A. Lincoln A Biography

Chapter 22
What Will the Country Say? January 1863–May 1863

ALL PERSONS HELD AS SLAVES … SHALL BE THEN, THENCEFORWARD, AND FOREVER FREE.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Emancipation Proclamation, January 1, 1863

ABRAHAM 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.




23
You Say You Will Not Fight to Free Negroes May 1863–September 1863

PEACE DOES NOT APPEAR SO DISTANT AS IT DID. I HOPE IT WILL COME SOON, AND COME TO STAY; AND SO COME AS TO BE WORTH THE KEEPING IN ALL FUTURE TIME.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Speech to the Springfield rally, September 3, 1863

DURING HIS FIRST TWO YEARS AS PRESIDENT, LINCOLN TURNED DOWN all invitations to speak outside Washington. He believed he could not spare the time away; as he expanded his role as commander in chief, he wanted to stay close to the White House and the War Department in order to communicate with his generals and monitor the ebb and flow of military battles.
He broke his silence in 1863 in response to a deafening volley of criticism. The contest for public opinion escalated in May as rallies were organized in Detroit, Indianapolis, New York, and other Northern cities to protest Lincoln’s handling of the arrest and trial of Vallandigham. Copperheads led the way, but conservative Democrats, who did not approve of the actions of the Ohio congressman, saw this episode as an opportunity to attack an administration weakened by defeats at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. On May 19, 1863, Erastus Corning, wealthy iron manufacturer, railroad owner, and conservative Democratic politician, forwarded to Lincoln the “Albany Resolves,” ten resolutions from a boisterous public meeting in Albany, New York, on May 16. The resolutions called upon the president to “be true to the Constitution” and “maintain the rights of States and the liberties of the citizen.”
Lincoln could easily have been defensive at the tone of the protests but as a political leader, he realized they presented an opportunity for him to make his case, not simply to a local group of New York Democrats, but to a national audience. He replied to Corning on May 28, 1863, that he intended to “make a respectful response.”
By the early summer of 1863, Lincoln began to take considerable care in drafting his “public letters.” Although he worked hard in the last days of May on his response to Erastus Corning, he told Congressman James F. Wilson of Iowa that when he started to write the letter, “I had it nearly all in there,” pointing to the drawer in his desk, “but it was in disconnected thoughts, which I had jotted down from time to time on separate scraps of paper.” Lincoln was referring to the notes to himself he had been writing for decades. He told Wilson it was by this method that “I saved my best thoughts on the subject.” He added, “Such things often come in a kind of intuitive way more clearly than if one were to sit down and deliberately reason them out.”
A measure of Lincoln’s seriousness was that he took the unusual step of bringing his letter to a cabinet meeting on June 5, 1863. Lincoln read it in its entirety, which, at more than 3,800 words, would have taken at least twenty-five minutes. Navy Secretary Gideon Welles wrote in his diary, “It has vigor and ability and with some corrections will be a strong paper.” One week later, on June 12, Lincoln mailed the letter to Corning, sending it at the same time to Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, which published it on June 15.
Lincoln began his letter not with confrontation but with commendation. He lauded those who met in Albany for “doing their part to maintain our common government and country.” He described their intention as “eminently patriotic.” He sought to stand with them in their commitment to the Union. “My own purpose is the same.” Lincoln sounded like he was back in Illinois putting the arguments of the opposing lawyer in their own words. He emphasized their common purpose at the very moment when his opponents were seeking to incite division. He lowered his voice even as his opponents were raising theirs. He finally joined the fray when he said, “The meeting and myself have a common object, and can have no difference, except in the means or measures for effecting that object.”
The “except” was the transition to the purpose of the letter. The “means” became the occasion for Lincoln’s disquisition on the meaning and proper interpretation of the Constitution. The supplicants “assert and argue, that certain military arrests and proceedings following them for which I am ultimately responsible, are unconstitutional. I think they are not.”
Lincoln, in this public letter, did not allow his opponents to set the agenda. Although he had addressed the question of civil liberties in his message to Congress in July 1861, Lincoln now used Corning’s complaints to put the issue into a much larger context. He started with what he declared were the real origins of the war. “The insurgents had been preparing for it more than thirty years, while the government had taken no steps to resist them.” The South, he argued, had set out on “an unrestricted effort to destroy Union, constitution, and law,” whereas the government was “restrained by the same constitution and law, from arresting their progress.”
Once the war started, everyone, including the South, knew that there must be detentions to thwart the actions of “a most efficient corps of spies, informers, suppliers, and aiders and abettors.” They fully understood, Lincoln said, that habeas corpus would be suspended, and then his opponents would set up a “clamor” of protests. Lincoln’s only apology, ironically, was that “thoroughly imbued with a reverence for the guaranteed rights of individuals, I was slow to adopt strong measures.”
At this point, Lincoln made a telling comment on the judicial system. He argued that the courts worked well in peacetime for cases involving individuals, but in “a clear, flagrant, and gigantic case of Rebellion,” the ordinary courts were often “incompetent” to deal with whole classes or groups of individuals. By way of example, he said it was common knowledge in the first days after his inauguration that many leading officers, including Robert E. Lee, Joseph E. Johnston, and John B. Magruder, were about to defect from their military obligations to the Union. In hindsight, Lincoln said, they could have been arrested as traitors. If this had been done, “the insurgent cause would be much weaker.” Lincoln declared, “I think the time not unlikely to come when I shall be blamed for having made too few arrests rather than too many.”
When Lincoln turned to the case of Ohio Peace Democrat Clement Vallandigham, he argued that the resolutions from Albany had it all wrong. The former Ohio congressman “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.” It was his attack on the military that gave the military “constitutional jurisdiction to lay hands on him.” Lincoln even offered to review the case if it could be shown that Vallandigham “was not damaging the military power of this country.” He knew his opponents had no such proof.


Lincolns letter to Erastus Corning, the first of a number of public letters published in newspapers across the country in 1863, allowed Lincoln to communicate his views on the meaning of the Civil War to a wider public.

