; New York News, quoted in Washington Daily Intelligencer, July 25, 1864.

  19. New York World, July 25, 1864; New York Herald, Aug. 7, 1864.

  20. Newark Daily Advertiser and Ann Arbor Journal, quoted in Washington Daily Intelligencer, Aug. 8, 1864.

  21. New York Tribune, July 28, 1864; Nevins and Thomas, Diary of George Templeton Strong, 474, entry of Aug. 19, 1864.

  22. Lincoln to Charles Robinson, Aug. 17, 1864, Basler, Collected Works, 7:499–501.

  23. Ibid., 500, 506–7.

  24. William Frank Zornow, Lincoln and the Party Divided (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1954), 112; Basler, Collected Works, 7:514.

  25. Raymond to Lincoln, Aug. 22, 1864, Lincoln Papers. Emphasis in original.

  26. Basler, Collected Works, 7:517; John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, 10 vols. (New York: The Century Co., 1890), 9:220.

  27. Nicolay to Hay, Aug. 25, 1864, Nicolay to Therena Bates, Aug. 28, 1864, in Michael Burlingame, ed., With Lincoln in the White House: Letters, Memoranda, and Other Writings of John G. Nicolay, 1860–1865 (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), 152–53.

  28. On this matter see Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner Ettlinger, eds., Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), 238, entry of Oct. 11, 1864; and Charles A. Dana to Henry J. Raymond, n.d., in Francis Brown, Raymond of the Times (New York: Norton, 1951),
260n.

  29. Zornow, Lincoln and the Party Divided, 108–16; for the platform, see Edward McPherson, The Political History of the United States during the Great Rebellion, 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C.: Philip and Salomans, 1865), 406–7.

  30. Halleck to Grant, Aug. 11, 1864, Grant to Halleck, Aug. 15, 1864, O.R. 42:111–12, 193–94.

  31. Lincoln to Grant, Aug. 17, 1864, Basler, Collected Works, 7:499; Horace Porter, Campaigning with Grant (New York: The Century Co., 1897), 279.

  32. McPherson, Political History of the United States, 419–20.

  33. Sherman to Halleck, Sept. 3, 1864, O.R. 38, v:77.

  34. Nevins and Thomas, Diary of George Templeton Strong, 480–81, entry of Sept. 3, 1864; St. Paul Press, Sept. 4, 1864, quoted in Gray, Hidden Civil War, 189.