CHAPTER 22
ALL PERSONS HELD AS SLAVES … SHALL BE THEN, THENCEFORWARD, AND FOREVER FREE.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Emancipation Proclamation, January 1, 1863
BRAHAM LINCOLN DID NOT GO TO BED ON NEW YEAR’S EVE. AS revelers celebrated in streets nearby, he paced back and forth on the White House second floor. For weeks he had been absorbed with finalizing the wording of his Emancipation Proclamation.
In the early hours of January 1, 1863, Lincoln walked from his bedroom in the west end of the White House to his office in the east end. He sat at the long oak table cluttered with rolled-up maps, newspapers, letters, and military orders, and reached for the proclamation that had become the subject of so much debate and controversy in recent months.
More than anyone, Lincoln understood the implications of the signing to take place that afternoon. The war had now convulsed the nation for more than two and a half years; some had started calling it “Mr. Lincoln’s war.” In the spring of 1861, most people in the North had predicted a quick victory, but the question on everyone’s mind now was: How long would this war go on?
As the first rays of sun came through his office’s east window, Lincoln reviewed three long pieces of paper, determined to revise the proclamation one more time before signing it. He studied again the central paragraph.
And by virtue of the power, and for the purpose aforesaid, I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be free, and that the Executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons.
How long he had brooded over the decision about slavery announced in these words.
IN THE LAST WEEKS OF DECEMBER, critics had besieged Lincoln from all sides. He barely mentioned the proclamation in his annual message to Congress on December 1, 1862, and many wondered whether Lincoln still intended to hold fast to it. Abolitionists were acclaiming Lincoln’s initiative but grumbling that it did not go far enough. African-American leader Frederick Douglass wondered aloud, “What if the President fails in this trial hour, what if he now listens to the demon slavery—and rejects the entreaties of the Angel of Liberty?” Old-line Republican supporters were concerned about how the proclamation would affect the morale of troops, who, they repeated, had signed on to save the Union, not to free slaves. Emboldened by Democratic gains in the 1862 elections, Democratic newspapers, such as the Chicago Times, predicted that Lincoln would withdraw the final proclamation.
Republican senators Charles Sumner and Orville Browning offered opposite recommendations to Lincoln. On December 27, 1862, Sumner called on the president at the White House. He brought with him a memorial signed by ministers calling for him to “stand by” his proclamation. The Massachusetts senator talked with Lincoln about how many persons were “impatient” that the act be signed. Lincoln responded, he “could not stop the Proclamation if he would, & would not if he could.”
Browning, who always had personal access to the president, called at the White House to convey his belief that the proclamation “was fraught with evil … and would do much injury.” A conservative Republican, Browning had previously told the president that he believed the announcement of the proclamation in September was the main reason behind the disappointing biennial election results. Resigned to the fact that the president intended to sign it, Browning concluded his diary for 1862 with the words, “There is no hope. The proclamation will come—God grant it may not be productive of the mischief I fear.” Lincoln and Browning had enjoyed a close relationship in recent years, but their friendship would begin to cool once Lincoln signed the proclamation.
Early Monday morning, December 29, 1862, Lincoln assembled his notes and wrote a draft of the proclamation. He gave it to John Nicolay and asked his secretary to make printed copies for members of the cabinet. Lincoln convened his regular cabinet meeting at 10 a.m. He read aloud the final draft, asking the cabinet to make suggestions to him in writing. Secretary of State Seward expressed concern that the proclamation, which he supported in principle, would lead to a total collapse of order in the South. He recommended language urging the freed slaves “to abstain from all violence unless in necessary self-defense.” Treasury Secretary Chase presented a new preamble that was lengthier than Lincoln’s whole proclamation. Lincoln’s original manuscript copy has not survived, but the copies handed out to Seward, Chase, Edward Bates, and Montgomery Blair do, along with their comments.
On Wednesday, December 31, 1862, Lincoln, having read the cabinet members’ written responses, convened a special cabinet meeting to consider the proclamation a final time. Chase proposed adding a “felicitous” concluding sentence. He believed it important for Lincoln to offer justifications for this bold act beyond military necessity. He wanted Lincoln to invoke both the Constitution and God. Lincoln thanked them for their suggestions and told the cabinet “he would complete the document.”
After the meeting concluded, Lincoln greeted a committee of New York abolitionist ministers headed by George Cheever, pastor of the Church of the Puritans, who had authored God Against Slavery in 1857, and William Goodell, who had helped organize both the American Anti-Slavery Society and the Liberty Party. The ministers wanted some confirmation that Lincoln was actually going to sign the proclamation. Lincoln would only say, “Tomorrow at noon, you shall know—and the country shall know—my decision.”
Now, on the morning of January 1, 1863, as he sat alone at his table, he decided to ignore the bulk of his cabinet’s recommendations. He did work with Chase’s suggestion, which became a new final paragraph: “And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God.”
While Lincoln was bent over the table revising, his wife and oldest son appeared in his office. Before retiring the previous evening, Mary had asked her husband, “What do you intend doing?” Now Lincoln looked up, his face worn with lines. Robert Lincoln would comment later that there was a “presence” in his father’s manner that silenced both his mother and himself.
Lincoln completed his editing. A clerk was called and asked to carry the document to the State Department where a final copy would be prepared for Lincoln’s signature.
At 10:45 a.m. William Seward and his son, Frederick, climbed the stairs to the president’s office bearing the newly revised proclamation. While preparing to sign it, the president noticed an error in the transcription. He made the necessary change and asked Seward to have a new copy engrossed, completed in a fine handwriting. By now it was nearly eleven o’clock and Lincoln needed to prepare to meet his New Year’s Day guests in the Blue Room.
Outside the White House, the streets of Washington had been thronged with persons eager to welcome in the New Year since early morning. The day had dawned bright and clear. People greeted one another with “warm salutations.” Despite the tenseness in the capital in the wake of the demoralizing defeat at Fredericksburg in December, the festivities of New Year’s Day seemed to hold out the prospect of a hopeful and better future.
The crowd, larger than usual, knew how special this reception would be. New Year’s Day receptions at the White House were a long tradition, and on January 1, 1863, persons of all walks of life wanted to be present when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. People lined up two and three abreast along Pennsylvania Avenue stretching back toward Seventeenth Street.
The official guests entered the White House at 11 a.m., beginning with the diplomatic corps arrayed in their best finery from the fashions of the various countries. The nine judges of the Supreme Court came next, led by the aged Roger Taney. Gideon Welles, secretary of the navy, attended, but most cabinet members hosted their own receptions at their residences. A group of army officers, who had assembled at the War Department, arrived together, led by General Henry Halleck.