To embody his logic, Lincoln offered one of his favorite literary devices—a dramatic contrast: “Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wiley agitator who induces him to desert?” One of Lincoln’s great agonies in the war was signing off on an execution order as the punishment for desertion. Lincoln brought into sharp focus not simply the sympathetic picture of the “soldier boy,” but a portrait of a Copperhead fomenting such desertions. Lincoln’s term “wiley agitator” stuck with the public. “I think that in such a case, to silence the agitator, and save the boy, is not only constitutional, but withal, a great mercy.” Lincoln’s opponents had been arguing for justice for Vallandigham; he inverted their argument by putting the focus on the real victims, young soldiers, and calling for the Christian virtue that was higher than justice—mercy. This empathic figure immediately became the “sound bite” of his public letter.
At this point, Lincoln pasted a scrap of paper to his draft, wanting to use an argument that probably had been sitting as a note in his desk drawer for some time. He invoked Democratic president Andrew Jackson in order to make his case against his Democratic critics. Lincoln grew into political manhood in steadfast opposition to Jackson. He may have chuckled as he brought into his letter an episode that followed Jackson’s victory over the British at New Orleans in 1815. Lincoln recounted how, after the battle was over, the hero of New Orleans “maintained martial, or military law” by making a number of crucial arrests.
Lincoln understood that his critics were foisting upon the public the notion that the president was changing the understanding of the Constitution and the rule of law in American society. He was at pains to disabuse them of the notion that “throughout the indefinite peaceful future” the American people will lose the basic freedoms enumerated in the Bill of Rights. Lincoln would not admit this danger because he was not able to believe “that a man could contract so strong an appetite for emetics during temporary illness, as to persist in feeding upon them through the remainder of his healthful life.” Where were the government printer, John D. Defrees, and the National Intelligencer literary editor, James C. Welling, who both had tried to talk Lincoln out of indelicate language in previous communications? One of the marks of Lincoln’s communication skills was his ability to combine in the same speech or public letter various styles of language and analogies that helped him appeal to a wide audience.
Lincoln wrote his letter to Corning at a time of rapidly diminishing confidence in himself and his administration. He knew he needed to calm the fears of the nation. Even though he thought the letter to be one of his best efforts, he must have been surprised by the responses to it. John W. Forney, editor of the Washington Chronicle, wrote, “God be praised the right word has at last been spoken by the right man, at the right time, and from the right place. It will thrill the whole land.” It was “timely, wise, one of your best State Papers,” was the response of New York senator Edwin D. Morgan. Roscoe Conkling, born in Albany, one of the founders of the Republican Party in New York who had been defeated for reelection to Congress in the fall of 1862, wrote to thank Lincoln for a letter that “covered all essential ground in few words, and in a temper as felicitous and timely, as could be.” Secretaries Nicolay and Hay recalled, “There are few of the President’s state papers which produced a stronger impression upon the public mind.”
Wanting this letter to be read by as wide an audience as possible, Lincoln had John Nicolay send it to leading Republicans. Francis Lieber, law professor at Columbia, and president of the recently formed Loyal Publication Society of New York, wrote Lincoln telling him that he was planning to print an initial installment of ten thousand copies. “The Publication Society will do it with great pleasure.” At least five hundred thousand copies of the public letter to Corning were read by upward of ten million people. The letter served to damp down, for the moment, the pervasive despair and fear across the North. Most important, it lifted Lincoln’s standing among members of his own Republican Party. Comfortable with pen and ink, and perhaps surprised by the results of the letter, Lincoln learned an important lesson about public communication that he would apply again and again in the coming months.
The letter did not, however, put an end to dissent. On June 25, 1863, Lincoln received a delegation from Ohio who came to protest the treatment of Vallandigham. They were coming fresh from a June 11 state Democratic convention where they had nominated Vallandigham, in absentia, for governor. David Tod, the present Republican governor of Ohio, had written Lincoln on June 14, “Allow me to express the hope that you will treat the Vallandigham Committee about to call on you with the contempt they richly merit.” Tod did not know Lincoln.
The lobbying group arrived with the advantage of having read the Corning letter. They were more strident in their criticisms of Lincoln than their New York co-belligerents. Cabinet secretaries Chase and Stanton, both Ohioans, having witnessed the positive reactions to Lincoln’s public letter to Corning, advised the president not to reply to the committee in person, but to tell them he would write a public letter.
Lincoln, buoyed up by the response to the Corning letter, was much more forceful in his letter to Matthew Birchard and the Ohio delegation. He challenged their misrepresentations of his previous comments on the subject. He disputed their “phraseology calculated to represent me as struggling for an arbitrary personal prerogative.” As for Vallandigham, Lincoln went further than he had in the Corning letter, charging that the acts against the military were “due to him personally, in a greater degree than to any other one man.” In his conclusion, Lincoln offered to return Vallandigham to Ohio, provided each member of the delegation would sign a pledge “to do all he can to have the officers, soldiers, and seamen of the army and navy, while engaged in the effort to suppress the rebellion, paid, fed, clad, and otherwise well provided and supported.”
The delegation would not accept this responsibility. They replied on July 1, 1863, that to do so would be at the “sacrifice of their dignity and self-respect.” They offered a defensive response to a president who was now on the offensive. In this second public letter, Lincoln again forcefully enunciated his principles, which began to win the day with Unionists across the North.
