Lincoln (87 page)

During this time, when his generals and admirals were concerting plans for a new assault upon the Confederacy, he did what he could to ensure success. It was his job to see that the commanders had everything they required in the way of men and weapons. Manpower now posed a real problem. There had been severe losses in a contest that had now lasted nearly two years. The terms for which many regiments had enlisted were about to expire, and soldiers wanted to go home. Thousands were absent without leave, and Lincoln’s offer of amnesty to those who returned to their regiments had only limited success. There were almost no new volunteers. It would be months before the new conscription act could bring in recruits.

Reluctantly, and after great hesitation, Lincoln turned to the one source of manpower he had vowed he could never use: African-Americans. It was a move that many abolitionists and black leaders had been urging since the beginning of the war. Frederick Douglass demanded, “Let the slaves and
free colored people be called into service, and formed into a liberating army, to march into the South and raise the banner of emancipation among the slaves.” But powerful conservative voices opposed the idea. Some maintained that Negroes would never fight, so that arms given to them would simply be seized by the Confederates; others predicted that armed blacks would rise against their masters and make of the South another Santo Domingo. Though the Confiscation Act of July 1862 specifically authorized Negro enlistments, the President was averse to pursuing so revolutionary a policy. When General David Hunter, in the Department of the South, attempted to raise black regiments in South Carolina, the President overruled him, stating that he “would employ all colored men as laborers, but would not promise to make soldiers of them.”

Lincoln’s resistance to using Negro troops persisted even after he issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. That proclamation was designed to persuade Confederates to return to the Union within one hundred days or else lose their slaves; it would have been illogical and counterproductive at the same time to announce that those slaves who were successful in escaping from their masters would be organized into regiments of the Union army. From Lincoln’s point of view it made more sense to talk of colonizing the blacks out of the country than to plan on making them soldiers. But the movement to enlist black troops had become irresistible. Even before the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, Stanton, without Lincoln’s knowledge, but also without his disapproval, authorized General Rufus Saxton to enlist blacks in South Carolina; General Benjamin F. Butler began mustering in free men of color in Louisiana; and in Kansas, James H. Lane’s Jayhawkers welcomed recruits of any race.

Under continuous pressure, especially from Sumner, whose support, or at least neutrality, was needed during the cabinet crisis, Lincoln began to shift his position on Negro troops. Perhaps he was influenced by several talks with Vice President Hamlin, who brought to the White House a delegation of young army officers, including one of his sons, to volunteer for command of colored troops. Surprised and moved that these promising young men were willing to risk their careers in a cause that aroused strong racial prejudice, Lincoln told them, “I suppose the time has come.” Recognizing that the Emancipation Proclamation had “in certain quarters” worked against recruitment for the Union armies, he concluded he ought to “take some benefit from it, if practicable” by enrolling black soldiers.

In his final Emancipation Proclamation he announced that former slaves would be received into the armed forces—though as yet he limited their role “to garrison and defend forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts.” An unstated corollary of the President’s new position was that plans to colonize blacks outside the United States were abandoned. Henceforth Lincoln recognized that blacks were to make their future as citizens of the United States.

Once converted, Lincoln began actively urging his commanders to employ black troops. For instance, he asked General John A. Dix, in command of Yorktown and Fort Monroe in Virginia, whether these posts “could not, in whole or in part, be garrisoned by colored troops, leaving the white forces now necessary at those places, to be employed elsewhere.”

By spring the President was urging a massive recruitment of Negro troops. When neither General Butler nor General Frémont accepted his offer to go South and raise a black army, Lincoln turned directly to men already in the field. “The colored population is the great
available
and yet
unavailed
of, force for restoring the Union,” he reminded Andrew Johnson, whom he had appointed military governor of Tennessee, and he urged Johnson to take the lead in raising a force of black troops. “The bare sight of fifty thousand armed, and drilled black soldiers on the banks of the Mississippi,” he predicted, “would end the rebellion at once.”

Eventually he found it necessary to be more aggressive. As the spring campaigns were about to get under way, he authorized General Daniel Ullmann of New York to raise a brigade of volunteers from the freedmen in Louisiana. In a more ambitious undertaking he and Stanton sent Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas into the Mississippi Valley to recruit blacks; by the end of 1863 Thomas had enrolled twenty regiments of African-Americans.