At twelve noon, the large White House gates were opened and the crowd surged in. Delegations from Maine to California had been waiting in line for hours. The civil and the uncivil pressed and pushed their way the length of the grand portico toward the main entrance. A small detachment of police, backed up by members of a Pennsylvania regiment, tried to maintain some order, but there was little. Visitors were admitted in groups at intervals. As soon as one group had entered, another was passed through. Once inside, the “scuffle” of the annual New Year’s Day reception began. The plush carpets had been covered to protect them from the mud.
Abraham and Mary Lincoln stood in the Blue Room in the midst of the melee. This was Mary’s first public reception since the death of Willie the previous February. Some of the surviving soldiers of the War of 1812, known as the “old defenders,” stood out among the visitors. Lincoln was flanked on his left by his outsized Illinois friend Ward Hill Lamon, acting as marshal for the occasion. Lamon obtained the name of each guest and announced the person to the president. Each person was eager to shake the hand of the “pres,” as he was familiarly called. Lincoln pumped each hand in return. After three hours of hand shaking, the president was exhausted and his right hand was swollen. Finally, at shortly after 2 p.m., the last of the crowd exited the White House.
The president returned upstairs to his office. Visibly drooping with fatigue, he prepared to sign the proclamation. As he took up his gold pen and dipped it in ink, “his hand trembled, so that he held the pen with difficulty,” Senator Charles Sumner observed. Illinois congressman Isaac Arnold reported that Lincoln told him when he grasped the pen, “My hand and arm trembled so violently, that I could not write.” Unusually, Lincoln signed his full name in a slow and careful hand. He looked up and allowed himself a little laugh, exclaiming, “That will do.” When it was all over, Lincoln sighed, “I never, in my life, felt more certain that I was doing right, than I do in signing this paper.”
EVEN ON THIS DAY OF CELEBRATION, Lincoln’s continuing struggle to find competent military leadership intruded. After the Union army’s de moralizing defeat at Fredericksburg, General Ambrose Burnside, commander of the Army of the Potomac, traveled to Washington and requested a meeting with the president. They met briefly on December 31, but Lincoln convened a larger meeting on the morning of January 1 that included General in Chief Halleck and Secretary of War Stanton.
Lincoln had developed a strong liking for Burnside, a man with large blue eyes and a winning smile. His regard was only strengthened when the general accepted responsibility for the defeat at Fredericksburg, an attitude so unlike that of the previous commander. When Burnside arrived, he gave the president a letter he had written the night before at Willard’s Hotel. “Burn,” as his men called him, appeared outwardly strong, but inside self-doubt ate away at his ability to command. In his letter he told Lincoln, “It is of the utmost importance that you be surrounded and supported by men who have the confidence of the people and of the army.” Because Burnside believed he no longer retained that confidence, he asked to be relieved so that he might “retire to private life.” He went on to say that neither Stanton nor Halleck had the confidence of the army, and they should resign also. Lincoln read the letter, and, without saying a word, returned it to Burnside.
The four men talked about Burnside’s plan to cross the Rappahannock again. Burnside, cordial but agitated, did not defend his plan but simply expanded on the reasons for it. Lincoln turned to Halleck and asked for his opinion. Halleck hesitated, hemming and hawing. The tension between Burnside and Halleck was evident. The president, irritated, continued to press Halleck for his recommendation; the general in chief replied that the decision was the prerogative of the field commander. Seeing that he was not getting anywhere, Lincoln concluded the meeting.
After Burnside, Stanton, and Halleck left, Lincoln wrote a letter to Halleck instructing him to go with Burnside, assess the situation, consult with the other officers, and then either approve or disapprove the plan. “If in such a difficulty as this you do not help,” Lincoln wrote, “you fail me precisely in the point for which I sought your assistance. Your military skill is useless to me, if you will not do this.” Lincoln gave the letter to Stanton to deliver to Halleck.
When Halleck received the letter, he resigned. Lincoln, finding himself caught in an intolerable situation between a man who acted more like a clerk than a commander, but with no one else to take his place, withdrew his letter. He wrote on the bottom, “Withdrawn, because considered harsh by Gen. Halleck.”
LINCOLN DID NOT ACCEPT Burnside’s resignation. He wished to give him another opportunity to succeed.
Relieved by Lincoln’s support, Burnside’s spirits were revived. He worked long hours with little sleep in an effort to redeem himself and took advantage of the unusual dry winter weather of the first weeks of January to prepare for battle.
Burnside did not intend to keep his troops cooped up in winter quarters. He was determined to win a victory in January that was denied him in December. On a cold, clear January day he mounted his walleyed gray horse, Major, for “a fine ride of 15 or 18 miles,” bound for a personal reconnaissance of the upper fords of the Rappahannock, looking for the best place where his huge army might cross above Fredericks-burg.
On Monday morning, January 19, 1863, Burnside gave the orders for his 130,000-man army to begin the march up the Rappahannock. The river, which traversed 184 miles across northern Virginia, had become an unofficial boundary between North and South. The troops initially marched quickly on dry roads. Intelligence, which would later prove faulty, brought news that James Longstreet’s corps had departed for Tennessee. Burnside hoped this might be the beginning of a great Union victory.
His hopes were quickly dashed. After three weeks of clear weather, it began to rain heavily, turning the roads into a quagmire. Wagons bogged down. Horses struggled to pull the heavy artillery. After two days, Burnside ordered the troops back to winter camp. What became dubbed derisively the “Mud March” resulted in yet another failure for the Army of the Potomac.
Burnside learned that Joseph Hooker and William B. Franklin, two key senior officers, had openly criticized his plans to their troops. He was determined that there should be accountability for the defeatist chatter. He headed for Washington, and, after considerable difficulty because of the continuing horrendous weather, made it shortly after 7 a.m. on January 24, 1863. He went directly to see Lincoln, carrying Order Number Eight, which outlined his determination to fire or transfer Hooker, William Franklin, and other complainers who he believed had sowed dissension in the ranks, or be himself relieved of command.
The next day, January 25, 1863, Lincoln welcomed Burnside into his office at 10 a.m. The president thanked Burnside for his service and told him he had decided to replace him. Burnside was reassigned to the Department of the Ohio.
WHO WOULD BE BURNSIDE’S REPLACEMENT? At a time of low morale, both in the country and throughout the Army of the Potomac, Lincoln understood how much was riding on making the right appointment. Whoever he chose would be the fourth commander of the Army of the Potomac in less than two years. Lincoln determined not to consider George McClellan or any of McClellan’s partisans, some of whom the president now transferred out of the Army of the Potomac. He may have thought of Western commanders, such as Ulysses S. Grant or William S. Rosecrans, but they were doing well where they were. Besides, Lincoln did not want to antagonize his Eastern soldiers with another imported Western commander, as had happened six months earlier with the appointment of John Pope.