IN MAY 1863, Lincoln studied the framed and rolled-up maps in his office. In the East, Joseph Hooker had been beaten at Chancellorsville. In the West, Grant was stalled, and Lincoln did not know where, near Vicksburg. The president knew that Lee’s next high-stakes gamble was yet to be revealed.
By the middle of 1863, Lincoln had settled into a pattern of leadership both as commander in chief and, in effect, general in chief. Halleck may have held that title, but Lincoln had decided to ride both horses with a tight rein. As irritated as Lincoln may have been with “Old Brains’s” passivity, Halleck’s inaction created space for Lincoln’s action.
During the next two months, two decisive battles would be fought in the war’s eastern and western theaters. In Washington, the gaunt man in the White House often worked eighteen hours a day, walking back and forth to the War Department several times daily.
Lincoln typically downplayed his contribution. He closed a letter to Hooker by recalling the story of Jesus’s commendation of the widow who willingly gave out of her poverty an ancient coin called a mite, saying that he, although less qualified than his generals, would continue to contribute “his poor mite.”
At each crucial moment of the war, Lincoln sought face-to-face communication with his key generals. On May 6, 1863, within only one hour of learning of the retreat of the Army of the Potomac back across the Rappahannock, Lincoln traveled to Hooker’s headquarters at Fal-mouth. To the surprise of Hooker and his senior officers, Lincoln did not come to question or to criticize. He was sympathetic to the fact that Hooker had been injured and perhaps not able to be in full command of his troops. He was distressed to hear Hooker’s criticisms of his key officers—Stoneman, Leftwich, Reynolds—blaming them for missteps in his battle plan. During Lincoln’s visit, and in subsequent meetings and letters, he learned that many of the senior officers blamed Hooker for the defeat. “I have some painful intimations that some of your corps and division commanders are not giving you their entire confidence. This would be ruinous, if true.” Lincoln was doing his own reconnaissance.
Lincoln always followed up a personal conversation with a letter that usually combined both commendation and questions. On May 7, 1863, the president expressed his confidence in Hooker but encouraged him to plan to move forward. “Have you already in your mind a plan wholly or partially formed?” Lincoln let Hooker know he wanted to stay involved, but he expressed his wish in a winsome self-deprecation. “If you have, prossecute it without interference from me. If you have not, please inform me, so that I, incompetent as I may be, can try [to] assist in the formation of some plan for the Army.”
LINCOLN WAS RESTLESS to hear any news about Grant and Vicksburg. Having heard nothing at the telegraph office, and with no news from war correspondents in the Northern newspapers, on May 11, 1863, he telegraphed General John A. Dix at Fortress Monroe, Virginia, “Do the Richmond papers have anything about Grand Gulf or Vicksburg?”
On May 19, 1863, unbeknownst to Lincoln, Grant attacked Confederate general John Pemberton’s garrison at Vicksburg. At 2 p.m. Pemberton ordered three volleys fired from each piece of artillery high atop the bluffs. Union forces advanced but, met by an overwhelming barrage of cannon and bullets, fell back.
Three days later, on May 22, 1863, Grant’s men mounted a second attack, applying the force of two hundred pieces of artillery plus one hundred guns from Admiral Porter’s ironclads, only to be repulsed again. The Union forces sustained almost four thousand casualties in these two days of fighting. Grant, though stymied, knew he was not to be stopped. He prepared to lay siege to Vicksburg. Grant wrote Halleck on May 24, “The fall of Vicksburg, and the capture of most of the garrison, can only be a question of time.”
Meanwhile, time was passing slowly for Lincoln in Washington. More oppressive than the onset of warm, humid weather was the sense of despair about Union armies east and west. Finally, word of Grant’s advance on Vicksburg began filtering into the capital. Lincoln, who was learning not to make predictions, could not contain his jubilation upon hearing the news that Grant was now investing the Southern Gibraltar. On May 26, 1863, the president replied to a letter from Chicago congressman Isaac Arnold, “Whether Gen. Grant shall or shall not consummate the capture of Vicksburg, his campaign from the beginning of this month to the twenty second day of it, is one of the most brilliant in the world.” Lincoln, despite his many misgivings about Grant’s strategy, was eager to salute him for his efforts.
WHILE JOSEPH HOOKER STRUGGLED with his own plan, Robert E. Lee was sure of his next move. He determined that he could not remain below the Rappahannock River in Virginia and wait for the Army of the Potomac to attack him yet a third time. Lee regularly scanned Northern newspapers. Heartened by victories at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, he became convinced that the way forward against a larger and better-equipped foe was to move north again in another daring military move that might convince the North that they could not win. Lee had come to believe that the more the Confederacy was successful on the battlefield, the greater the chance for anti-Lincoln forces to be successful at the ballot box in the elections of 1863 and 1864. On April 19, 1863, Lee wrote his wife, Mary Anna, “I do not think our enemies are so confident of success as they used to be. … If successful this year, next fall there will be a great change in public opinion at the North. The Republicans will be destroyed & I think the friends of peace will become so strong that the next administration will go in on that basis.” Lee, always realistic about the odds his smaller armies faced, believed the road to a third morale-crushing victory lay in another invasion of the North.
However, the whole South had heard the story of their greatest loss at Chancellorsville. On the evening of May 2, 1863, just before 9:30 p.m., Stonewall Jackson, with a few of his officers, rode beyond Confederate lines to try to gain information about Union positions. As he and his party rode back toward their lines, in the darkness they were mistaken for Union cavalry and fired upon. Three bullets struck Jackson. Initially there was hope that he would recover, but he died on Sunday, May 10. His death took away Lee’s right-hand man and severely tested the South’s belief that God was on their side.
Three days later, Lincoln read in the Washington Chronicle an appreciative editorial on Jackson. That same day, Lincoln wrote editor John W. Forney, “I wish to lose no time in thanking you for the excellent and manly article in the Chronicle on ‘Stonewall Jackson.’ ” Lincoln’s respect for a Christian gentleman and soldier knew no borders.
