CHAPTER 36
The President announces to the country that news from the Army of the Potomac . . . is such as to cover that Army with the highest honor, to promise a great success to the cause of the Union, and to claim the condolence of all the many gallant fallen. And for this, he especially desires that on this day, He whose will, not ours, should ever be done, be everywhere remembered and reverenced with profoundest gratitude.
—WHITE HOUSE PRESS RELEASE, JULY 4, 1863
The glorious Fourth . . . was just in season to catch Franklin Pierce with his trousers down at Concord.
—DAILY NATIONAL REPUBLICAN, JULY 14, 1863
Lincoln ~ Pierce ~ Buchanan
Lincoln was euphoric over the news from Gettysburg. But he did not know what was happening that day in Vicksburg. On the morning of July 4,General Pemberton’s men lined up outside of their works, deposited their guns, and marched back into the city. The anxious eyes of the Union army observed their surrender without visible celebration, and when it was finished, they entered the city. Grant’s men, who had lived off the abundance of the Mississippi River Valley, generously shared food with their starving counterparts, who had resorted to eating rats and tree bark.
“The men of the two armies fraternized as if they had been fighting for the same cause,” Grant noted.
The great mass of thirty-one thousand Confederates were paroled—released on a written promise not to take up arms against the Union. Sixty thousand muskets and 172 cannon were taken. Vicksburg had fallen, and the last remaining fort on the Mississippi surrendered in a matter of days. The Union controlled the great river from the source to the mouth. The Confederacy was cut in half. And the key was in Lincoln’s pocket.
It was an inauspicious time for Franklin Pierce to make his next movement against the administration. The sequence of events would prove to be a political Pickett’s Charge. A newspaper of July 3 announced that Franklin Pierce “will preside and speak at the Democratic Mass Convention which meets in this city [Concord] on July 4.” The entire town was prepared for the occasion. The estimated crowd of twenty-five thousand began pouring into the city the night before, and gathered on the morning of the Fourth at 8:00 a.m. “Every foot of space within hearing distance of the stand, held its man,” according to the Sun, with twenty people crowded into a single tree. It was suggested that this was the largest political meeting in New Hampshire history, and perhaps in all of New England.
In front of the Capitol there was an “exquisite arch decorated with shields and miniature flags,” with the words LIBERTY AND LAW in gilt letters. Above was a large eagle holding “a profusion of radiating flags.” The Columbian Hotel to the south was “gracefully and beautifully decorated,” with an arch over the entrance proclaiming 1775–JULY 4, 1863. Banners and pennants were everywhere, and one newspaper reported “the street at this point seemed to be a field of waving flags.” Representative slogans included THE CONSTITUTION AS IT IS; THE UNION AS IT WAS.
Pierce wasted no time in declaring where he stood. “Do we not know that the cause of our calamities is the vicious intermeddling of . . . the northern states with the constitutional rights of the southern states? And now, war! War, in its direst shape—war, such as it makes the blood run cold to read of . . . war, on a scale of a million men in arms—war, horrid as that of barbaric ages, rages in several of the states of the Union . . . and casts the lurid shadow of its death . . . into every nook and corner of our vast domain.
“Even here in the loyal states, the mailed hand of military usurpation strikes down the liberties of the people and its foot tramples on a desecrated Constitution.
“It is made criminal . . . for that noble martyr of free speech, Mr. Vallandigham, to discuss public affairs in Ohio.” Here Pierce received a loud applause.
“This fearful, fruitless, fatal civil war has exhibited our amazing resources and vast military power,” Pierce continued, condemning emancipation, which could only yield a “harvest of woe . . . ripening for what was once the peerless Republic.”
Pierce argued that if he were president, his effort would be entirely invested in “moral power,” rather than “the coercive instrumentalities of military power.” He argued that the last two years had proven the conflict to be futile, and even if successful, that the nation could never be reconstructed by arms.
Pierce then painted a dark picture of America after the Constitution failed, when “the ballot box is sealed.” What then? Pierce argued, “You will take care of yourselves; with or without arms, with or without leaders, we will, at least, in the effort to defend our rights as a free people, build up a great mausoleum of hearts, to which men who yearn for liberty will, in after years, with bowed heads and reverently resort, as Christian pilgrims to the sacred shrines of the Holy Land.”
Pierce spent the rest of the day at his home with Nathaniel Hawthorne. By nightfall he had received word that his friend Colonel Cross of the 5th New Hampshire regiment had been killed at Gettysburg.