Lincoln offered a surprise when he decided to appoint Joseph Hooker, even after all of Hooker’s sniping at Burnside behind his back. Lincoln did not consult Stanton, Halleck, or members of his cabinet. At a White House reception the evening of January 24, 1863, Henry J. Raymond, editor of the New York Times, warned Lincoln about Hooker’s loose talk. Lincoln put his hand on Raymond’s shoulder and, speaking softly into his ear, not wanting to be overheard, said, “That is all true. Hooker does talk badly, but the trouble is, he is stronger with the country today than any other man.” Lincoln’s primary priority in early 1863 had become the public and the soldiers.
Born in Hadley, Massachusetts, and a graduate of West Point, “Fighting Joe” Hooker was handsome, with wavy brown hair and blue eyes. He had earned his nickname for his courage at Williamsburg in the battle on the Virginia peninsula in the spring of 1862. Hooker seemed to be everywhere, calmly directing his men from the vantage point of “Colonel,” his large white horse. Hooker did not like his nickname because he believed it did him “incalculable injury,” leading the public to think “I am a hot headed, furious young fellow” not given to calm and thoughtful military leadership. He earned a reputation for caring about his soldiers during the siege at Yorktown. He commanded a division in the second battle of Bull Run and was wounded in the foot at Antietam in September 1862.
If Lincoln may have earlier overlooked some of the flaws of McClellan, Pope, Halleck, and Burnside, he made the appointment of Hooker with his eyes wide open. Lincoln knew that Hooker came with both assets and liabilities. Hooker’s chief assets were that he was an independent and outspoken soldier. Hooker’s chief liabilities were the same two qualities. In the Mexican War, he had criticized General Winfield Scott, testifying against him in a court of inquiry. Assigned to command the Center Grand Division under Burnside at Fredericksburg, he was “incensed” from the start of Burn’s much-too-slow strategy to cross the Rappahannock. He tried to persuade Burnside not to continue the suicidal attack on Marye’s Heights.
Abraham Lincoln made a surprise appointment in choosing “Fighting Joe” Hooker to become the fourth commander of the Army of the Potomac in January 1863.
When Lincoln made his decision to appoint Hooker, he summoned him to the White House. The president told him,
I think it best for you to know that there are some things in regard to which, I am not quite satisfied with you. … I think that during Gen. Burnside’s command of the Army, you have taken counsel of your ambition, and thwarted him as much as you could, in which you did a great wrong to the country, and to a most meritorious and honorable brother officer.
One can only imagine Hooker’s expression when Lincoln then said, “Of course it was not for this, but in spite of it, that I have given you the command.” Lincoln had heard that among Hooker’s headstrong loose talk he had made the suggestion that what the country might need in this crisis was a dictator. Lincoln told Hooker, “Only those generals who gain successes, can set up dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship.”
Lincoln later wrote what he had said in Hooker’s letter of appointment. He mingled affirmation with admonition in the remarkable letter, all in a tone of kindness, even humor. Several months later, Hooker told reporter Noah Brooks, “That is just such a letter as a father might write to a son. It is a beautiful letter, and although I think he was harder on me than I deserved, I will say I love the man who wrote it.”
As a part of his appointment, Hooker requested that he report directly to the president, wanting to bypass Henry Halleck. Hooker and Halleck had studied together at West Point, but bad blood had developed in their days in California in the 1850s. Apparently Hooker owed Halleck money, and Halleck had publicly disapproved of Hooker’s drinking and carousing. Lincoln, sometimes too willing to oblige, acquiesced to Hooker’s request. His decision to bypass the chain of command would pose problems in the future.
With a new commander in place and no immediate advance planned, Lincoln could finally step back from his daily regimen as commander in chief. No president, before or after, ever spent nearly as much time in the day-to-day, hour-by-hour command of the armed forces of the nation. Lincoln’s nonstop work was taking a tremendous toll on him.
WHO DID THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION FREE? Critics quickly created an oft-repeated maxim that the only slaves emancipated were outside the reach of the Northern army. The proclamation exempted the border states, as well as Tennessee, plus areas of Virginia and Louisiana occupied by Union troops. The proclamation was not so much a fact accomplished as a promise to be realized.
If the Emancipation Proclamation could be achieved, it would be by the marching feet of a liberating army. But up until now this had been “a white man’s war.” By the middle of the nineteenth century, most Americans had forgotten that African-Americans fought in both the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. Blacks had been barred from state militias since 1792. The regular army, including West Point, did not recruit or enroll black soldiers.
If critics pointed to the weaknesses of the proclamation, it contained one potentially large strength: “And I further declare and make known, that such persons of suitable condition, will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service.” But the promise came with a question. Did Lincoln intend that freed slaves join the Union army and navy? If so, in what roles? Even Lincoln’s closest colleagues were not sure what he intended at the beginning of 1863.
The second Confiscation Act of July 17, 1862, gave Lincoln the power to employ blacks in any way he chose, but he had been reluctant to use them as soldiers. Since early in the war, slaves had sought refuge in Union camps. Soldiers quickly learned that some slaves were willing bearers of information about Confederate troops and movements.
The overwhelming majority of Northern soldiers did not sign up to free black slaves or fight beside them in the Union army. The attitudes of these soldiers combined a hatred of blacks with a greater hatred of the system of slavery they saw as a foundation of the Confederate states.
Recruitment of slaves for the Union military had taken place piecemeal in South Carolina, Louisiana, and Kansas in 1862, without either Lincoln’s affirmation or authorization. In July 1862, days before sharing his plans for an Emancipation Proclamation with his cabinet, Lincoln had told Senator Orville Browning that the arming of black soldiers “would produce dangerous & fatal dissatisfaction in our army, and do more injury than good.” After his public announcement of his plans for emancipation in September, the suggestion of arming black soldiers incited as much or more antagonism from Democrats and from Unionists in border states than the idea of emancipation itself.
AFTER MONTHS OF FOREBODING, Frederick Douglass was elated when he heard that Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation. He had been encouraging the arming of black troops since the start of the war. From his editor’s desk in Rochester, and on platforms across the North, Douglass had criticized the president in 1861 and 1862 for fighting a war with his white hand while his black hand was tied behind his back.
Now, at the beginning of 1863, Douglass made plans to act upon the military promise within the civil promise of emancipation. In February, he traveled two thousand miles to encourage black enlistment. In an address delivered at the Cooper Institute in New York, Douglass declared, “The colored man only waits for honorable admission into the service of the country. They know that who would be free, themselves must strike the blow, and they long for the opportunity to strike that blow.” On his tour, Douglass was struck by the clash of twin emotions—white Northern discouragement with the war effort and eagerness on the part of blacks to enlist and serve.
As black leaders, abolitionists, and radical Republicans promoted the deployment of black troops, Lincoln moved, quietly, behind the scenes. All the while he was being encouraged, if not pushed, by Secretary of War Stanton, with whom he had forged a strong working relationship.