Lee began his next march north on June 3, 1863. For several days, the Northern intelligence service, the Bureau of Military Information, struggled to discern his intentions. What was his objective? Baltimore? Philadelphia? Harrisburg? Anxious crowds gathered at the Willard Hotel hoping for some credible information.
On the morning of June 5, 1863, Hooker sent a telegram to Lincoln proposing a response. As Lee moved north, Hooker wanted “to pitch into his rear.” Lincoln, seeing more clearly than Hooker, believed Lee was “tempting” Hooker and saw this offensive as an opening. After first stating his objection in military language, Lincoln employed a colorful analogy to make his point. “I would not take any risk of being entangled upon the river, like an ox jumped half over a fence, and liable to be torn by dogs, front and rear, without a fair chance to gore one way or kick the other.”
Hooker, not convinced that Lee intended to take his whole army on a raid into Maryland or Pennsylvania, presented a plan to Lincoln and Halleck on June 10, 1863. He believed he could strike a mortal blow by crossing the Rappahannock at Fredericksburg and marching directly to Richmond, which he believed was defended by only 1,500 men.
Lincoln replied within ninety minutes. “I would not go South of the Rappahannock upon Lee’s moving North of It.” Furthermore, “If you had Richmond invested to-day, you would not be able to take it in twenty days; meanwhile, your communications, and with them, your army, would be ruined.” The president told Hooker what he had told McClellan and Burnside. “I think Lee’s Army, and not Richmond, is your true objective point.” He then offered military advice. “If he comes towards the Upper Potomac, follow on his flank, and on the inside track, shortening your lines, while he lengthens his. Fight him when opportunity affords. If he stays where he is, fret him, and fret him.” With his growing sense of military strategy, Lincoln was out-generaling one of his leading generals.
As Lee’s divisions moved north down the Shenandoah Valley, Jeb Stuart’s cavalry guarded the passes and gaps of the Blue Ridge to screen these movements from federal eyes. Hooker had been instructed by Lincoln and Halleck to keep the bulk of his army between Lee and Washington in order to protect the capital from any sudden Confederate incursion. Lee skillfully had his division commanders move their troops at different times and in different directions.
Lincoln, listening to the chatter at the telegraph office, understood that Lee’s line of march must be strung out over many miles. Accordingly, on June 14, 1863, he wrote to Hooker, “If the head of Lee’s army is at Martinsburg and the tail of it on the Plank road between Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, the animal must be very slim somewhere. Could you not break him?”
That same Sunday, Gideon Welles wrote in his diary, “Scary rumors abroad of army operations and a threatened movement of Lee upon Pennsylvania.” In the evening, Welles found Lincoln and Halleck at the War Department. The president told Welles “he was feeling very bad.” Welles volunteered that if Lee was moving, this could be an opportunity for Hooker to “take advantage and sever his forces.” Lincoln agreed, replying that “our folks … showed no evidence that they ever availed themselves of any advantage.”
The next day, June 15, 1863, Lincoln learned that the Union garrison at Winchester, Virginia, had fallen to Confederate general Richard Ewell’s troops. He also received reports that the advance units of Lee’s army were beginning to cross the Potomac into Maryland and Pennsylvania.
Growing more upset with Hooker, on June 16, 1863, Lincoln told him that his strategy “looks like defensive merely, and seems to abandon the fair chance now presented of breaking the enemy’s long and necessarily thin line.” In Lincoln’s third communication of the day to Hooker, the president, exasperated, placed Hooker under Halleck’s direct command.
This break was the beginning of the end for Hooker. Lincoln made a mistake at the outset in allowing him to go around Halleck and report directly to the president. In the next ten days, Hooker quarreled with Halleck, especially over Hooker’s request to have the troops guarding Harpers Ferry transferred to his command. The break was painful. On June 26, 1863, Welles confided in his diary that “the President in a single remark to-day betrayed doubts about Hooker, to whom he is quite partial.”
The next evening, Lincoln, Stanton, and Halleck, agreeing that Hooker was no longer the man to face Lee, selected General George Gordon Meade to replace him. A native of Pennsylvania, Meade “would fight well on his own dunghill,” Lincoln remarked. The next day, June 28, 1863, Lincoln pulled from his pocket a resignation letter from Hooker that he had accepted and told his cabinet he had “observed in Hooker the same failings that were witnessed in McClellan after the battle of Antietam—a want of alacrity to obey, and a greedy call for more troops which could not, and ought not to be taken from other points.” He announced that the new commander would be Meade.
Even before informing the cabinet, Stanton and Lincoln had dispatched Colonel James A. Hardie to Pennsylvania with orders for Meade. Clad in civilian clothes, Hardie persuaded Meade’s staff members to let him enter the general’s tent at three o’clock in the morning. Waking Meade, Hardie’s first words to him were that he had come from the War Department to bring him trouble. Startled out of his sleep, hearing this ill-timed humor, Meade later wrote his wife that his first thought was that Hooker had sent this man to arrest him.
George Meade was born in 1815 in Cadiz, Spain, where his father was an agent for the navy. Young George, tall and slender, graduated from West Point in 1835. At the outbreak of the Civil War, he was appointed brigadier general of the Pennsylvania Reserves. He fought under McClellan on the Virginia peninsula campaign in 1862 and was seriously wounded at Glendale when a musket ball hit him above his hip and just missed his spine. An additional bullet struck his arm, but Meade had stayed on his horse and persisted in commanding his troops until his loss of blood forced him to retire from the field.
After recuperating in a Philadelphia hospital, Meade led his Pennsylvania troops at South Mountain and Antietam. As a corps commander at Chancellorsville, he was dismayed by Hooker’s defensive tactics, but he led his own troops with great skill. In the aftermath of the battle, when Hooker’s leading generals believed their leader had lost his nerve in battle, the talk in the officers’ tents was that they wanted Meade to replace Hooker as commander of the Army of the Potomac, but he had refused to be part of any uprising.


