CHAPTER 34
I would be very happy to oblige you, if my passes were respected; but the fact is, sir, I have, within the past two years given passes to 250,000 men to go to Richmond, and not one has got there yet.
—ABRAHAM LINCOLN, TO A MAN REQUESTING A PASS TO RICHMOND
Lincoln ~ Fillmore
It was daybreak on April 29, 1863. The peace that had existed throughout the winter and early spring was suddenly at an end when Hooker, taking advantage of a heavy fog, moved the Army of the Potomac across the Rappahannock. For two days, the Confederates retained their strong defenses around Fredericksburg, where they had been since December. After two disasters at Bull Run, the failed Peninsula Campaign, and the earlier slaughter of Fredericksburg, this moment seemed to be a great chance for a Union victory. It was the largest mismatch on any Civil War battlefield, 130,000 to sixty thousand, and one of Hooker’s generals believed his chances of ending the war were 90 percent. But this conflict would prove the worth of military strategy and leadership, and place its victors in the pantheon of military history. Though terribly outnumbered, Lee divided his forces, leaving a contingent in Fredericksburg to tie down Union forces of a far greater number. Lee then took the initiative, attacking Hooker’s superior numbers.
On May 1, Jackson beat back an advance detachment under Hooker and took control of the highest ground for miles at Zoan Church. Hooker withdrew to the simple country crossroad that gave the battle its grandiose name, near the isolated house of the Chancellor family.
That evening, Lee, Jackson, and Longstreet sat beneath a pine tree and rewrote the laws of war. The next morning, Lee divided his forces once again, giving Jackson twenty-five thousand men. Jackson led them on a long, circuitous western route, around the Union right flank, using the heavily wooded area to screen his movements. The march took nearly the entire day. At dusk, Jackson’s men “swarmed out of the woods,” a quarter of a mile in front of Union lines. For a half hour Jackson “had the Army of the Potomac at his mercy,” until artillery fire sent them back into the woods.
That night, Jackson rode through the forest to plot out a second attack. Riding near his lines, a group of his own sentries fired at him, killing two of the men accompanying him and shooting the general twice in his left arm and through his right hand. Carried to the Chancellor house after midnight, Jackson had his left arm amputated and the ball removed from his right hand. Lee, horrified, delivered a note wishing he could have been wounded in his stead.
Jackson had lost his left arm; Lee believed that he was losing his right. Jackson would never fully recover, dying from pneumonia before the month was out. The morning after his injury, the Union line was broken. Against the overwhelming odds, Chancellorsville had been a complete Confederate victory. Jackson’s attack, his last, had all but sealed its outcome.
It was late in the Telegraph Office when the news came in. “My God! Stanton,” Lincoln said, “our cause is lost! We are ruined—we are ruined; and such a fearful loss of life. My God! This is more than I can endure.” Lincoln stood up, “trembling visibly, his face of ghastly hue, the perspiration standing out in big spots on his brow.” Putting on his coat and hat, he paced back and forth for five minutes. “If I am not about early tomorrow,” Lincoln said, “do not send for me, nor allow anyone to disturb me. Defeated again, and so many of our noble countrymen killed. What will the people say?”
He returned to the White House to greet visitors still holding the telegram. “The sight of his face and figure was frightful,” remembered one. Lincoln “seemed stricken with death,” and nearly tottered as he found his way to a chair. His complexion blended into the wall behind him, “not pale, not even sallow, but gray, like ashes.” Handing the telegram to one of his guests, he asked, “What will the country say? Oh, what will the country say?” Lincoln’s last visitors departed at 9:00 p.m. The president walked back and forth across the room the rest of the night. His secretary left at 3:00 a.m. Arriving back at the office at 8:00 a.m., he found Lincoln breakfasting by himself. He had not left the room. But his secretary noticed a “cheery, hopeful morning light on his face instead of the funeral battle cloud of Chancellorsville.” Next to him he had written instructions urging Hooker to renew the fight again.
On May 16, Millard Fillmore wrote to Lincoln on behalf of his nephew, recently a first lieutenant serving in South Carolina, but who had been dismissed “for alleged intemperance and inefficiency.”
“If I believed the charges true,” Fillmore wrote, “I should not utter a word of complaint, but commend the act.” His nephew, however, had presented him with a letter from his company commander refuting the charges. He asked Lincoln for a court of inquiry. Fillmore asked “as a matter of justice that he may have an opportunity to show his innocence.”
Lincoln forwarded the letter to the judge advocate general, asking him to “please examine and report upon this case. The young man is nephew of Ex. President Fillmore, who writes the within letter.”
Ambrose Burnside, shifted to command the Department of the Ohio, would now trouble the administration again. Pursuant to Lincoln’s expanded order suspending habeas corpus, the general announced that anyone committing “express or implied treason” would be tried in a military court with execution or exile as possible punishments. Clement Vallandigham, Ohio congressman and the leader of the anti-war Democrats, accepted this invitation, making a speech attacking “King Lincoln” for freeing blacks and putting whites into slavery. He was promptly arrested and convicted under Burnside’s order for “disloyal sentiments” calculated to weaken the government’s war effort.
Welles recorded, “It was an error on the part of Burnside. All regretted the arrest, but, having been made, every one wished he had been sent over the lines to the Rebels with whom he sympathizes.” Lincoln came under withering criticism; it was not just a rallying point for Democrats, but also from friendly quarters. The president ultimately commuted Vallandigham’s sentence to exile in the Confederacy.
Lincoln defended the action as best he could, in his response to the “Albany Resolutions,” adopted by a meeting of prominent members of that community, including Erastus Corning. This group was strongly pro-Union and supportive of the war, but had real concerns about civil liberties. Vallandigham’s “arrest was made because he was laboring, with some effect, to prevent the raising of troops, to encourage desertions from the army, and to leave the rebellion without an adequate military force to suppress it. He was not arrested because he was damaging the political prospects of the administration, or the personal interests of the commanding general; but because he was damaging the army, upon the existence, and vigor of which, the life of the nation depends. He was warring upon the military; and this gave the military constitutional jurisdiction to lay hands upon him. If Mr. Vallandigham was not damaging the military power of the country, then his arrest was made on mistake of fact, which I would be glad to correct, on reasonably satisfactory evidence.”
Ohio Democrats, eager to capitalize on the fallout, nominated Vallandigham for governor.