When Stanton replaced Simon Cameron in Lincoln’s cabinet in January 1862, he quickly learned that Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase stood alone in the cabinet in arguing that it made no sense to fight a war while refusing to deal with the underlying cause of the rebellion. Stanton had made himself acceptable to the Buchanan-Breckinridge cabinet by muting his own views, and he did the same thing in his first months in the Lincoln cabinet.
In his early work with Lincoln, Stanton recognized in the president a cautious if not apprehensive attitude about the arming of black troops. In Stanton’s dealings with Congress, however, he found himself gravitating toward the ideas of the Benjamin Wade–Zachariah Chandler– Thaddeus Stevens troika, who were far ahead of Lincoln in seeing the absolute necessity of using black troops to win the war.
After January 1, 1863, Lincoln followed Stanton’s lead in the arming of black troops. But moving African-Americans from their role as contraband laborers in the rear to trained soldiers at the front would require navigating a tricky obstacle course. The initial obstacle was the white mind-set that blacks, after years of plantation life, did not have the courage to step forward and fight, but would melt away at the first sign of struggle. A second obstacle was the deep prejudice of most white officers from the North who were unwilling to see black soldiers fight alongside white ones. The Confederates were the third obstacle as, alert to the problem of runaway slaves, they moved their slaves away from the seacoast, far from Union lines.
On March 25, 1863, Stanton ordered General Lorenzo Thomas, a career officer, to go to the Mississippi Valley to head up recruitment of African-Americans. Thomas, who for most of his career had been a desk general, surprised his colleagues by becoming a military entrepreneur who, with tireless energy, regularized the recruitment of black soldiers. On the day he began his assignment, only five black regiments had been organized. By the end of 1863, twenty regiments would be organized. The day Thomas headed west, Lincoln wrote to Andrew Johnson, the Democratic military governor of Tennessee, “The bare sight of fifty thousand armed, and drilled black soldiers on the banks of the Mississippi, would end the rebellion at once. And who doubts that we can present that sight, if we but take hold in earnest?”
Artist James Fuller Queen painted these twelve illustrated cards in 1863 depicting the journey of a slave from plantation life to freedom. The culmination of the journey is service in the Union army, where he willingly gives his life for the cause of the Union and liberty.
In these months, Lincoln moved from hesitant consent to eager advocacy of black soldiers. He wrote to Stanton, “I desire that a renewed and vigorous effort be made to raise colored forces along the shores of the Mississippi.” Stanton had kept Lincoln informed of Thomas’s success. The president was impressed. “I think the evidence is nearly conclusive that Gen. Thomas is one of the best, if not the very best, instruments for this service.”
LINCOLN WATCHED IMPATIENTLY as Joseph Hooker took charge of the Army of the Potomac. Skeptics abounded. Charles Francis Adams, Jr., great-grandson and grandson of presidents, wrote his father, the U.S. minister to England, that the “Army of the Potomac is at present fearfully demoralized.” He added, “The Government” took away McClellan and relieved Burnside—“all this that Hooker may be placed in command, a man who has not the confidence of the army and who in private character is well known to be—I need not say what.”
Much of the resentment in the initial days of Hooker’s command was due to the disheartening condition of the soldiers. Thousands were in poor health, and hundreds were dying from lack of adequate medical care in their winter quarters. The majority opposed Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Desertions numbered two hundred per day.
Ill will turned to goodwill, however, as Hooker initiated changes. New hospitals were built and older ones revamped. Improved rations, especially vegetables, suddenly appeared. Hooker stated, “My men shall be fed before I am fed, and before any of my officers are fed.” In March, he instituted insignia badges of different colors, two inches square, which were worn with pride on the caps of the men of each corps. He implemented Lincoln’s order of November 15, 1862, wherein the president, as commander in chief, directed “the orderly observance of the Sabbath,” as “a becoming deference to the best sentiment of a Christian people, and a due regard for the Divine will.”
Hooker was still not without his detractors. Women and whiskey have always followed soldiers, but Hooker’s headquarters became a gathering place for female camp followers who acquired a name that stuck long after the Civil War—“hookers.” Stanton warned Hooker to prohibit women and liquor from his camps. Young Adams described Hooker’s headquarters as “a combination of bar-room and brothel.”
Although Hooker was proving to be a good administrator, Lincoln wondered if he was up to the challenge of leading a large army into battle. In February and March, Hooker sent out detachments up and down the Rappahannock, but Robert E. Lee and his troops, in their winter camps south of the river, derided these moves as intended merely to frighten. Southern pickets greeted Union soldiers with derisive cheers. The winter weather was dark, with plenty of snow and sleet, but Hal-leck and Stanton wondered whether Hooker, despite his earlier criticisms of McClellan, was afflicted with the same disease of inaction. Lincoln decided to see for himself.
On April 4, 1863, Lincoln left the Navy Yard on the steamer Carrie Martin at 5 p.m. leading a party that included Mary, Tad, Attorney General Bates, and Noah Brooks, correspondent for the Sacramento Daily Union, bound for Hooker’s camp at Falmouth, in northern Virginia. On April 6, a blustery day, Lincoln reviewed the cavalry. The president, an excellent horseman, rode using a saddle recently received by Hooker from San Francisco, while little Tad clung to the saddle of his pony, as drums rolled, trumpets blared, and the various regiments dipped their colors. As the president and General Hooker prepared to receive the troops in review, they witnessed a sight never seen before. In the first two years of the war, the Union cavalry were attached to infantry units and generally misused as escort or messenger services. Now, under the leadership of Major General George Stoneman, who had roomed with Stonewall Jackson at West Point, the cavalry had been brought together under a single command. On this day, seventeen thousand cavalry, with horses prancing, the largest cavalry parade ever assembled, with the six-foot-four-inch Stoneman in the lead, marched before the president.
The next day, Lincoln insisted on going through all the hospital tents and talking with countless soldiers. He listened with endless patience to the stories of soldiers and offered kindness and comfort in return. When he left the hospital tents he was greeted by a thunderous cheer.
On April 8, 1863, Lincoln reviewed sixty thousand men in the infantry and artillery. He touched his stovepipe hat in a return salute to the officers, but uncovered his head to the soldiers in the ranks. The review went on, uninterrupted, for five and a half hours.
But Lincoln mainly came to talk with Hooker. From the outset their conversation took the form of an odd call-and-response. Hooker would begin his conversations with, “When I get to Richmond,” to which Lincoln would respond, “If you get to Richmond, General,” Hooker would then interrupt, “Excuse me, Mr. President, but there is no if in the case. I am going straight to Richmond if I live.”
Lincoln, in a final conference, haunted by the misuse of resources by George McClellan at Antietam and Ambrose Burnside at Fredericks-burg, spoke with both Hooker and Darius N. Couch, the senior corps commander. “Gentlemen, in your next battle, put in all your men.”
Lincoln returned to Washington impressed with the changes instituted by Hooker, which had resulted in an obvious upturn of morale, but disturbed by the easy, almost nonchalant attitude he witnessed when he sought to engage Hooker in conversation about the difficult days ahead. Lincoln confided to Brooks, “That is the most depressing thing about Hooker. It seems to me that he is over-confident.”
