CHAPTER 39
Please tell these little people I am very glad their young hearts are so full of just and generous sympathy, and that, while I have not the power to grant all they ask, I trust they will remember that God has, and that, as it seems, He wills to do it.
—ABRAHAM LINCOLN, RESPONSE TO A PETITION FROM FREE CHILDREN FOR THE EMANCIPATION OF SLAVE CHILDREN
Fillmore ~ Lincoln
Planning out the spring campaign from his headquarters at the Culpeper Courthouse, Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant noted that despite some of the greatest battles fought in the history of warfare, in the east “the opposing forces stood in substantially the same relations towards each other as . . . when the war began.”
The Union efforts, which had from the beginning been disjointed, would now work in concert, and move, per Grant’s orders to General Sherman, “somewhat towards a common center.” Aside from Richmond, the greatest target was the army of Joseph Johnston, near Atlanta, Georgia. The fall of that city, entrusted to General William Sherman, would be crucial in bringing down the Confederacy. Sherman noted the enormity of the task. The Confederates were fighting on the defensive, in territory they knew, and where the population supported them. As the Union moved forward, they were required to leave forces behind to secure their gains. As the Confederates fell back, they gained reinforcements. The Union would have to rely on long supply lines through the hostile territory of a sorely deprived people; the Confederates could more easily be provisioned by railroads in their interior lines.
On March 24, 1864, Fillmore responded to George McClellan’s wife, who wanted to auction his autograph for the New York Sanitary Fair. “The pleasure would be greatly increased—instead of the autograph I had the power for the sake of my bleeding country to send you an order restoring your gallant husband to the position of ‘General Commander in Chief,’” Fillmore said. He felt his “blood boil with indignation at the injustice that has been done him,” and prayed “that the people may do him justice by elevating him to be” president of the United States. Fillmore closed by saying, “I have long since ceased to be a politician, and have no other wish or desire than to see our Union restored and our distracted country once more enjoying the blessings of peace.”
President Lincoln wrote Lieutenant General Grant on April 30, 1864, expressing his “entire satisfaction with what you have done up to this time, so far as I understand it.
“You are vigilant and self-reliant,” he wrote. “If there is anything wanting which is within my power to give, do not fail to let me know. And now with a brave Army, and a just cause, may God sustain you.”
Grant replied, “From my first entrance into the volunteer service of the country, to the present day, I have never had cause of complaint, have never expressed or implied a complaint, against the Administration, or the Sec. of War, for throwing any embarrassment in the way of my vigorously prosecuting what appeared to me my duty. Indeed since the promotion which placed me in command of all the Armies, and in view of the great responsibility, and importance of success, I have been astonished at the readiness with which every thing asked for has been yielded without even an explanation being asked. Should my success be less than I desire, and expect, the least I can say is, the fault is not with you.”
While planning his movement into Virginia, Grant left his headquarters at Culpeper regularly for meetings with Lincoln and Stanton. On their final interview before departing, Grant explained that troops could hold territory and protect the North from invasion just as well by advancing as standing still.
From the beginning of the war, Lincoln had wanted to pressure the Confederacy on as many points as possible. Lincoln easily understood, offering a saying popular in the west. “Those not skinning can hold a leg.”
On May 2, Confederate officers at the signal station on Clark’s Mountain observed through their field glasses a Union force unlike any they had ever seen, amassing north of the Rapidan. The following day, Grant and his men crossed that river. Lee was headquartered near the courthouse in Orange, Virginia, where seventy-five years earlier James Madison and James Monroe, in their campaign against one another for Congress, had debated the merits of the Constitution.
Grant and Lee met near the Spotsylvania Wilderness, an “uneven [ground covered with] woods, thickets, and ravines right and left. Tangled thickets of pine, scrub oak, and cedar,” which reduced Lee’s numerical disadvantage. A Confederate general remembered “a desperate fight” at “close quarters.” In the thick forest, “Officers could not see the whole length of their commands, and could tell whether the troops on their right and left were driving or being driven only by the sound of the firing.”
The trees burned in every direction, and more than two hundred Union men died from fire alone. The wounded, unable to move from the no man’s land were burned or suffocated. The second day of fighting was the same smoky, scorching hell as the tide “ebbed and flowed many times . . . strewing the Wilderness with human wrecks.”
Lee’s forces withdrew on the evening of May 6. Sherman, who was not present, would call Grant’s next decision “the supreme moment of his life . . . Without stopping to count his numbers, he gave his orders calmly, specifically, and absolutely—‘Forward to Spotsylvania.’”
Union casualties were 17,666, to 11,400 for the Confederates. “How near we have been to this thing before and failed,” Lincoln said, receiving the news. “I believe if any other general had been at the head of that army it would have now been on this side of the Rapidan. It is the dogged pertinacity of Grant that wins.” Meade reportedly told Grant that the enemy seemed ready to make it a cat fight, to which Grant responded “Our cat has the longest tail.”
From the Wilderness Grant moved to Spotsylvania in an attempt to put himself between Lee’s army and Richmond, and perhaps to bring him out into the open. Lee, arriving first, fortified the area, forcing Grant to attack him there. On May 11, Grant reported that for six days his men had engaged in “very hard fighting.” He noted heavy losses, but determined that the enemy’s must be more severe, promising to “fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.” Actually, Grant had suffered 18,399 casualties to Lee’s nine thousand in front of Spotsylvania. But again Grant moved forward, forcing Lee into the defenses around Richmond. For the next five days there was constant rain, leaving the wounded to die in ambulances trapped by washed-out roads.
Lincoln paced the floor of the Executive Chamber with his hands behind his back. When Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax arrived to see him, Lincoln looked at him with the saddest face he had ever seen, “his dark features contracted still more with gloom.” Lincoln said, “Why do we suffer reverses after reverses! Could we have avoided this terrible, bloody war! Was it not forced upon us! Is it ever to end!” But then “hope beamed on his face,” and he said, “Grant will not fail us now; he says he will ‘fight it out on that line,’ and this is now the hope of our country.”
On May 30, a convention met in Cleveland, seeking to nominate a more radical candidate than Lincoln and settling on John C. Fremont. But only four hundred delegates came, rather than the thousands expected. When word arrived in the telegraph office on June 1, Lincoln requested a Bible, and read from 1 Samuel 12:2. “And every one that was in distress, and every one that was in debt, and every one that was discontented, gathered themselves unto him; and he became a captain over them; and there were with him about four hundred men.” But while Fremont fizzled, the radical Republican threat remained, in the form of Lincoln’s rogue treasury secretary, Salmon Chase.
Throughout May and June, as Sherman pushed from Tennessee into Georgia, Johnston continued to fall back. Each time he did so expertly, leaving nothing behind, delaying Sherman. For the remainder of 1864, these three campaigns—Sherman’s, Grant’s, and Lincoln’s—would determine the fate of the United States.