Lincoln (105 page)

Unlike many in the capital, the President was not worried about his own safety. He only reluctantly obeyed Stanton’s directive to move back into the city from the exposed Soldiers’ Home where he, Mary, and Tad were spending the summer, and he was furious when he learned that Gustavus V. Fox had ordered a naval vessel to be ready in the Potomac in case the Lincolns needed to escape.

As during previous invasions of the North, he was less concerned about the security of Washington than with the capture of the Confederate force, but he was hamstrung by his pledge not to interfere with Grant’s operations. Knowing how severely he had been criticized for meddling with military matters, especially in the case of McClellan, he was reluctant now to give direct orders to his general-in-chief. All he felt he could do was to keep a close watch over Early’s progress and try to prevent panic in Washington and Baltimore. But when Grant grandly announced that there were already enough forces in the area to defeat the invaders and offered to come to the capital himself only if the President thought it necessary, Lincoln responded on July 10 that he should leave enough men to retain his hold on Petersburg and “bring the rest [of your army] with you personally, and make a vigorous effort to destroy the enemie’s force in this vicinity.” But the President ended his telegram: “This is what I think, upon your suggestion, and is not an order.”

Still not understanding the seriousness of the threat, Grant chose to remain where he was, dispatching some veteran troops of the Sixth Corps, under General Horatio G. Wright, to assist in the defense of Washington. On July 11, before they could arrive, Early’s men had already pushed down the Seventh Street Pike, marched through Silver Spring, where Francis Preston
Blair, Sr., and Postmaster General Montgomery Blair both had houses, and approached the sturdy but feebly manned defenses of Fort Stevens. The Confederates drove in the Union pickets and came within 150 yards of the fort before artillery fire forced them back.

Lincoln was in the fort when it was first attacked. Having driven out from Washington in his carriage, he mounted to the front parapet. He borrowed a field glass from signal officer Asa Townsend Abbott and looked out over the field where the Confederates were advancing. “He stood there with a long frock coat and plug hat on, making a very conspicuous figure,” Abbott recalled. When the Confederates came within shooting distance, an officer twice cautioned Lincoln to get down, but he paid no attention. Then a man standing near him was shot in the leg, and a soldier roughly ordered the President to get down or he would have his head knocked off. He coolly descended, got into his carriage, and was driven back to the city, where he went to the wharf to greet troops of the Sixth Corps, “chatting familiarly with the veterans, and now and then, as if in compliment to them, biting at a piece of hard tack which he held in his hand.”

The next day Early made one last effort to capture the capital. Once again the heaviest fighting was at Fort Stevens, and President and Mrs. Lincoln, along with many other prominent public officials and their wives, came out to witness the fighting. Thoughtlessly Wright invited the President to mount the parapet in order to get a clear view as Union soldiers charged the enemy line, and the general recorded that Lincoln “evinced remarkable coolness and disregard of danger.” After a surgeon standing near him was shot, Wright ordered the parapet cleared and asked the President to step down. Lincoln insisted on remaining until the general said he would have him removed forcibly. “The absurdity of the idea of sending off the President under guard seemed to amuse him,” Wright recalled, “but, in consideration of my earnestness in the matter, he agreed to compromise by sitting behind the parapet instead of standing upon it.”

After the failure of his final assault, Early retreated from Washington. Wright made a halfhearted attempt to follow the Confederates, but he soon halted, as Lincoln said scornfully, “for fear he might come across the rebels and catch some of them.” Browning found the President “in the dumps,” lamenting “that the rebels who had besieged us were all escaped.” Though half a dozen generals—Wright, Hunter, Sigel, Wallace, and others—were involved, nobody was in charge of pursuing the enemy. As Assistant Secretary of War Charles A. Dana wrote Grant: “There is no head to the whole and it seems indispensable that you should at once appoint one Gen Halleck will not give orders except as he receives them—The President will give none, and until you direct positively and explicitly what is to be done everything will go on in the deplorable and fatal way in which it has gone on for the past week.”