THREE AND A HALF MONTHS after signing the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln continued to consider its implications, not just for the United States, but for the family of nations. In another of his reflections, this time on the back of Executive Mansion stationery, Lincoln wrote out a resolution on slavery. First, Lincoln stated the problem: “Whereas, while heretofore, States, and Nations, have tolerated slavery, Recently, for the first time in the world, an attempt has been made to construct a new Nation, upon the basis of, and with the primary, and fundamental object to maintain, enlarge, and perpetuate human slavery, therefore, …”
Then he stated the resolution: “Resolved, That no such embryo State should ever be recognized by, or Admitted into, the family of christian and civilized nations; and that all ch[r]istian and civilized men everywhere should, by all lawful means, resist to the utmost, such recognition or admission.”
On April 17, 1863, Lincoln showed this resolution to Senator Charles Sumner. They talked about its use, including publishing it in the English press, to further bolster the cause of the Union there. The resolution was never published, perhaps made unnecessary by events on the battlefield in the next three months. On November 30, Sumner would write to Lincoln encouraging the president to include the resolution in his upcoming annual message to Congress. Lincoln did not do so. Although never to see the public light of day, this private memo is further evidence that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was not simply a military emergency strategy, but in his mind the conception of the model of a new nation.
ULYSSES S. GRANT was one of the few senior generals Lincoln had never met. The president liked what he first heard of the Illinoisan’s unassuming manner. What a contrast after dealing earlier with McClellan and now with Hooker. Lincoln appreciated Grant’s spare but concise communications, his lack of concern about rank, and, most of all, that he never asked for reinforcements and was ready every day to fight.
The president had heard all the gossip about Grant—that the general was surprised at Shiloh; that Grant had reverted to old habits and was tippling again. He discovered that whenever a politician or another general wished to undercut Grant in the field, they resorted to recycling old stories about Grant and liquor. The president quickly learned of the jealousies within the army. He could believe the resentments against Grant were increasing in direct proportion to his rapid rise in rank.
In April 1863, Lincoln, in a private reflection, continued to think about the wider implications of emancipation for the family of nations.
Only once had Lincoln questioned Grant’s judgment. In the fall of 1862, frustrated by the illicit cotton trading along the Mississippi that he believed was channeling supplies and money into the Confederacy, Grant took steps to try to stop it. In November, he gave orders to conductors that some of the traders, Jews, could no longer travel south on the railroad into his military department. On December 17, 1862, when Grant believed his order was being evaded, he issued General Order Number Eleven: “The Jews, as a class, violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department, and also Department orders, are hereby expelled from the Department.” Some at the time tried to say that Grant’s order was issued by his staff, or that the word “Jew” was shorthand for shrewd merchants, but Grant alone was responsible for this sweeping anti-Jewish order.
When it became public, the order produced widespread denunciations of Grant. Cesar J. Kaskel, of Paducah, Kentucky, led a delegation of Jewish leaders who called on Lincoln at the White House. The president, who seven years earlier had expressed his strong disagreement with a nativism that targeted immigrants, especially Catholics, listened respectfully. Kaskel reported that Lincoln defused the tension in the room with a “heartwarming, semi-humorous, Biblical” exchange.
“And so the children of Israel were driven from the happy land of Canaan?”
Kaskel replied, “Yes, and that is why we have come unto Father Abraham’s bosom, asking protection.”
Lincoln responded, “And this protection they shall have at once.” Lincoln told Grant that he was revoking the order immediately.
IN 1863, Lincoln understood that control of the Mississippi River, which he had navigated twice to New Orleans as a youth and young man, could cut the Confederacy in two. Control depended on the strategic Mississippi fortress town of Vicksburg.
With Lincoln unable to bring Grant to Washington or visit him in the field, and with rumors circulating in the steamy political air of Washington, Stanton, with Lincoln’s approval, decided to send a personal emissary to be their eyes and ears in Grant’s headquarters. Stanton tapped Charles A. Dana, who since 1847 had been the managing editor of the New York Tribune, to become his assistant secretary of war. He assigned Dana to travel to Grant’s headquarters supposedly to investigate the paymaster service in the Western armies, but really to spy for Stanton.
Lincoln, although he had never met Ulysses S. Grant, took a long-distance liking to this modest, hard-fighting general. Their growing appreciation of each other would become one of the fascinating stories of the Civil War.
Dana took the measure of Grant and passed on his findings in almost daily secret ciphers to Stanton and Lincoln. Writing later, he described Grant to be “an uncommon fellow—the most modest, the most disinterested, and the most honest man.” Dana found him “not an original or brilliant man, but sincere, thoughtful, deep, and gifted with courage that never faltered.” Lincoln was strongly inclined to believe in Grant before Dana’s visit, but the newspaperman’s reports only confirmed his own intuition.
Even so, Lincoln continued to receive charges against the major general. On April 1, 1863, Murat Halstead, editor of the influential Cincinnati Commercial, contacted John Nicolay in an effort “to reach the ear of the President through you.” Halstead wrote, “Grant’s Mississippi opening enterprise is a failure—a total, complete failure.” Three days later, Chase wrote to Lincoln, passing on a letter he had received from Halstead. “Genl. Grant, entrusted with our greatest army, is a jackass in the original package. He is a poor drunken imbecile.” Halstead asked, “Now are our Western heroes to be sacrificed by the ten thousand by this poor devil? Grant will fail miserably, hopelessly, eternally.” Chase added, in an accompanying note, that although he didn’t like the tone of Halstead’s letter, these comments “are too common to be safely or even prudently disregarded.”
Lincoln had been down this road before—with Pope, McClellan, and Burnside. Criticisms would rise up from the public. Complaints would be registered from within the ranks of officers. Would the criticisms of Grant lead to the same unhappy ending? In May, Lincoln admitted, “I have had stronger influence brought against Grant, praying for his removal … than for any other object, coming too from good men.”
Grant would need all of his military wisdom and courage for a siege against Vicksburg. Sitting atop two-hundred-foot bluffs, the Confederate garrison was commanded by John Pemberton, a forty-eight-year-old native of Philadelphia who, married to a Virginian, was one of the few Northern officers to join the Confederacy. Grant and Pemberton fought alongside each other in Mexico. Now Pemberton’s soldiers were positioned on the top and the sides of this Mississippi River fortress, ready to rain down fire upon approaching enemy troops.
Throughout the winter and spring of 1863, Grant pursued option after option. He had his engineers attempt to rechannel the Mississippi River by digging a canal opposite Vicksburg to divert the river, so that he could make an assault from land. Lincoln, with his long-standing fascination with engineering ventures, followed the progress of this proj ect closely. Halleck wrote Grant, “The President attaches much importance to this.” After months of hard labor, however, Grant’s engineers had to abandon the canal as nature took its course.