The New Hampshire Patriot called Pierce’s speech “a most complete and triumphant success,” with headlines such as FREE SPEECH VINDICATED AND EXERCISED, and IMMENSE DEMONSTRATION IN DEFENSE OF THE CONSTITUTION AND UNION. But reaction from throughout the north was almost universally devastating. The Hartford Courant editorialized “when his country is in peril, when an invading army is in Pennsylvania, this black-hearted copperhead reviles the men who have rallied to the defense of their country, and would build up a party on the ruins of every thing dear to patriots. Jefferson Davis is a saint compared with such a copperhead as Franklin Pierce.” The Vermont Phoenix announced, under the headline REBEL INVASION OF NEW HAMPSHIRE, that “Gen. Pierce, with a force variously estimated at from ten to twenty thousand persons, occupied Concord, N.H., on the 4th of July.” The Boston Daily Advertiser noted with understatement that “the news from Pennsylvania was somewhat untimely,” while the Constitution cracked that Pierce “stands up for the south now in the same way that some of the Pennsylvania Dutchmen in the back counties are said to vote every year for Gen. Jackson. The country ought to be spared the shame of being reminded that it ever had such a president.”
On that same Independence Day, Lincoln appeared at an upper window of the White House in response to a procession and bands serenading him. Lincoln thanked “Almighty God” for the news that had brought them there. “How long ago is it?” he asked, “eighty odd years—since on the Fourth of July for the first time in the history of the world a nation by its representatives, assembled and declared a self-evident truth that ‘all men are created equal.’” The crowd cheered. “That was the birthday of the United States of America. Since then the Fourth of July has had several peculiar recognitions.” Lincoln pointed out how, fifty years to the day of the Declaration, the two men most responsible for it—its author and strongest defender—Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died. And five years later, James Monroe. Now, in the midst of “a gigantic Rebellion, at the bottom of which is an effort to overthrow the principle that all men are created equal, we have the surrender of a most powerful position and an army on that very day.” There were “long and continued cheers” for the president. Lincoln confessed that he was not prepared to make a speech worthy of this great occasion. “Having said this much,” he concluded, “I will now take the music.”
The day had ended with Lincoln triumphant and Pierce at his nadir. But once again the Union army would fail to consolidate its success. With “sadness and despondency,” the president announced to his cabinet that Meade lingered at Gettysburg, instead of intercepting the retreating rebel army. Lincoln believed that at this pace, Meade was “quite as likely to capture the Man-in-the-Moon as any part of Lee’s Army.”
Lincoln was with Treasury Secretary Chase and several others pointing out Grant’s movements on a map when Welles entered with a telegram. Vicksburg had fallen on the 4th. Lincoln put down the map, stood up, and picked up his hat, “His countenance beaming with joy.” Grabbing Welles by the hand, he said, “What can we do for the Secretary of the Navy for this glorious intelligence? He is always giving us good news. I cannot, in words, tell you my joy over this result. It is great, Mr. Welles, it is great!” Together they walked across the lawn to telegraph the news to General Meade.
As Lee retreated back to Virginia, after a long delay caused by the swollen Potomac, Lincoln lay on a sofa in Stanton’s office. Thirty-one thousand soldiers at Vicksburg had been paroled. If Meade had pursued Lee, the war might well have ended. Lincoln was “absorbed, overwhelmed with the news.” Though “subdued and sad,” he was also “calm and resolute.” He wrote to Meade, “Yet you stood and let the flood run down, bridges be built, and the enemy move away at his leisure, without attacking him . . . I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee’s escape. He was within your easy grasp, and to have closed upon him would, in connection with our other late successes, have ended the war.”
Lee had escaped with the remains of his army. “We had only to stretch forth our hands and they were ours,” Lincoln said despondently. “And nothing I could say or do could make the army move . . . This is a dreadful reminiscence of McClellan. The same spirit that moved McClellan to claim a great victory because Pennsylvania and Maryland were safe . . . Will our generals never get that idea out of their heads? The whole country is our soil.”
But after “A few days having passed,” Lincoln recorded, “I am now profoundly grateful for what was done, without criticism for what was not done.” And while the aftermath of July 4 was bittersweet for the president, the news continued to worsen for Franklin Pierce. The New York Heraldwas soon to announce an IMPORTANT CAPTURE, the DISCOVERY AND SEIZURE OF JEFF. DAVIS’ PRIVATE LIBRARY AND CORRESPONDENCE. A former slave had directed Union soldiers to Brierfield, the home of Jefferson Davis, twenty miles south of Vicksburg. Nearly everything of value was stolen or destroyed. Above the door, Union soldiers painted THE HOUSE THAT JEFF BUILT. The home was then turned over to runaway slaves. Davis’s personal “papers were brought into camp, and served as novel literature for our officers and men.” They also discovered a walking cane from Pierce, inscribed, “from a soldier to a soldier’s friend.”