Along with supplying troops, Lincoln made it his responsibility to see that the armies had the best, and most up-to-date, arms. In this effort he was constantly hampered by the army bureaucracy, slow-moving and hidebound. James W. Ripley, his chief of ordnance, who had been born in 1794, was a traditionalist, who objected to every new idea and referred every innovation to a board of inquiry, where most were killed. Ripley was opposed to the breech-loading rifle, to the repeating rifle, to the “coffee-mill gun” (a precursor of the machine gun), and to virtually all other military novelties. The President found the navy more willing to experiment, as the enormous risk that Secretary Welles took in supporting the
Monitor
proved, but here, too, the bureaucratic machinery often worked creakingly.

Lincoln, on the other hand, was interested in any new ideas that promised to shorten the war—including a number that were wholly impractical. He spent a good deal of time with one Francis L. Capen, who claimed that he could save thousands of lives and millions of dollars through his expert prediction of the weather. After a trial of the scheme, Lincoln recorded on April 28: “It seems to me Mr. Capen knows nothing about the weather, in advance. He told me three days ago that it would not rain again till the 30th of April or 1st. of May. It is raining now and has been for ten hours. I can not spare any more time to Mr. Capen.”

Always interested in machinery and gadgets, Lincoln accumulated models of proposed new weapons—a cuirass of polished blue steel far too heavy for a soldier to carry into battle, a grenade that served as a presidential paperweight, a brass cannon, which he used to hold down land patents.
Himself an inventor, he wanted to give those who came up with fresh ideas a fair chance. Sometimes he tried out their inventions on the back lawn of the White House. More often he went to the Washington Navy Yard, where Dahlgren was always ready to test new weapons and explosives. Secretary Welles thought Dahlgren was a courtier who was trying to ingratiate himself with the President, and no doubt he hoped to advance his own career. But Lincoln found the lean fifty-two-year-old Philadelphian a man of broad-ranging intellectual curiosity and of sound judgment. Hardly a week passed that he did not visit the Navy Yard, sometimes to escape the pressure from job hunters and other visitors at the White House, more often to witness the trials of some new weapon or explosive.

He took great interest, for instance, in a repeating rifle of a French inventor named Rafael (or perhaps “Raphael”) and referred this “new patern of gun” to Dahlgren for testing. Dahlgren got good results and invited the President to a demonstration at the Navy Yard. Accompanied by Seward, Stanton, and a correspondent of the
New York Tribune,
the President spent more than two hours watching the machine gun shoot at targets on the Potomac. Afterward there was talk about how the mechanism of the gun prevented the escape of gas at the breech, and the President said, with a mischievous glance at the
Tribune
correspondent, “Now have any of you heard of any machine, or invention, for preventing the escape of ‘gas’ from newspaper establishments?”

The chief benefit from the President’s exertions was perhaps that he got out of doors and improved his health. Few of the new weapons he examined proved practicable or ever got into the hands of the soldiers. What Gideon Welles called Lincoln’s “well-intentioned but irregular proceedings” in the testing of new weapons made him “liable to be constantly imposed upon by sharpers and adventurers.”

After Congress adjourned in March, Lincoln found himself, unexpectedly, with time on his hands. There were no senators to be soothed, no representatives to be placated, no bills to be signed. Talk of foreign mediation had died down, and rumors of Copperhead uprisings in the West had abated. One day in April, after a long visit with Dahlgren at the Navy Yard, the President remarked good-humoredly that it was time for him to leave. “Well I will go home,” he said; “I had no business here; but, as the lawyer said, I had none anywhere else.”

That moment of tranquillity signified that the plans for a great spring assault on the Confederacy were finally in place. A huge armada, including both ironclad monitors and conventional warships, was being prepared to attack Charleston, the heart of the Confederacy. Generals Grant and Sherman were readying a new campaign to capture Vicksburg, the last major link
between the eastern states of the Confederacy and the trans-Mississippi region. From New Orleans, General Banks was supposed to push north to join forces with Grant. In eastern Tennessee, Rosecrans was poised for a drive that would capture Chattanooga, break the most important rail connection between the seaboard and Mississippi Valley states of the Confederacy, and, most important of all from Lincoln’s point of view, liberate the longsuffering Unionists of the mountain regions. And in the East, Hooker’s vast Army of the Potomac was eager to advance against Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.