In another venture, Admiral David D. Porter sent his ironclad gunboats through Steele’s Bayou, twenty-five miles north of Vicksburg, but the boats were almost trapped by Confederates who felled trees to try to block the boats from each end. Reports began to circulate of flagging morale and of spreading sickness among Grant’s troops—dysentery, typhoid, and pneumonia. The failed attempts, and the rumors about troop morale, increased the criticism of Grant and the pressure on Lincoln.
Lincoln had his own ideas as to what Grant should do to achieve victory at Vicksburg. Early on, he believed Grant should join forces with General Nathaniel Banks, who became commander of the Department of the Gulf, based in New Orleans, in December 1862. Banks was one of the political generals, having served as Speaker of the House of Representatives and Republican governor of Massachusetts. Lincoln suggested that either Grant move south to help Banks in his attempts to take Port Hudson, Louisiana, or Banks move north to cooperate with Grant in attacking Vicksburg. Grant, however, knew that two hundred treacherous river miles lay between Vicksburg and Port Hudson, and he did not trust Banks’s competency. Great respect for Lincoln notwithstanding, Grant rejected the idea. On April 2, 1863, Henry Halleck tele graphed Grant that the president was becoming “impatient” and continually asking “questions” about Grant’s progress.
Lincoln put another roadblock in Grant’s path to Vicksburg when he allowed himself to be persuaded by another political general, John A. McClernand, who had served with Lincoln in the Illinois legislature. Lincoln appreciated that McClernand, a Democrat, had led the way in damping down secessionist views in southern Illinois. The former congressman commanded a division at Forts Henry and Donelson and also at Shiloh, all under Grant.
McClernand took advantage of his friendship with Lincoln to go outside normal military channels and communicate with him directly. Lincoln, always wishing to see the best qualities in people, was slow to perceive McClernand’s shadowy side. Not so, General Grant. “Unconditional Surrender” Grant saw what Lincoln did not see: At Forts Henry and Donelson, McClernand acted without orders and not only claimed far more for himself and his troops than results warranted, but downplayed the actions of fellow officers.
McClernand came to Washington in late September 1862, to lobby the president and members of his cabinet for an independent command of a new force of Midwestern volunteers, many of them democrats, to open up the Mississippi River. He made a favorable impression on Chase, but when the treasury secretary asked the president his opinion of McClernand, Lincoln replied that “he thought him brave and capable, but too desirous to be independent of every body else.” Lincoln’s comment notwithstanding, the president’s largess toward his independent-minded Illinois friend would become Grant’s management headache on the Mississippi in the months ahead.
In early May, Grant made his own plans. Instead of marching back to Port Hudson, or moving directly on Vicksburg, he struck out northeast into the Mississippi countryside. After four dreary months of camping in the mud by the Mississippi River, the Army of the Tennessee, with thirty thousand men, left its supply line on the river behind and, determined to live off the land, simply disappeared. Lincoln, anxious for any news, read Grant’s spare telegram to Halleck, “You may not hear from me for several days.” Grant pressed ahead on an authority based in his own experience.
In the days ahead, Grant marched his men 130 miles, captured Jackson, the capital of Mississippi, and waged five battles against surprised opponents. The Confederate forces, in total, were actually as large as Grant’s army, but he was determined to fight their different divisions separately and never let them combine.
Elihu Washburne, Lincoln’s friend and the congressman for Grant’s district in northwestern Illinois, was traveling with Grant and wrote the president. Washburne and Lincoln had enjoyed many laughs together back in Illinois. The congressman closed with comments sure to bring a smile to the president. “I am afraid Grant will have to be reproved for want to style. On this whole move of five days he had neither a horse nor an orderly or servant, a blanket or overcoat or clean shirt, or even a sword. His entire baggage consists of a tooth brush.”
“THE PRESIDENT TELLS ME that he now fears ‘the fire in the rear’—meaning the Democracy, especially in the Northwest—more than our military chances.” So wrote Senator Charles Sumner to Francis Lieber, German-born professor of law at Columbia College in New York on January 17, 1863. Antiwar protest surged in the winter and spring of 1863, nowhere more than in Lincoln’s Midwest. Two years after the start of the war, “Peace Democrats,” or “Copperheads,” lashed out at the Emancipation Proclamation, which, they said, would produce “nigger equality.” Republicans coined the name “Copperheads” in the summer of 1861 when an anonymous writer to the Cincinnati Commercial likened the peace faction of the Democratic Party to the snake in Genesis 3:14: “Upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life.” Copperheads were poisonous snakes, but like many labels that begin as terms of derision, the disparaged soon wore the term as a badge of honor. They cut the Goddess of Liberty from the head of pennies—“Copperheads”—and wore them in the lapels of their coats. Their efforts were no small sideshow, as has often been suggested, but rather a relentless push by well-organized forces that gathered momentum in 1863. They sought to gain control of all states in the Midwest. Lincoln, knowing well the sentiments from which the Copperheads sprung, took the movement seriously.
This cartoon from the February 28, 1863, issue of Harper’s Weekly depicts three Copperheads advancing on Columbia, who bears a sword and a shield inscribed “Union.”
Lincoln’s comment to Sumner was surely a response to a speech in Congress by Congressman Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio three days earlier. Born in New Lisbon, Ohio, the handsome son of a Presbyterian minister, the self-assured Vallandigham was first elected to the Ohio state legislature in 1845, just months after his twenty-fifth birthday. Elected to Congress in 1858, he became a vigorous states’ rights advocate in the tradition of Andrew Jackson. Often caricatured as a wacko, Vallandigham, a conservative Democrat, was actually an effective spokesman for the interests of concerned citizens, especially farmers and immigrants, in the Midwest.
After Republicans had gerrymandered the forty-two-year-old Vallandigham out of a fourth term in Congress in the fall of 1862, he returned to Washington for the final session of the Thirty-seventh Congress determined to make his voice heard before he left office. He had campaigned on the slogan “The Constitution as it is, the Union as it was,” stressing that the “arbitrary government” of Lincoln, with its record of unlawful arrests and the Emancipation Proclamation, was changing the Union forever. Vallandigham believed the Confederacy could not be defeated, and that the nation should go forward as it had in the past, with a mixed political system that allowed for slavery. When he listened to the reading of Lincoln’s annual message on December 1, 1862, the words that especially piqued him were, “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. … As our case is new, we must think anew.”
On January 14, 1863, as Vallandigham left his seat and moved to the center of the opposition benches to speak, congressmen laid aside their newspapers and put down their pens. He began by reproaching the Republicans, not the Southern fire-eaters, for the crisis that had erupted into war. He argued that despite the repudiation of Republicans in the fall elections, especially in the Midwest, Lincoln did not withdraw his Emancipation Proclamation, which, he claimed, was a strategy to divert attention from the president’s own failures.
