A. Lincoln A Biography

Chapter 24
A New Birth of Freedom September 1863–March 1864

NOW WE ARE ENGAGED IN A GREAT CIVIL WAR TESTING WHETHER THAT NATION, OR ANY NATION SO CONCEIVED, AND SO DEDICATED, CAN LONG ENDURE.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863

HE SIGNS LOOK BETTER. SO ABRAHAM LINCOLN HAD DECLARED IN his letter to the Springfield meeting on September 3, 1863, but not everyone agreed. Whether the president’s confident outlook was justified would become a matter of vigorous debate in the fall of 1863. Politicians, generals, and preachers all became instant pundits, forecasting the future. How one saw “the signs” depended on where one stood.
With crucial elections in key states coming up in October, Republicans closed ranks—at least on the surface—to express their public support for the president. They feared Democratic election gains of 1862 could be expanded in the state elections of 1863. Meanwhile, Lincoln found himself damned with faint praise by leaders in Washington. The president was an honest and good person, so went the conversations in the congressional corridors of power, but he remained too soft and too slow. In the barrooms beyond the cloakrooms, radical Republicans freely voiced their denunciations of the president—he was not up to the job.
Out in the country, by contrast, people increasingly recognized in Lincoln a gentle leader, free from the egomania associated with most political leaders; in short, he was a man they could trust. Lincoln’s public letters of 1863 generated an upswing of goodwill. He received a boost in the fall when The Letters of President Lincoln on Questions of National Policy enjoyed a brisk sale at eight cents a copy. The twenty-two-page pamphlet brought together letters to General George McClellan, Horace Greeley, New York mayor Fernando Wood, the Albany Committee, Governor Horatio Seymour, and the Springfield meeting. Ordinary people, when reading the pamphlet, began to recognize both Lincoln’s political genius in dealing with nettlesome questions and his artistry with words.
Henry Ward Beecher spoke for many religious leaders in his estimate of Lincoln. Writing in the Independent, an influential weekly founded in 1848 with evangelical and antislavery roots, Beecher declared, “Rising to the dignity of the time, the President during his third year has shown a comprehensive policy and a wisdom in its execution which promise to broaden his sun at its setting.”
George Curtis, author of the celebrated “Lounger” column in Harper’s Weekly, provided the most astute analysis in the fall of 1863. “The conservative Republicans think him too much in the hands of the radicals; while the radical Republicans think him too slow, yielding, and half-hearted.” Curtis had come to believe Lincoln knew better than anyone how to play the political game. “Both factions had to accept [Lincoln’s] leadership—for the moment.”
“FOR THE MOMENT.” Time indeed weighed heavily on Lincoln’s mind. He said so in a private letter to Governor Andrew Johnson of Tennessee. “It is something on the question of time, to remember that it cannot be known who is next to occupy the position I now hold, nor what he will do.” He knew party radicals were dissatisfied with him, and that some in his party were casting about for an alternative candidate for 1864. He believed that Democrats thought their chances for victory in 1864 improved the longer the war went on. Aware it had been more than thirty years since a president had been elected to a second term, Lincoln pondered how to improve the Republicans’ odds.
Should he assume the mantle of the partisan party leader? He had become a party leader in Illinois by learning how to apply grease to the wheels of party machinery, be they Whig or Republican wheels. In Washington, he had assumed a more independent stance in terms of party organization.
Or should he increase his efforts to reach out beyond his Republican base? From his first political campaign in Illinois to his appointment of his presidential rivals to his cabinet, Lincoln possessed the rare political instinct to move beyond partisanship and bring people of differing viewpoints together.
Lincoln made his decision. He would appeal for a larger loyalty. He had been pleased when the call went out to the Springfield meeting of September 3, 1863, to “Unconditional Union men of the State of Illinois, without regard to former party associations.” He now envisioned a new National Union Party to run in the remaining state elections of 1863 and in the national election of 1864. He urged Republicans to run under this banner in the hopes of attracting the votes of Democrats.