Lincoln appointed George Meade to succeed Joseph Hooker as commander of the Army of the Potomac at the end of June 1863.

Lincoln dealt differently with this new commander. Perhaps learning a lesson after trying to offer fatherly advice to Burnside and Hooker, he let his intentions be communicated through Halleck. Meade, at age forty-seven, was in no danger of being mistaken for a prima donna. Competent, if colorless, he gained the nickname “the Old Snapping Turtle” because he was short-tempered, especially with civilians and newspapermen. Unlike Hooker at Chancellorsville, Meade always led from the front.
AS ROBERT E. LEE invaded Pennsylvania, Lincoln stepped up his monitoring of the telegraph traffic. But he did not simply receive information; he constantly asked for updates. On June 24, 1863, he wired General Darius N. Couch, in command of the Department of the Susquehanna, “Have you any reports of the enemy moving into Pennsylvania?” On the day that Meade assumed command, he asked Couch, “What news now? What are the enemy firing at four miles from your works?”
Although Lincoln’s steady stream of telegrams might sound like he was pushing a panic button along with everyone else in Washington, his true beliefs were revealed in an exchange of letters with Governor Joel Parker of New Jersey. Parker wrote on June 29, 1863, “The people of New Jersey are apprehensive.” The governor insisted on telling the president what to do. McClellan should be reinstated as commander of the Army of the Potomac and “the enemy should be driven from Pennsylvania.” Lincoln responded on the day before the commencement of the battle at Gettysburg with the exact opposite opinion. “I really think the attitude of the enemies’ army in Pennsylvania, presents us the best opportunity we have had since the war began.” Lincoln, almost alone, saw Lee’s invasion not as a dire tragedy, but as an opportunity. The president was also fully aware that he was placing Meade in command of a recently twice-beaten army whose morale, from fighting for so long in Virginia, was fragile. His basic concern was that Meade’s Army of the Potomac needed to fulfill two functions at once: protect Washington and Baltimore and strike at Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia as they entered Pennsylvania.
THE STRIKE CAME SOONER than Meade or Lee or even Lincoln expected. On the morning of June 30, 1863, John Buford, one of the best intelligence men in the Union army, rode into Gettysburg, a market town and county seat of 2,400 residents 75 miles north of Washington, 115 miles west of Philadelphia, and only 8 miles across the Maryland border. Brigadier General Buford rode at the head of 2,950 men in two divisions of the Eighth Illinois Cavalry. At 12:20 p.m. he wrote General Alfred Pleasanton, “I entered this place to-day at 11 a.m. Found everybody in a terrible state of excitement on account of the enemy’s advance upon this place.” Buford, carefully reconnoitering the countryside, deployed his horse soldiers in ever-wider arcs of defensive pickets seven miles long around the town.
On the morning of July 1, 1863, with a “blood red sunrise” in the east, A. P. Hill, one of Lee’s senior commanders, sent one of his divisions led by Major General Henry Heth down the Chambersburg Pike toward Gettysburg, where information said there was a supply of shoes. As his men approached this hub town, where twelve roads converged, the two armies simultaneously spied each other. At 7:30 a.m., Lieutenant Marcellus E. Jones of the Eighth Illinois Cavalry borrowed his sergeant’s carbine, steadied it on a fence rail, and fired the first shot of what would become the largest battle ever fought in the Western Hemisphere.
Both sides had stumbled into what the military textbooks called a “meeting engagement.” Neither side was prepared to fight at this place at this time; the approaching battle was “unintended;” neither side held an obvious advantage. General Meade, on only the fourth day of his command, would discover that 165,000 soldiers would soon converge on a town of 2,400.
The engagement, like a spontaneous three-act play, grew as more and more actors converged on Gettysburg. Meade, perched on “Old Baldy,” his hat pulled low over his face, was by nature a cautious general, and once engaged, fought mostly from a defensive posture. Lee, who had invaded the North to pull the Union troops away from Washington and to relieve the pressure upon Virginia, wanted to fight in Pennsylvania at a time and a place of his own choosing. He did not choose Gettysburg.
Seventy-five miles away, Washington watched and waited. Lincoln now believed a battle was looming. He did not attend the regularly scheduled cabinet meeting on June 30, 1863, but camped out at the War Department with Stanton and Halleck.
Early on the morning of July 2, 1863, Lincoln read the incoming dispatches from General Meade. The Confederate attacks were uncoordinated and disjointed, whereas the Union leaders acted with initiative and self-assurance. Yet there was no clear outcome of the battles on this second day of fighting.
With Lincoln busy at the War Department, word came that Mary Lincoln, while being driven in her carriage from the Soldiers’ Home to the White House, had been involved in an accident. The driver’s seat became detached from the carriage, frightening the horses; Mary was tossed from the coach and hit her head on a rock. Although injured, Mary would make a full recovery.
On the morning of July 3, 1863, as preparations in Washington for the Independence Day celebration were in full swing, the battle at Gettysburg turned. Lee, against the counsel of his most trusted generals, decided to attack the center of the Union line. The plan was to overwhelm the Union artillery with Confederate cannon followed by a charge of 13,000 soldiers—ever after known as “Pickett’s charge.” The advance led to a crushing defeat, with approximately 6,600 Confederate casualties and half again that number taken prisoner. Meade, with the advantage shifted to his side, did not counterattack. An evening rain helped end three of the most deadly days in the war.


