Lincoln (88 page)

Over the next few weeks all of Lincoln’s forebodings seemed to be justified. On April 7, while he was with the Army of the Potomac, Samuel F. Du Pont’s fleet of nine ironclads steamed into Charleston harbor and attacked Fort Sumter. By the end of the day five of Du Pont’s ironclads had been badly damaged, and he was forced to withdraw. Lincoln, who, as Gideon Welles observed, had “often a sort of intuitive sagacity,” never had high hopes for this largest naval operation of the Civil War; Du Pont’s dispatches and movements reminded him of McClellan’s. All he could do now was to put the best face possible on this major defeat. To someone who remarked that Du Pont had suffered a repulse at Charleston, he replied sharply: “A check, sir, not a repulse.” He ordered the fleet to hold its position inside
the bar near Charleston, in order to prevent the Confederates from erecting new defenses or batteries.

Equally disappointing were the operations on the Mississippi River. After Grant’s army spent much of the spring digging a canal on the Louisiana side of the Mississippi River in the hope of bypassing Vicksburg, the banks caved in, and the whole enterprise was abandoned. An attempt by Union warships to run the batteries of Vicksburg was successful but costly. Then Grant, taking no one into his confidence, marched his troops down the west side of the river, crossed into Mississippi, and disappeared, with no one in Washington knowing where he was or what he planned to do. Banks, after a delay so long that his movement was of no assistance to Grant, moved up the Mississippi and staged an ill-timed and bloody assault on Port Hudson, Louisiana.

By way of contrast, in Tennessee, Rosecrans offered only inaction. He seemed to operate under the curious idea that the art of war permitted only one campaign to be fought at a time. While Grant was moving against Vicksburg, the rules required him to remain stationary in eastern Tennessee. Nothing Lincoln could do or say could disabuse Rosecrans of this notion. Instead of staging an offensive against Bragg, or, at the least, sending reinforcements to Grant, he spent his time in worrying about alleged slights and indignities. Lincoln was finally obliged to assure him, “I really
can not
say that I have heard any complaints of you.” But Rosecrans was unconvinced and remained inactive.

Lincoln watched most closely the Army of the Potomac, where, on April 28, Hooker began moving 70,000 of his men across the Rappahannock River and threatened to crush Lee’s flank. The President had asked to be informed of Hooker’s strategy before the battle, and he wanted frequent dispatches once the fighting began. When he did not receive sufficiently detailed information, he wired General Daniel Butterfield, Hooker’s chief of staff: “Where is Gen. Hooker? Where is Sedgwick? where is Stoneman?” His concern was, once more, that all the Union forces be thrown into the engagement.

The concern was warranted. Hooker, after a most promising start, paused at Chancellorsville and failed to push his offensive. Lee took advantage of his hesitation, boldly divided his much smaller army, and sent “Stonewall” Jackson by a circuitous route to fall on Hooker’s right. The Confederates gained another major victory, and Hooker was forced to retreat to the north side of the Rappahannock.

News of the battle of Chancellorsville was slow in reaching Washington. Highly optimistic predictions after the first day’s fighting withered as more and more bad news came in. Lincoln spent most of the time at the War Department, showing “a feverish anxiety to get facts.” He feared that Hooker had been licked, although he still held on to a shred of hope. But in midafternoon of May 6, holding a telegram in his hand, he came into the room in the White House where Dr. Henry and Noah Brooks were talking. His
face was ashen, and his voice trembled as he said to his guests, “Read it—news from the Army.” At no other time, Brooks thought, did the President appear “so broken, so dispirited, and so ghostlike.” As Brooks and Dr. Henry read of Hooker’s defeat and his retreat back across the river, Lincoln paced up and down the room, exclaiming: “My God! my God! What will the country say! What will the country say!”

A New Birth of Freedom

T
he weeks after the battle of Chancellorsville were among the most depressing of Lincoln’s presidency. Everything went wrong—at Charleston, at Vicksburg, in eastern Tennessee, and, especially, in northern Virginia. Failure of Union arms led to renewed protests against the war and to demands for peace negotiations. Controversy over the arrest of Vallandigham and the suppression of civil liberties mounted. So did complaints about the incompetence of Lincoln’s administration. At one end of the political spectrum a Democratic politician addressing a huge peace rally in New York City characterized the President as a donkey in a china shop and urged, “You must get him out or he will smash the crockery.” At the other end Missouri Radical Republicans attacked Lincoln for his compromising, indecisive course and for refusing to put abolitionist generals like Frémont and Butler in command of the armies. Even more disturbing were reports that some army officers, like Major Charles J. Whiting of the Second United States Cavalry, were denouncing this “damned abolition nigger war,” claiming that “the President had exceeded his authority in proclaiming the niggers free, and in suspending the writ of Habeas Corpus, and that Republicans would not have the war cease, if they could.... They were all making money out of it, and consequently it was for their interest to prolong the war.”

Grimly Lincoln informed his critics that it might be “a misfortune for the nation that he was elected President. But having been elected by the people, he meant to be President, and to perform his duty according to
his
best understanding, if he had to die for it.” But the downward spiral of events during the past six months finally convinced the reluctant President that he had to exert more active leadership, both in the conduct of military operations
and in the shaping of public opinion. Firmly taking the lead, he recovered much of the ground he had lost during the previous months of indecision and inaction.

The immediate issue after Chancellorsville was what to do about the Army of the Potomac. In public the President tried to be of good cheer, but in private he predicted that effects of the defeat at Chancellorsville “would be more serious and injurious than any previous act of the war.”