Initially, controversy came from uncovered Davis correspondence with Buchanan. In 1853, Buchanan had written Davis, “I heartily rejoice that you are in the cabinet.” He recommended an applicant to federal office, adding, “You might perhaps be pleased to know that he even went ahead of myself in his opinions on the subject of southern rights.” But these messages were innocent enough in their context.
As Davis’s papers were examined further, and his correspondence with Pierce was discovered, there was “a great ado,” in the words of one newspaper. At issue was Pierce’s January 1860 letter, encouraging Davis to run for president and remarking on the current state of affairs. The New YorkDaily Tribune called it “a valuable contribution to the history of the Rebellion, and, though nobody will be surprised that Mr. Pierce should have written it, its publication will be a sore perplexity to those who insist that the Abolitionists were the instigators of the rebellion, that it was not premeditated by southern politicians, and that their plans were not known and approved of by their northern associates.
In the letter, Pierce emphasized the need to “overthrow abolitionism at the polls, and repeal unconstitutional and obnoxious laws [specifically the Liberty Laws].” The Tribune opined, “We doubt if Jeff Davis ever received from the most rampant of his Southern fellow-conspirators more unequivocal assurances of sympathy and aid than Franklin Pierce gives him in this letter.”
After that summer’s excitement, Buchanan traveled to Bedford Springs to relax, finding a warm reception there “as in the days of my power.” There was a large dinner given in his honor, and many callers came to pay their respects, including “several naughty secession girls here from Baltimore—some of them very bright,” he recorded. “My principal amusement has been with them.” They told him stories of how they provoked the occupying federal troops, and he laughed. “They speak rather contemptuously of General Dix; but [General] Schenk is their abomination. I treat them playfully,” he noted, “and tell them I love them so that it would be impossible for me ever to consent to part from them and that the shocking idea has never once entered my head of living in a separate confederacy from them.”
Lincoln was busy ensuring that Buchanan would never have to do so. The idea of arming blacks was loaded with controversy, requiring Lincoln to tread carefully. The Second Confiscation Act of 1862 permitted blacks to enlist, but it was a much different thing in practice. In the final Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln announced that blacks would be armed, but in defensive roles and aboard ships. Quietly, Stanton had permitted several generals to begin recruiting black soldiers. By the spring of 1863, Lincoln was directing a widespread recruiting drive for black soldiers and regiments. To that end, the president met on August 10 with Frederick Douglass at the White House. Douglass, an escaped slave who had inspired millions with his intellect and oratory in defense of freedom, was nervous at meeting the nation’s leader on his first visit to the president’s mansion. But the presence of Lincoln put him instantly at ease. Douglass first saw Lincoln “seated in a low chair, surrounded by a multitude of books and papers . . . . On my approach he slowly drew his feet in from the different parts of the room into which they had strayed, and he began to rise, and continued to rise until he looked down upon me, and extended his hand and gave me a welcome.”
“You need not tell me who you are, Mr. Douglass,” he said, inviting him to sit down next to him.
“Mr. Lincoln,” Douglass said, “I have assisted in filling up two regiments in Massachusetts, and am now at work in the same way in Pennsylvania, and have come to say this to you, sir, if you wish to make this branch of the service successful.” Douglass asked for equal pay, compulsion to force Confederates to treat captured black soldiers the same as whites.
“I assure you, Mr. Douglass, that in the end they shall have the same pay as white soldiers.” Lincoln had already issued his Order of Retaliation, arguing that under the laws of war the Confederacy must treat black prisoners of war the same as whites, promising to retaliate against their prisoners should that not be the case. By the end of the year, one hundred thousand blacks were serving the Union cause in uniform.
Lincoln was not only executing his plan to include blacks in the war, but preparing for their success when it had concluded. With this in mind, Lincoln wrote Nathaniel Banks, the former Know Nothing Speaker of the House and the new commander of the Department of the Gulf. He recommended a new state constitution for Louisiana recognizing the Emancipation Proclamation. “And while she is at it, I think it would not be objectionable for her to adopt some practical system by which the two races could gradually live themselves out of their old relation to each other, and both come out better prepared for the new.
“As an anti-slavery man I have a motive to desire emancipation, which pro-slavery men do not have; but even they have strong enough reason to thus place themselves again under the shield of the Union; and to thus perpetually hedge against the recurrence of the scenes through which we are now passing.”