On July 3, 1863, at Gettysburg, Mathew Brady photographed the dead of the First Minnesota near the Peach Orchard.

On July 4, 1863, Meade’s headquarters issued a congratulatory declaration to the army. He did not write it but must have approved it. “Our task is not yet accomplished, and the commanding general looks to the army for greater efforts to drive from our soil every vestige of the presence of the invader.” Lincoln surely winced when he read Meade’s declaration. Once again, a Union commander revealed that he did not understand that his task was to destroy the army, not drive it from Union soil, where it could only restore itself once again.
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BY THE END OF MAY 1863, Lincoln believed that the fall of Vicksburg was just a matter of time. Grant, having suffered more than 3,000 casualties in his initial assaults, and with an overwhelming advantage in manpower, decided to settle into a siege. Confederate general John Pemberton pleaded for relief, but with Sherman guarding the Union rear with six divisions, no relief would be forthcoming.
As the days turned into weeks, Grant’s 80,000 men, with limitless ammunition, slowly squeezed the 30,000 defenders of Vicksburg into submission. Finally, on July 3, Pemberton, who had served in the same division with Grant in the Mexican War, sent his aide-de-camp to discuss terms of surrender with Grant. Lincoln’s leading general offered his standard reply: unconditional surrender.
After a siege of forty-seven days, as the Confederate soldiers stacked their rifles in defeat, there was no cheering but silent respect by the victors. The unconditional Grant, out of respect for the bravery of the defenders, granted the condition to the defenders not of a Union prison but of parole. On July 4, at 10 a.m., twelve hundred miles from Gettysburg, the Stars and Stripes was raised over Vicksburg.
FOR THREE DAYS, Washington had waited as incomplete reports trickled in about the battle at Gettysburg. Finally, at 10 p.m. on July 3, the Washington Star issued a bulletin of Meade’s victory. The next day, the Fourth of July, amid firecrackers and rockets, the U.S. Marine Band played “The Star-Spangled Banner” over and over again. At 10 a.m., the president issued an announcement. He wished the nation to know that the victory at Gettysburg “is such to cover that Army with the highest honor, and to promise a success to the cause of the Union.” The an nouncement concluded, “He especially desires that on this day, He whose will, not ours, should ever be done, be everywhere remembered and reverenced with profoundest gratitude.”
On July 7, Secretary Welles received word from Admiral Porter that Vicksburg had fallen on July 4, 1863. The celebration started up again. At 8 p.m. on July 7, 1863, a huge throng assembled at the National Hotel and marched up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Executive Mansion. Reaching the White House, the crowd serenaded the president until Lincoln appeared at a window and offered an impromptu response. After thanking both the assemblage and “Almighty God,” Lincoln asked a question. “How long ago is it?—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 as a self-evident truth that ‘all men are created equal?’ ” The sentence was too long and complex, but he would tuck the idea away for later use.
UNBEKNOWNST TO THE PUBLIC that festive evening, but known to members of his cabinet who had met earlier that day, Lincoln was deeply disturbed that Meade, flushed with victory and attending to housekeeping duties of his battered troops, had failed to go after Lee. The rains that fell on Gettysburg on the evening of July 3, 1863, kept falling, so Lee was stuck in Pennsylvania, unable to ford the raging Potomac River. Meade’s infantry skirmished with some of Lee’s rearguard troops on July 11, 12, and 13, more than a week after the victory celebrations in Washington. Finally, on the morning of July 14, at 6 a.m., the Union forces mounted their long-awaited offensive. But when they approached the river, there was no one to fight. The last of Lee’s troops had crossed over during the night.
That day, Halleck wrote Meade, “The enemy should be pursued and cut up, wherever he may have gone.” He went on to say, “I need hardly say to you that the escape of Lee’s army without another battle has created great dissatisfaction in the mind of the President.”
Meade could not bear this censure and immediately offered to resign his command. Lincoln took up his pen to reply that very day, although his letter may have taken several days to compose. After thanking Meade for what he did at Gettysburg and recapitulating the strength of Meade’s forces and the weakness of Lee’s forces, he concluded:
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—As it is, the war will be prolonged indefinitely. If you could not safely attack Lee last Monday, how can you possibly do so South of the river, when you can take with you very few more than two thirds of the force you then had in hand? It would be unreasonable to expect, and I do not expect you can now effect much. Your golden opportunity is gone, and I am distressed immeasurably because of it.
This was a strong letter from the commander in chief to the commander of the Army of the Potomac. Too strong. Lincoln never sent it, understanding that if he sent it he would lose the services of a hard-working commander. Lincoln folded the letter and placed it in an envelope, on which he wrote, “To Gen. Meade, never sent, or signed.”
Lincoln recognized, even if many did not, that the victory at Vicksburg was at least equal to the accomplishment at Gettysburg.
One day before writing Meade, Lincoln took up his pen to write a very different letter to Grant. On July 13, 1863, he began, “I do not remember that you and I ever met personally.” After acknowledging “the almost inestimable service you have done the country,” Lincoln said he wished “to say a word further.”
When you first reached the vicinity of Vicksburg, I thought you should do what you finally did—march the troops across the neck, run the batteries with the transports and thus go below; and I never had any faith, except a general hope that you knew better than I, that the Yazoo-Pass expedition, and the like could succeed. When you got below, and took Port Gibson, Grand Gulf and vicinity, I thought you should go down the river and join Gen. Banks; and when you turned Northward, East of the Big Black, I feared it was a mistake.
Lincoln, after this detailed recitation of his disagreements with Grant’s strategy, concluded: “I now wish to make the personal acknowledgement that you were right and I was wrong.”
In two days, Lincoln wrote two completely different letters to the commanders who had won victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. The letters reflected his quite different views of the two generals. Meade had fought well in a defensive posture in a battle he had not sought, but had failed to follow up that victory. Grant had continuously sought the initiative and, in the face of many setbacks, against massive fortifications, de termined to achieve nothing but unconditional surrender of the enemy.
The Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg marked a turning point in the war, but Lincoln understood that the South was far from defeated and that there would be much hard fighting ahead. Lincoln, confronting a North tiring of war, had much to do to convince them that the fight to preserve the Union was worth the sacrifice.
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IN AN AUGUST 9, 1863, letter to Ulysses S. Grant, Lincoln brought up the possibility of the arming of black troops. He noted that General Lorenzo Thomas was recruiting black troops. “I believe it is a resource which if vigourously applied now, will soon close the contest.”
Yet, Frederick Douglass was discouraged. He had discovered the Union army was treating black soldiers poorly and not providing equal pay. Draft riots had erupted in New York City in early July. The mostly black victims were beaten to death while their homes and churches were burned. Lincoln had to deploy federal troops to restore order. Major George Luther Stearns, a wealthy Boston abolitionist, had appointed Douglass as an agent for recruitment and now encouraged him to present his concerns to Lincoln.
On August 10, 1863, Douglass arrived at the White House in hopes of seeing Lincoln, but when he entered, he saw a large number of people waiting with the same intent. To his surprise, within minutes, a door opened and Douglass was ushered into Lincoln’s office. The president stood to welcome him. Douglass pressed upon Lincoln the need for more official recognition of black troops. They spoke about the troublesome issue of unequal pay for blacks.
Douglass was taken aback by the tone and substance of their conversation. Later, in Philadelphia, he spoke about his meeting with Lincoln. “I never met with a man, who, on the first blush, impressed me more entirely with his sincerity, with his devotion to his country, and with his determination to save it at all hazards.”
On August 23, 1863, Grant replied to Lincoln, “I have given the subject of arming the negro my hearty support. This, with the emancipation of the negro, is the heaviest blow yet given the Confederacy.” The exchange with Grant and the meeting with Douglass prompted the president to seek out a public opportunity to defend both emancipation and the courage of the black soldiers.
So when he was invited to speak at a “Grand Mass Meeting” in Springfield, Illinois, on September 3, 1863, his heart must surely have leapt.
Lincoln’s old Springfield neighbor James C. Conkling had tendered the invitation. He wrote, “It would be gratifying to the many thousands who will be present on that occasion if you will also meet with them.” He concluded with a plea, “Can you not give us a favorable reply?”
Conkling made Lincoln a tempting offer. After victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, Conkling believed the Springfield meeting offered Lincoln the opportunity to speak about his policies at a crucial moment. Lincoln could expect that vindication would be his traveling companion on the train trip home to Springfield.