Immediately he set about determining responsibility for the disaster, and on May 6, accompanied by Halleck, he went to the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac at Falmouth, Virginia. Pleased to discover that the “troops are none the worse for the campaign,” he let it be known that he was “agreeably surprised with the situation.” Less encouraging was the mental state of their commander. Hooker, as always, was “cool, clear and satisfied,” unwilling to recognize his mistakes and unable to learn from his defeat.

In deciding on the general’s future, Lincoln was torn. He genuinely liked Hooker, who had shown himself candid and brave. He also learned that the general had skillfully planned the battle and had been on the verge of victory until he was stunned by a falling beam when a Confederate cannonball hit his headquarters at the Chancellor house. Sardonically the President mused that if the ball had been aimed lower—so as to hit Hooker—the battle would have been a great Union success. On leaving Falmouth he announced to a newspaper correspondent that “his confidence in Gen. Hooker and his army [was] unshaken.” When another reporter asked whether he intended to replace the general, he replied with some displeasure that since he had tried McClellan “a number of times, he saw no reason why he should not try General Hooker twice.”

He was determined, though, to keep a closer personal control of the general’s future operations. “What next?” he asked Hooker. Did the general have in mind a new movement against the enemy that would “help to supersede the bad moral effect of the recent one”? Hooker remarked that less than one-third of his army had been engaged at Chancellorsville and promised that in the next action “the operations of all the Corps” would be under his personal supervision. Lincoln did not remind him that was exactly what he had instructed the general to do before the battle.

Hooker had a plan—a hopelessly wrongheaded one. Learning that Lee was moving north of the Rappahannock, he proposed to cross that river and attack the Confederate rear guard at Fredericksburg. Promptly Lincoln warned, “I would not take any risk of being entangled upon the river, like an ox jumped half over a fence, and liable to be torn by dogs, front and rear, without a fair chance to gore one way or kick the other.” But Hooker seemed not to learn. Within a week he suggested that if Lee invaded the North the Army of the Potomac should march south and attack Richmond.
Quietly Lincoln reminded him of the dangers of this harebrained scheme and pointed out a basic truth so many of his commanders seemed unable to grasp:
“Lee’s
Army, and not
Richmond,
is your true objective point.”

Certainly Hooker was obtuse, but the President himself was in part responsible for the general’s failure. Though Lincoln had excellent strategic sense, which improved as the war progressed, he was not a professional military man and knew that he was not competent to draft proper orders for a military campaign. He also knew how much military men objected to what they regarded as meddling by a civilian. Consequently he deprecated the advice he offered as “my poor mite” and advanced ideas hesitantly, “incompetent as I may be.” Expressing his wishes as suggestions, rather than commands, he relied on Halleck, his general-in-chief, to translate his ideas into military orders that the armies could follow.

Besides being cumbersome, the system could not work because of Halleck. That general, as Lincoln knew very well, was unwilling to take the initiative or assume responsibility. Like McClellan, Halleck was a master of procrastination when he did not agree with the President’s ideas. He could always find technical reasons why Lincoln’s suggestions could not be carried out, and the President usually yielded to his objections, saying, “It being strictly a military question, it is proper I should defer to Halleck whom I have called here to counsel, advise and direct, in these matters, where he is an expert.” Gideon Welles accurately described the resulting stalemate: “No one more fully realizes the magnitude of the occasion, and the vast consequences involved than the President—he wishes all to be done that can be done, but yet [in army operations] will not move or do except by the consent of the dull, stolid, inefficient and incompetent General-in-Chief.”

In dealing with Hooker, Lincoln faced the further problem that Halleck disliked the commander of the Army of the Potomac, who had once borrowed money from him in California and failed to pay it back; indeed, Halleck had opposed Hooker’s appointment. For his part, Hooker despised the general-in-chief and would have as little as possible to do with him. When he took command of the Army of the Potomac, he had insisted on communicating directly with the President, bypassing the War Department, yet, now, with Lee on the march, he complained that he had “not enjoyed the confidence of the Major General Commanding the Army.”

As the Confederates swept through western Maryland, many in Washington panicked. Rumor had it that a steamer was anchored in the Potomac, ready to take the President and his cabinet to safety when the rebels arrived. But Lincoln was in excellent spirits, spending much of his time in the telegraph office of the War Department, joking and reading the latest dispatches. He improved the occasion to instruct the sober quartermaster general, Montgomery C. Meigs, about the writings of Orpheus C. Kerr. “Any one who has not read them must be a heathen,” he exclaimed. The humorist’s papers delighted him, he said, except when their wit was turned on him; then he found them unsuccessful and rather disgusting. “Now the hits that are given
to you, Mr. Welles I can enjoy,” he laughingly told the Secretary of the Navy, “but I dare say they may have disgusted you while I was laughing at them. So
vice versa
as regards myself.”

Lincoln’s good cheer stemmed from his conviction that Lee’s invasion offered a chance to bag the entire Confederate army. The Army of the Potomac, facing the rebels on Union soil, could not “help beating them, if we have the man,” Lincoln told Welles, but he worried that “Hooker may commit the same fault as McClellan and lose his chance.”

That remark revealed his doubts about Hooker. Like everybody else, he heard reports that the general was drinking too much. He knew, too, that there had been much grumbling against Hooker since the defeat at Chancellorsville. Both General Darius N. Couch and General Henry W. Slocum asked the President to remove Hooker. In a long interview at the White House, General John F. Reynolds, disavowing any desire to command the Army of the Potomac himself, urged Lincoln to replace Hooker with his fellow Pennsylvanian George Gordon Meade. Lincoln demurred, saying that he was not inclined to throw away a gun because it had once missed fire but “would pick the lock and try it again,” but he thought the complaints sufficiently serious to warn Hooker that he did not have the full confidence of some of his division commanders.