Lincoln’s patience, even with Grant, began to wear thin. Early continued
to stage raids from the Shenandoah, and on July 30 his men rode into Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, demanded a ransom of $500,000 in currency or $100,000 in gold, and, when the townsmen were unable to pay it, burned the town. Northern newspapers decried the humiliation of the raids, which showed “there is folly or incompetence somewhere in our military administration,” but Grant, still entrenched before Petersburg, seemed little concerned. Not even a personal visit from the President, who summoned him to Fort Monroe on July 31, stirred the general from the lethargy into which he had unaccountably lapsed. On hearing of Early’s continuing activities, he telegraphed that all the Union forces in the Shenandoah Valley command should put themselves south of the enemy and follow him to the death. Lincoln replied that his strategy was just right, but he added tartly: “Please look over the despatches you may have rece[i]ved from here... and discover, if you can, that there is any idea in the head of any one here, of ‘putting our army
South
of the enemy’ or of [’]following him to the
death’
in any direction.” “I repeat to you,” the President insisted, “it will neither be done nor attempted unless you watch it every day, and hour, and force it.” Called to heel, Grant immediately started for Washington, and after consultation with the President named the brilliant young cavalry officer Philip Sheridan to command all the Union forces operating in the Valley.

It was not only Grant who tried Lincoln’s patience during these unusually hot, depressing summer months of 1864. Usually he was ready to spend countless hours listening to visitors who brought him their complaints and petitions, sometimes over quite trivial matters, but now he had had enough. When two citizens of Maine asked him to intervene to settle a personal problem, the President sharply responded: “You want me to end your suspense? I’ll do so. Dont let me hear another word about your case.” A few days later his anger erupted again when Charles Gibson resigned as solicitor in the Court of Claims, protesting the radicalism of the Republican platform but expressing gratitude to the President for treating him with “personal kindness and consideration.” With what Bates called “blind impetuosity” Lincoln lashed back that there were “two small draw-backs upon Mr. Gibson’s right to still receive such treatment, one of which is that he never could learn of his giving much attention to the duties of his office, and the other is this studied attempt of Mr. Gibson’s to stab him.”

In calmer times Lincoln would have ignored a semiliterate communication from a Pennsylvania man who urged him to remember that “white men is in class number one and black men is in class number two and must be governed by white men forever.” But now, in his irascible mood, he drafted a reply to be sent out over Nicolay’s signature requesting the writer to inform him “whether you are either a white man or black one, because in
either case, you can not be regarded as an entirely impartial judge.” “It may be,” the President continued, in an unusual tone of sarcasm, “that you belong to a third or fourth class of
yellow
or
red
men, in which case the impartiality of your judgment would be more apparant.”

Lincoln’s sharp temper extended at times even to his closest advisers. Montgomery Blair, furious because Early’s men had burned his house in Silver Spring, denounced the “poltroons and cowards” responsible for the defenses of Washington. Halleck, always defensive of professional military men, demanded that the President either endorse “such wholesale denouncement and accusation” or dismiss Blair. Lincoln replied that he did not approve the Postmaster General’s remarks but that his words, which “may have been hastily said in a moment of vexation at so severe a loss,” were not sufficient grounds for removing him. “I propose continuing to be myself the judge as to when a member of the Cabinet shall be dismissed,” he said sternly, and he took the unusual step of reading to the entire cabinet a carefully prepared memorandum: “I must myself be the judge, how long to retain in, and when to remove any of you from, his position. It would greatly pain me to discover any of you endeavoring to procure anothers removal, or, in any way to prejudice him before the public. Such endeavor would be a wrong to me; and much worse, a wrong to the country.”

On the more important issue of possible peace negotiations with the Confederates, the President was obliged to control his anger. Indeed, he gained a certain sardonic pleasure from his skillful handling of the question. The prime mover was the erratic and excitable editor of the
New York Tribune.
Just as Early’s men were approaching the capital, Greeley wrote Lincoln that his “irrepressible friend” William C. (“Colorado”) Jewett was certain that representatives of the Confederate government were on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls with full authority to negotiate a peace. Greeley urged the President to explore the possibility, because the country was in such desperate shape. A full and generous announcement of Union conditions for ending the war, even if they were not accepted, would remove the “wide-spread conviction that the Government and its prominent supporters are not anxious for Peace” and help the Republican cause in the fall elections.