Frederick Douglass, abolitionist editor and reformer, strongly disapproved of Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address. Douglass’s meeting with Lincoln at the White House in August 1863 began a series of significant conversations between the two leaders.

Six days later Lincoln replied: “Your letter of the 14th is received. I think I will go, or send a letter—probably the latter.”
Lincoln’s secretaries, John Nicolay and John Hay, both from Illinois, appreciated the emotional tug-of-war they observed in their boss. “For a moment the President cherished the hope of going to Springfield, and once more in his life renewing the sensation, so dear to politicians, of personal contact with great and enthusiastic masses, and of making one more speech to shouting thousands of his fellow-citizens.”
Conkling wrote again on August 21, 1863. “While it would afford the many thousands of loyal men assembled together on that occasion, great pleasure to hear from you, by Letter … they would infinitely prefer to see you in person.”
With little time before the event, Lincoln had to make a decision. On August 26, 1863, he gave his answer. “It would be very agreeable to me, to thus meet my old friends, at my own home; but I can not, just now, be absent from here, so long as a visit there, would require.”
The next day, Lincoln wrote on War Department stationery, “I cannot leave here now. Herewith is a letter instead. I have but one suggestion—read it very slowly.”
William O. Stoddard witnessed the composition of the letter. As a young newspaper editor from Champaign, Illinois, he was one of the first to champion Lincoln for the Republican nomination in 1859. He now served as an additional secretary, assisting Nicolay and Hay, from 1861 to 1864. Stoddard entered Lincoln’s office on or about August 23, 1863, and the president asked him if he could read what he was writing aloud, saying, “I can always tell more about a thing after I’ve heard it read aloud, and know how it sounds.”
The September 3, 1863, meeting was in part a response to a large “peace meeting” that had been held in Springfield on June 17. On a warm summer’s day, a Democratic antiadministration crowd of upward of forty thousand had listened to heated oratory critical of Lincoln, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the arming of black troops. The culmination of the day’s events was the adoption of twenty-four resolutions, highlighted by what became known as the famous twenty-third resolution, declaring, “Further offensive prosecution of this war tends to subvert the constitution and the government, and entail upon this Nation all the disastrous consequences of misrule and anarchy.” In Lincoln’s hometown, the boisterous assemblage churned out anti-Lincoln sentiment as it called for peace.
Expecting a huge crowd for the September meeting, organizers arranged for speeches to take place into the twilight at a half dozen stands. Conkling drew out Lincoln’s letter and started to read—slowly.
Lincoln did not usually respond to critics, especially Peace Democrats or Copperheads, but he began this speech by addressing them as well as his supporters, not simply at Springfield but in the nation. “There are those who are dissatisfied with me. To such I would say: You desire peace; and you blame me that we do not have it.”
The victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, hailed by most Republicans, were understood quite differently by Peace Democrats, War Democrats, and some conservative Republicans. They greeted these victories as an opportunity to bargain for peace and end the war.


Lincoln, invited to speak in Springfield on September 3, 1863, sent a letter read by his friend James Conkling to the largest Union rally of the war.