Anxiously Lincoln watched all these elements in his grand strategy that could bring about the collapse of the Confederacy. He frequently consulted Secretary Welles about the naval expedition off South Carolina, and he went almost daily to the War Department to learn of preparations and progress for the military campaigns. He kept the Army of the Potomac under closest scrutiny, partly because it was so near at hand, partly because he had residual doubts about Hooker. But that general in the months since he assumed command had proved, for all his bluster and bragging, an expert at army organization, and the Army of the Potomac was in better physical shape and had higher morale than at any time in its history.

In early April, Lincoln, perhaps at the suggestion of Mary, who thought her husband needed respite from the cares of office, decided to visit Hooker’s headquarters in northern Virginia. The general’s welcoming telegram set the tone for the visit: “I... only regret that your party is not as large as our hospitality.”

Accompanied by Mrs. Lincoln and Tad, together with Attorney General Bates, Dr. Anson G. Henry, an old friend from Springfield, Noah Brooks, the Washington correspondent of the
Sacramento Union,
and a few others, Lincoln sailed down the Potomac on the unarmed
Carrie Martin
and, after being delayed by a snowstorm, was taken by train to Hooker’s headquarters. On April 6 he reviewed the entire cavalry of the Army of the Potomac, which Hooker had recently reorganized into a single corps, and the soldiers, though they found him “an ungainly looking man,” gave him a hearty welcome because, as one lieutenant wrote in his diary, they “respect him for his integrity, and good management of the war.” Mrs. Lincoln received a less favorable rating as “a pleasant, but not an intelligent looking woman.” But Tad was the star of the occasion. Booted and spurred, he galloped along on a pony, clinging tenaciously to the saddle with his gray cloak billowing behind him.

During the next three days, in addition to visiting soldiers in the army hospital, the President reviewed more than 60,000 of the troops under Hooker’s command. Most of the time he rode a large bay horse, and if, as one soldier remarked, his appearance was “not very graceful, and... hardly calculated to inspire much admiration,” he was nevertheless roundly cheered by the soldiers as he rode past them. Mary Lincoln, accompanied
by Attorney General Bates, watched the reviews from a carriage drawn by four spanking bays. Though the reviews were exhausting, they were impressive, and Lincoln did not fail to notice the high state of readiness: “Uniforms were clean, arms bright as new, equipments in sp[l]endid condition.” As the presidential party left the army headquarters, Lincoln could afford a feeling of satisfaction that he had done everything possible to make the forthcoming campaign a success, and the salute he received at Aquia Creek from all the vessels in port and locomotives on shore, with whistles blown, bells rung, and flags displayed, should have given him a sense of confidence.

But with his native caution, the President was not ready to predict victory. When asked about the chances for Union success in the operations that were already under way, he remarked, “I expect the best, but I am prepared for the worst.” Even during the euphoria of his visit to army headquarters, some nagging doubts arose. While he was still in Hooker’s camp, discouraging information trickled in from Confederate newspapers and rebel pickets about the assault on Charleston.

Lincoln was also troubled by some things he saw and heard at Hooker’s camp. In describing his plans to the President, the general frequently prefaced remarks with “When I get to Richmond” or “After we have taken Richmond.” Taking Noah Brooks aside, Lincoln remarked in a whisper: “That is the most depressing thing about Hooker. It seems to me that he is over-confident.” He was also troubled that Hooker and his generals were debating whether the best road to Richmond was by going around Lee’s left flank or moving around his right flank, and he jotted down for their guidance a memorandum that combined common sense and a superior military insight: “Our prime object is the enemies’ army in front of us, and is not with, or about, Richmond—at all, unless it be incidental to the main object.” Finally, as he heard plans of battle discussed, he feared his new commander of the Army of the Potomac might follow his predecessors in throwing in his forces a few at a time. Not wishing to assume personal responsibility for planning a battle, the President just before leaving told Hooker and General Darius N. Couch: “I want to impress upon you two gentlemen in your next fight... put in all of your men.”