Vallandigham asked: What was the result of twenty months of war? His answer: “Defeat, debt, taxation, sepulchers, these are your trophies.” Claiming to speak for the greater Midwest, he thundered, “The people of the West demand peace, and they begin to suspect that New England [by which he meant abolitionism] is in the way.” Since the war had failed, it was time to give peace a chance. He proposed pulling Northern troops from the South and opening negotiations for an armistice. He concluded, “Let time do his office—drying tears, dispelling sorrows, mellowing passions, and making herb and grass and tree grow again upon the hundred battlefields of this terrible war.” Vallandigham, dubbed the apostle of peace, spoke for more than one hour while the packed gallery, including many uniformed soldiers, sat mesmerized.
Peace as well as War Democrats shared an apprehension about the quickly moving developments in the Midwest. John A. McClernand wrote the president on February 14, 1863, “The Peace Party means, as I predicted long since, not only a separation from the New England States, but reunion of the Middle and Northwestern States with the revolted States.” Many War Democrats, initially supportive of the war, were becoming increasingly critical of Lincoln because of their disagreement with the Emancipation Proclamation and the continuing price of the war. McClernand put Lincoln on notice. “Unless the war shall be brought to a close before the expiration of your Administration, or decisive victories gained, this scheme, in whole or a part, will find authoritative sanction.”
Clement L. Vallandigham, former Ohio congressman, became the symbol of the fire in the rear.” Lincoln did not underestimate the power the Copperhead, or Peace Democrat, movement had in the Midwest.
Back in Lincoln’s Illinois, the bitter fruits of the Democratic victories in 1862 were ripened in the state legislative agenda of 1863. The legislature passed resolutions criticizing the federal administration and calling for an armistice to end the war. A bill to stop the immigration of African-Americans was put on the docket for a vote. Finally, to stop further motions, Republican governor Richard Yates arbitrarily ended the session of the legislature, the first time this had ever happened in Illinois.
As winter gave way to spring, the Copperheads, incited by the March 3, 1863, passage of the Conscription Act, the first federal military draft, which stipulated that every male citizen between the ages of twenty and forty-five would be obligated to serve for three years or until the end of the war, moved from words to deeds. Protesters swiftly denounced the draft as unconstitutional. Recruiting officers were murdered. Young men were encouraged to desert. Violence sometimes erupted when Union army officers tried to round up deserters. African-Americans were attacked when Copperheads promoted the fear that the Emancipation Proclamation would produce an unwanted influx of blacks from South to North.
When Congress adjourned in March, Vallandigham returned home to a hero’s welcome in Dayton, Ohio. In the same month, the new commander of the Department of the Ohio, General Ambrose Burnside, arrived at his headquarters at Cincinnati. Each man had recently endured failures; each man came to Ohio determined to make his mark.
Vallandigham, not one to sit on the sidelines, set about making speeches and announced his plans to run for governor. Burnside, incapable of understanding the disaffection in Ohio and not recognizing the partisan editorial viewpoint in Murat Halstead’s attacks on Peace Democrats in the Cincinnati Commercial, decided to stamp out tyranny by force. On April 13, 1863, Burnside issued General Order Number Thirty-eight, a military edict aimed at persons who “uttered one word against the government of the United States.” Anyone guilty of “acts for the benefit of the enemies of our country” could be liable to execution. Burnside assured Ohio Republicans that he had the power to decide what treason was and what the suitable punishment would be.
Vallandigham saw immediately that Burnside’s overreaching offered an opportunity to test the limits of dissent. He became determined to bait Burnside. The commander of the Department of the Ohio proved more than willing to take that bait.
On May 1, 1863, with Vallandigham scheduled to speak at a Democratic rally in Mount Vernon, Ohio, Burnside dispatched two staff members to observe and take notes. A friend of Vallandigham tipped him off to Burnside’s intentions. Vallandigham began his speech by pointing to the American flags, with their thirty-four stars, that surrounded the speakers’ stands. He told the crowd the flag with all the states would still be united if it were not for Republican treachery. Looking right at one of Burnside’s note-taking agents, he said that his right to speak came from a document—the Constitution—that was higher than General Order Number Thirty-eight, which he derided as “a bane usurpation of arbitrary power.” “Valiant Val” concluded by saying that the remedy for all “the evils” was the ballot box, by which they could throw “King Lincoln” from his throne.
Burnside heard the applause for Vallandigham in Cincinnati and decided to act. He dispatched Captain Charles G. Hutton and a posse of sixty-seven men to Dayton. They arrived at 323 First Street at 2 a.m. When Vallandigham refused to come out of his house, Hutton’s men attacked the front door with bars and axes.
Union troops transported Vallandigham to Burnside’s headquarters in Cincinnati, where a military court tried him. While in custody, Vallandigham wrote an address, “To the Democracy of Ohio,” which was smuggled out of his confinement and published in newspapers across the country. “I am here in a military bastile for no other offense than my political opinions.” Vallandigham, denied a writ of habeas corpus, was sentenced to confinement in a military prison for the rest of the war.
The two main players in this Ohio melodrama appeared, at first glance, to be Vallandigham and Burnside, but the national audience understood that the lead actor was President Lincoln. All eyes watched to see what action he would take.
Lincoln recognized that both actors, Vallandigham and Burnside, had overplayed their roles. He brought the issue to a cabinet meeting on May 19, 1863, where Welles noted that the arrest was “an error on the part of Burnside.” Burnside learned of the cabinet’s deliberations and telegraphed Lincoln that he understood his actions were “a source of Embarrassment,” and offered to resign his command. Lincoln replied the same day that “being done, all were for seeing you through with it.”
Lincoln’s generous letter still did not answer the question of what to do. The president did not want to make Vallandigham a martyr, which would happen if he served in a military prison to the end of the war, but he also did not want to publicly reprimand Burnside. The president came up with his own resolution: Release Vallandigham, remove him from the Midwest, where he was becoming a folk hero, and banish him to the Confederacy. Burnside transferred Vallandigham as a prisoner to William Rosecrans’s Army of the Cumberland at Murfreesboro, Tennessee. On the morning of May 25, 1863, an Alabama cavalry officer on the Shelbyville Turnpike was surely surprised to be met by Union officers under a flag of truce presenting Clement L. Vallandigham.
BY THE MIDDLE OF APRIL, Joseph Hooker and the Army of the Potomac were finally ready to move. Fighting Joe’s army of 133,868 outnumbered Lee’s army of 60,892 by more than two to one. On April 12, 1863, Hooker sent Daniel Butterfield, his chief of staff, to the White House to deliver to Lincoln his battle plan, complete with maps. Lincoln wanted to be included. Hooker, on the other hand, was terribly afraid that no one could keep a secret, so that he did not inform his senior commanders of his final plans until the last moment. On April 13, he told his infantry commanders to have their men ready in two days with eight days’ rations and 140 rounds of ammunition. On April 14, George Stoneman, with more than 10,000 cavalry, was ready to make the first strike, intending to cross the Rappahannock, move around Lee’s left flank, and head for Culpeper Courthouse and Gordonsville, tearing up the railroads and communication lines along the way, with the goal of cutting off Lee’s supply line southeast to Richmond. Fighting Joe Hooker’s orders were “fight, fight, fight.”