But, to be plain, you are dissatisfied with me about the negro. Quite likely there is a difference of opinion between you and myself upon that subject. I certainly wish that all men could be free, while I suppose you do not. … You dislike the emancipation proclamation; and, perhaps, would have it retracted. You say it is unconstitutional—I think differently, I think the Constitution invests its commander-in-chief, with the law of war, in time of war.
Lincoln recognized that their conflict with him was over African-Americans and slavery. He knew that there were few abolitionists in the West. Most who united with the Republican Party in the 1850s shared his rejection of the expansion of slavery, but were not committed to its obliteration.
Lincoln used here almost the same words with which he had ended his public letter to Horace Greeley: “I certainly wish that all men could be free.” In his response to Greeley, written one year before, he had made a distinction between his personal wish and his duty under the Constitution. A year later, this division between personal and public views was no longer present.
You say you will not fight to free negroes. Some of them seem willing to fight for you; but, no matter. Fight you, then, exclusively to save the Union. I issued the [Emancipation] proclamation on purpose to aid you in saving the Union. Whenever you shall have conquered all resistance to the Union, if I shall urge you to continue fighting, it will be an apt time, then, for you to declare you will not fight to free Negroes.
Lincoln had concluded his letter to Greeley by stating, “I shall adopt new views so fast as they appear to be true views.” His affirmation of black soldiers here demonstrates how far he had traveled in the eight months since January 1, 1863.
These fiery words gave the Springfield letter its identity, but nowhere is Lincoln’s political and military strategy expressed in more picturesque language. Instead of detailing a list of military battles and victories, Lincoln invited his audience to stand with him on the mighty Mississippi. For Western people whose lives radiated around rivers, Lincoln could not have chosen a more open metaphor. He wanted this Illinois audience to appreciate all the partners in making the Mississippi free again.
The signs look better. The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea. Thanks to the great North-West for it. Not yet wholly to them. Three hundred miles up, they met New-England, Empire, Keystone, and Jersey, hewing their way right and left. The Sunny South too, in more colors than one, also lent a hand. On the spot, their part of the history was jotted down in black and white.
Lincoln’s rhetoric soared when he allowed his imagination free rein. A sign signifies something that points beyond itself. What did these signs point toward? The preservation of the Union. If Lincoln told Greeley he would save the Union, he told Conkling what kind of Union was worth saving.
Lincoln used images to describe these allies working together. He also doffed his tall stovepipe hat to the “Sunny South.” Up until now, the images had all been geographical, one kind of diversity. Lincoln now changed the metaphors of diversity in his word picture: “in more colors than one.” He said to the naysayers and doubters in the audience that even the South has “lent a hand” and that this part was acted out by both “black and white.”
Douglass had once accused Lincoln of fighting with his white hand while his black hand was tied behind his back. Lincoln now used the same metaphor to affirm the black hand and point to the courageous actions of black soldiers. The great majority of black soldiers who would fight for the Union were from the South.
In a grand transitional sentence, Lincoln moved from images of space to images of time.
Peace does not appear so distant as it did. I hope it will come soon, and come to stay; and so come as to be worth the keeping in all future time. It will then have been proved that, among free men, there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and that they who take such appeal are sure to lose their case, and pay the cost.
Lincoln allowed himself to think in the future tense about the shape of peace. He expressed his sense of hope by repeating the image of “come” three times: “come soon,” “come to stay;” “come as to be worth keeping in all future time.”
This balanced sentence created in the listener a crescendo of expectation toward the future.
Finally, Lincoln presented a contrast between the courage of black soldiers and the malevolence of some whites. Lincoln had previously commended the use of black soldiers in private letters, and he now did so, dramatically, in a public letter and speech.
And then, there will be some black men who can remember that, with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet, they have helped mankind on to this great consummation; while, I fear, there will be some white ones, unable to forget that, with malignant heart, and deceitful speech, they have strove to hinder it.
His words were powerful because he did not rely on analysis but on description. The “black men” that Lincoln extols are portrayed “with silent tongue, and clenched teeth,” “and well-poised bayonet.” Whereas the white men are pictured “with malignant heart,” “and deceitful speech.”
Lincoln worked with contrasts to heighten his message. The black men are “silent” whereas the “white ones” are noisy with “deceitful speech.” The black soldiers, who had won Lincoln’s admiration, he praised because “they have helped mankind on to this great consummation;” whereas some white men “have strove to hinder it.”
Lincoln did not just praise the courage of blacks; he did so in contrast to the reticence of whites.
Because Conkling read Lincoln’s words, it would seem we cannot know how Lincoln would have spoken these words to a real audience. But we can, through Stoddard’s recollections of Lincoln reading the letter aloud in his office.
Stoddard described the metamorphosis in Lincoln when he was roused from writer to speaker. “He is more an orator than a writer, and he is quickly warmed up to the place where his voice rises and his long right arm goes out, and he speaks to you somewhat as if you were a hundred thousand people of an audience, and as if he believes that fifty thousand of you do not at all agree with him. He will convince the half of you, if he can, before he has done with it.”
Stoddard “noted the singular emphasis which he put upon the words: ‘And there will be some black men who can remember with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well poised bayonet, they have helped mankind on to this great consummation.’ ”
He was a witness to the weight that Lincoln gave to these words—even if he was speaking to an audience of one.
The mass meeting in Springfield was a huge success. Conkling wrote to Lincoln on September 4, 1863, “The Letter was received by the Convention with the greatest enthusiasm.”
In the following days a wide circle of people commended the letter. Greeley, one year later, appreciated that Lincoln had used a rally to defend the Emancipation Proclamation. “ ‘God Bless Abraham Lincoln!’ The Promise must be kept!”
Abolitionists offered enthusiastic praise not accorded earlier Lincoln speeches. Senator Charles Sumner wrote from Boston, “Thanks for your true and noble letter. It is an historical document.” Sumner’s Massachusetts colleague, Senator Henry Wilson, wrote, “God Almighty bless you for your noble, patriotic, and Christian letter.” Wilson understood the public letter’s importance in the crosscurrents of conversation. “It will be on the lips, and in the hearts of hundreds of thousands this day.” John Murray Forbes, a railroad magnate and abolitionist, who had helped to organize African-American troops in Massachusetts, wrote to Lincoln on September 8, 1863. “Your letter to the Springfield Convention … will live in history side by side with your [Emancipation] proclamation.” Forbes believed Lincoln’s letter to Conkling spoke to a wide audience. “It meets the fears of the timid and the doubts of the reformer.”
On September 10, 1863, George Opdyke, the mayor of New York, stopped at the White House. Opdyke was a wealthy merchant who had joined the Republican Party in large measure because of its antislavery posture. Only three weeks before, on the evening of August 18, a group of twenty-five radical Republicans had met at Opdyke’s home to explore the possibility of convening a convention to nominate a candidate for president in 1864 other than Lincoln. Opdyke now came to thank the president “for his recent admirable letter to the Springfield Convention.”
IN SEPTEMBER 1863, Lincoln understood more than ever that his task was to convince more than half of a wearying Northern public that this terrible war was worth fighting. His words at Springfield on September 3 were his pledge that he intended to follow through on the full meaning of the promise of the Emancipation Proclamation. Surprised by the public response to his words, as summer turned into fall, Lincoln was more alert than ever for other occasions where he could convey his vision and influence public opinion about the meaning and purpose of the war.


This photograph by Alexander Gardner was taken on November 8, 1863, ten days before Lincoln traveled to Gettysburg to deliver his address.