Correctly Lincoln suspected a trap. He could not know why the three Confederate emissaries—former Mississippi Congressman Jacob Thompson, former Alabama Senator Clement C. Clay, and Professor James P. Holcombe of the University of Virginia—were in Canada, but his instincts told him that their purpose was not to make peace but to meddle in Northern politics with a view to influencing the presidential election.

He could not reject the proposed negotiations outright, even though he thought Greeley unreliable and mendacious. But this chosen intermediary of the Confederates had the power to shape Northern opinion. The
New York Tribune,
widely distributed in the West as well as in the East, boasted
the largest national circulation of any newspaper. The editor’s letter, which reminded the President “how intently the people desire any peace consistent with the national integrity and honor” and that an offer of fair terms would “prove an immense and sorely needed advantage to the national cause,” thinly masked a threat to go public in case Lincoln turned down this opportunity. If the
Tribune
portrayed the President as flatly rejecting a reasonable peace negotiation, it could do irreparable damage.

Shrewdly Lincoln solved his problem by naming Greeley himself as his emissary to the Confederates at Niagara and authorizing him to bring to Washington under safe conduct “any person anywhere professing to have any proposition of Jefferson Davis in writing, for peace, embracing the restoration of the Union and abandonment of slavery.” Greeley objected. For all his countrified looks and his shuffling gait, the editor was no fool, and he was unwilling to become “a confidant, far less an agent in such negotiations.” But the President refused to let him off the hook. “I not only intend a sincere effort for peace,” he wrote Greeley, “but I intend that you shall be a personal witness that it is made.” When Greeley continued to delay, the President expressed disappointment: “I was not expecting you to
send
me a letter, but to
bring
me a man, or men.” He then ordered John Hay to accompany Greeley to Niagara Falls, bearing a letter that spelled out the terms on which he was willing to deal with the Confederate emissaries.

Lincoln himself drafted the letter, consulting only Seward. Addressed “To Whom It May Concern,” it read: “Any proposition which embraces the restoration of peace, the integrity of the whole Union, and the abandonment of slavery... will be received and considered by the Executive government of the United States.” It also offered safe-conduct to the Confederate negotiators and “liberal terms on other substantial and collateral points.”

The letter reflected Lincoln’s careful balancing of political considerations against military needs. He could best promote his chances in the fall election by requiring only minimal conditions for beginning negotiations with the Confederates. If he announced that reunification of the nation was the sole condition for peace, he would cement the alliance that he had been trying for months to build with the War Democrats, who loyally supported his efforts to restore the Union, even though many of them had reservations about his emancipation policy. If, as he anticipated, Jefferson Davis rejected this reasonable, lenient offer, these Democrats could more easily favor the reelection of a Republican President.

But there was an unacceptable military risk in this approach. Conceivably the Confederates might accept reunion as a condition for discussing peace. If they did, they could propose a cease-fire during the progress of any negotiations, and Lincoln knew that the people were so war-weary and exhausted that it would be almost impossible to resume hostilities once arms were laid down. “An armistice—a cessation of hostilities—is the end of the struggle,” he concluded, “and the insurgents would be in peaceable possession of all that has been struggled for.”

Consequently he had to appear open to peace negotiations while proposing terms that would make them impossible. The first of his conditions, the restoration of the Union, was easy to predict; that was what the war, from the outset, had been about. But the second, requiring “the abandonment of slavery” as a condition for peace talks, was a surprise. It went considerably beyond his own Emancipation Proclamation or any law of Congress. The Emancipation Proclamation had freed slaves only in specified areas and had not ended the institution of slavery itself, and Congress had just failed to adopt the Thirteenth Amendment outlawing slavery. This condition was one Lincoln knew the Confederates would never accept.