As the battle was about to begin, Lincoln was filled with anxiety. He spent long hours at the telegraph office in the War Department. On April 14, 1863, he telegraphed Hooker, “Would like to have a letter from you as soon as convenient.” Lincoln became increasingly frustrated with the incomplete information he was receiving.
General Stoneman, so impressive in parading his cavalry before Lincoln on April 6, 1863, now moved unexplainably slowly. Before he could cross the Rappahannock, the rains came. At 11 p.m. Hooker wrote to Lincoln, but was not clear about the progress of his cavalry. Hooker did not like to send the president bad news.
On the morning of April 15, 1863, Hooker telegraphed Lincoln, assuring him that Stoneman would cross the Rappahannock, and “if he should meet with no unusual delay, he will strike the Aquia and Richmond Rail Road on the night of the second day.”
Lincoln was not assured. He replied that Hooker’s last letters gave him “considerable uneasiness.” Lincoln, by now a veteran commander in chief, understood a great deal about tactics and terrain. He wrote, “He has now been out three days without hindrance from the enemy, and yet he is not twenty five miles from where he started.” The president was not fooled. “To reach his point, he still has sixty to go; another river, the Rapidan, to cross, and will be hindered by the enemy.” Lincoln concluded, “I greatly fear it is another failure already.” He closed, “Write me often. I am very anxious.”
Weather was always the wild card. The best military plans, long before scientific methods of weather prediction, could be derailed by the sudden appearance of rain that could continue for who knew how long.
Because the Civil War shone a bright light on the inability to predict the weather, many weather “experts” began appearing in Washington. On the morning of April 25, 1863, Lincoln was visited by Francis L. Capen, who described himself as “A Certified Practical Meteorologist & Expert in Computing the Changes in Weather.” He wanted Lincoln to recommend him for a job. Three days later, Lincoln wrote to the War Department. “It seems to me Mr. Capen knows nothing about the weather, in advance. He told me three days ago it would not rain till the 30th of April or 1st of May. It is raining now & has been for ten hours. I can not spare any more time to Mr. Capen.”
The weather forced Hooker to modify his strategy. Still concerned about secrecy, he sent a message to Lincoln on April 27, 1863, saying, “I fully appreciate the anxiety weighing upon your mind, and hasten to relieve you from so much of it as lies in my power.” Hooker told Lincoln he intended to feint a crossing at Fredericksburg, while sending his main force thirty miles north to confront Lee’s forces. His ultimate goal was to trap a retreating Lee between two wings of his infantry and Stoneman’s cavalry. He would keep more than twenty thousand troops in reserve, able to move to the most urgent battle line.
Lincoln, receiving little communication, remained fretful. At 3:30 p.m. on the same day, he telegraphed Hooker one sentence: “How does it look now?” Hooker replied at 5 p.m. “I am not sufficiently advanced to give an opinion. We are busy. Will tell you all as soon as I can, and have it satisfactory.”
Hooker’s grand plan began with promise. On April 29, 1863, two infantry corps crossed the Rappahannock below Fredericksburg while five infantry corps marched upriver, crossed the Rappahannock, and moved eastward toward Fredericksburg and Robert E. Lee.
Lee was initially unsure about how to respond to the larger Union forces. He decided to adopt a risky strategy of dividing his outnumbered army and then dividing it again. He audaciously sent Stonewall Jackson to block Hooker’s left flank. Because Stoneman’s cavalry was in his rear, Jeb Stuart’s Confederate cavalry “owned” the spaces between the dueling armies, which Lee now used for reconnaissance between his different units.
On May 1, 1863, a bright and breezy morning, Hooker’s seventy thousand troops encountered Lee’s twenty-five thousand troops along the Orange Turnpike and Orange Plank Road just east of the hamlet of Chancellorsville, little more than a brick farmhouse occupied by the ten members of the Chancellor family. Suddenly, for reasons never fully explained, Hooker stopped, wavered, and ordered his troops to fall back and take up defensive positions around Chancellorsville.
Hooker lost the initiative. He later suggested that he intended to fight a defensive war and let the enemy attack him. Attack they did. On May 2, 1863, Jackson smashed the Union right flank.
In the late morning of May 3, 1863, just as a careworn Hooker leaned forward to receive a report, a twelve-pound shot fired by Confederate artillery hit a pillar on the south side of the Chancellor house veranda, splitting it in two. One of the beams struck Hooker on his head and side. For some time—a debate would ensue about how much time—the commander of the Army of the Potomac was out of action. By the middle of the day, the center of Hooker’s line was pushed back.
Lincoln, pacing back and forth from the White House to the War Department, telegraphed Butterfield:
“Where is General Hooker? Where is Sedgwick? Where is Stoneman?”
On May 4, 1863, the left side of Hooker’s forces was forced back across the river. Early in the afternoon, Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles met Lincoln at the War Department. The president told him “he had a feverish anxiety to get some facts.” At 3:10 p.m. Lincoln telegraphed Hooker, “We have news here that the enemy has reoccupied heights above Fredericksburg. Is that so?” Hooker replied, “I am informed that is so, but attach no importance to it.” Hooker was by now in almost total denial of what was happening.
On May 6, 1863, Hooker ordered the remaining troops to recross to the north side of the Rappahannock in a heavy rainstorm. The battle was lost. At Chancellorsville, the Union army had had all the advantages on its side—numbers of troops, horses, guns, supplies, telegraph wires, even balloons. The Union had far superior numbers, but once again, even after Lincoln had given him the strongest mandate, Hooker did not put into battle all of his men—he held out his reserves. The Union suffered a terrible loss at Chancellorsville—more than seventeen thousand casualties. Lee won perhaps his greatest victory, but it came at a huge cost: thirteen thousand Confederate casualties, a higher percentage of casualties than the Union forces.
When Lincoln received word at 3 p.m. that Hooker’s troops were retreating across the Rappahannock River, he was overcome. Noah Brooks, who was with the president, said his complexion, usually “sallow,” turned “ashen in hue.” The correspondent for the Sacramento Daily Union said he had never seen the president “so broken, so dispirited, and so ghostlike. … Clasping his hands behind his back, he walked up and down the room, saying, ‘My God! my God! What will the country say! What will the country say!’ ”
Frenchman Thomas Le Mere, who worked for Mathew Brady, told Lincoln there was “considerable call” for a full-length photograph of the president. Lincoln stood for it at Brady’s Washington studio on April 17, 1863.