Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief
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As the military campaigns of 1864 began, Gen. William T. Sherman was not widely known outside his own army. That would soon change, however, as Sherman’s campaign that resulted in the capture of Atlanta and his subsequent marches through Georgia and the Carolinas brought him fame in the North second only to Grant’s, and infamy in the South second to none. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Gen. John A. McClernand demonstrated a modest capacity for military leadership and an unlimited capacity for political intrigue to advance his military career. Lincoln initially shared McClernand’s high opinion of his own abilities, but the president soon saw through the general’s schemes to supersede Grant and supported the latter’s removal of McClernand from corps command during the Vicksburg campaign. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Although Lincoln complained of Gen. William S. Rosecrans’s lengthy preparations, which delayed advances against the enemy in Tennessee in the fall of 1862 and again in the summer of 1863, the president was gratified by the general’s success in the early stages of those campaigns. After Rosecrans’s defeat at Chickamauga, however, the president described him as “confused and stunned like a duck hit on the head.”LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Gen. George G. Meade worked his way up from brigade to corps command with solid if unspectacular performance at each level of command in the Army of the Potomac. He was the consensus choice to take over the army when Gen. Joseph Hooker faltered during the Gettysburg campaign. Despite Lincoln’s disappointment with Meade’s lack of aggressiveness after Gettysburg, he kept him in command of that army for the rest of the war. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
A former Speaker of the national House of Representatives and governor of Massachusetts, Nathaniel P. Banks could hardly be denied the commission he sought as major general of volunteers. Although he enjoyed some success as commander of the Army of the Gulf in Louisiana in 1863, he had been outfought by Stonewall Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley in 1862, and his Red River campaign of 1864 was a fiasco. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
A native of Virginia who had married a woman from New York, Gen. George Thomas remained loyal to the United States at the cost of ostracism by his Virginia relatives. Known as the “Rock of Chickamauga” for his unyielding defensive stand in that battle, he also earned plaudits as the “Hammer of Nashville” for his crushing offensive that virtually destroyed the Confederate Army of Tennessee in December 1864. NATIONAL ARCHIVES
Wearing his trademark porkpie hat, Gen. Philip Sheridan strikes a cocky pose for the photographer. Equally at home commanding infantry and cavalry, the thirty-three-year-old Sheridan smashed Jubal Early’s Confederate corps in the Shenandoah Valley in 1864, assuring Lincoln’s reelection as president. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
The grim harvest of war is illustrated by these two photographs. The one on the left was taken at Gettysburg on July 5, 1863, two days after the battle, showing the bloated corpses of Union soldiers killed there. The other photograph depicts freed slaves after the war disinterring the remains of Union soldiers who had been killed at Cold Harbor, Virginia, for reburial in the national military cemetery established there. Those killed at Gettysburg were also reinterred
in one of the first such cemeteries, where on November 19, 1863, Lincoln consecrated “these honored dead” and resolved that they “shall not have died in vain.” Seventy-two national cemeteries were ultimately created as the final resting places for Union soldiers who died in the Civil War—and also for later veterans of the U.S. armed forces.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Commander in Chief Lincoln spent countless hours in the War Department telegraph office next to the White House, anxiously awaiting news from the front and sending telegrams to generals in several theaters of the war. According to the memoirs of David Homer Bates, a wartime telegrapher, the president also drafted part of the Emancipation Proclamation in that office during the Seven Days’ battles in Virginia. This engraving from the frontispiece of Bates’s Lincoln in the Telegraph Office shows the commander in chief working on the proclamation as he waits for telegrams from Virginia. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
In February 1864 the New York portrait artist Francis B. Carpenter obtained an introduction to Abraham Lincoln in the White House. Carpenter considered the Emancipation Proclamation to be the preeminent achievement of the Civil War—indeed, of all American history—and he wanted to paint a picture commensurate with that achievement. Lincoln also believed that “if my name ever goes into history, it will be for this act,” so he readily consented to cooperate in Carpenter’s project. The artist selected the moment that Lincoln first read a draft of the proclamation to his cabinet on July 22, 1862, as the event he wished to portray. For six months Carpenter virtually lived in the White House, making sketches of the cabinet room, commissioning photographs of Lincoln and cabinet members, and painting individual portraits of them as models for their depiction in the huge canvas of the final painting. From left to right, the figures in the painting are Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, Lincoln, Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Interior Caleb Smith (who had died a month before Carpenter began the painting), Secretary of State William H. Seward, Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, and Attorney General Edward Bates. Intending a study in allegory as well as realism, Carpenter portrayed the two most radical members of the cabinet, Stanton and Chase, on the left, and the more conservative officials on the right, with Lincoln in the center. Befitting his dominant position in the cabinet, Seward sits directly across the table from Lincoln and is the only figure looking directly at the president.
An engraving of the painting, portrayed here, was a bestseller in its time at ten dollars a copy. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
In this photograph Horace Greeley looks like everyone’s favorite uncle. The image is misleading, for Greeley was the foremost journalist in America, and his slashing editorials against “the Slave Power,” “Rebels,” and “Copperheads” in his New York Tribune spearheaded the radical wing of the Republican Party. Of mercurial temperament, Greeley criticized Lincoln for slowness in moving against slavery in 1862 and for steadfastness in insisting on emancipation as a condition of peace in 1864. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Clement L. Vallandigham’s handsome countenance did not help his reputation among Republicans and other supporters of the war. Sympathetic to the South and slavery, Vallandigham believed that the Union could be restored only by negotiations and compromise. He returned from Canadian exile to write the antiwar plank in the 1864 Democratic platform. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Goaded by Democratic politicians and newspapers that denounced the draft as a Republican scheme to make poor white men fight to free the slaves who would come north to take their jobs, thousands of Irish Americans rioted when conscription began in New York City on July 13, 1863. For four days the Draft Riots raged, as mobs attacked hated symbols of the war, the draft, and emancipation. Almost a dozen black people were lynched, and the Colored Orphan Asylum was burned to the ground, as depicted here. More than 105 people were killed, most of them rioters shot by police and soldiers. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
On May 23 and 24, 1865, the Army of the Potomac and General Sherman’s Army of Georgia, each one hundred thousand strong, marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in a victory lap designated as “The Grand Review.” As they passed in front of reviewing stands near the White House, government officials, including the new president, Andrew Johnson, saluted the armed might of the republic—all of them, certainly, wishing that Abraham Lincoln could have been there to see the spectacle. This photo shows part of the Army of the Potomac on the march. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
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