LINCOLN QUICKLY LEARNED that battlefield results influenced election results. The battle for the West now shifted from Vicksburg to Chattanooga. Lincoln understood that while Vicksburg had been the key to controlling the Mississippi, whoever controlled Chattanooga, located at thejuncture of Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia, held the keys to the back doors of Virginia to the east and Georgia to the south. Situated in a valley between the Appalachian and the Cumberland mountain ranges, Chattanooga was a hub for rail lines radiating to the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Atlantic Ocean. It was second only to Richmond as the prize for federal forces in the fall of 1863. If the Union forces could oust the Confederate forces from the region around Chattanooga, the door could swing wide open to Georgia and ultimately to the Atlantic Ocean. If the Confederate forces could hold this corner of eastern Tennessee, they could keep the door open to supply Virginia from the west.
Lincoln knew that the people of this mountainous region, although living in a seceded state, remained fiercely loyal to the Union. They did not own slaves. Cut off geographically from both middle Tennessee to the west and Georgia to the south, they were an isolated mountain island in the midst of the Confederacy.
Lincoln had been discouraged when General William Rosecrans had stopped at Murfreesboro in middle Tennessee after his victory at Stones River in January 1863. Rosecrans, with a reputation for bold action, inexplicably seemed to give way to caution. Finally, on June 23, after nearly six months of preparation and unrelenting pressure from Lincoln and Secretary of War Stanton, Rosecrans’s Army of the Cumberland pushed the Confederate forces under General Braxton Bragg one hundred miles over the Cumberland mountains and across the Tennessee River to the edge of Chattanooga, with a loss of only 560 casualties. Then Rosecrans stopped again.
On July 7, 1863, Stanton, elated by the news of the victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, wired Rosecrans, “You and your noble army now have the chance to put the finishing blow to the rebellion. Will you neglect the chance?”
Rosecrans, more than a little annoyed that his army’s accomplishments had not been fully acknowledged, wired back, “You do not appear to observe the fact that this noble army has driven the rebels from Middle Tennessee. … I beg in behalf of this army that the War Department may not overlook so great an event because it is not written in showers of blood.” Old Rosy’s final comment was a not-so-subtle reference to his belief that Grant had sacrificed far too many men to achieve victory at Vicksburg.
At Lincoln’s urging, Henry Halleck wired Rosecrans on July 24, 1863. “There is great disappointment felt here at the slowness of your advance.” Later that day, Halleck wrote again, “The patience of the authorities here has been completely exhausted.”
Rosecrans, bypassing Halleck, wrote the principal authority on August 1, 1863. In a long letter to Lincoln he listed nine reasons for his delay. He told Lincoln he had been held up by a torn-up Louisville and Nashville railroad, by a lack of “adequate cavalry,” by rains that had rendered the “turnpikes next to impossible,” that he needed to draw supplies 260 miles “exposed to hostile cavalry raids,” and on and on. Rosecrans concluded, “You will not be surprised if in face of these difficulties it takes time to organize the means of success.”
Lincoln, having the same sinking feeling about Rosecrans that he had in the past about too many previous commanders, began his reply with his customary affirmation, expressing his “kind feeling for and confidence in you.” Lincoln hoped to calm the agitated Rosecrans, to get him to stop worrying and start fighting. The president concluded, “Do not misunderstand. … I am not watching you with an evil eye.”
Rosecrans’s Army of the Cumberland finally moved on Chattanooga on August 16, 1863. The Confederate Army of Tennessee, under General Braxton Bragg, abandoned the city on September 9. General Ambrose Burnside, in command of the small Army of the Ohio, had captured Knoxville, Tennessee, in a parallel advance a week earlier. Lincoln had hoped to liberate eastern Tennessee in the fall of 1861, but it seemed finally accomplished in the fall of 1863. Or was it? Rosecrans, heading south into Georgia in three columns, believed he had defeated Bragg, but the Confederate general had only engineered a strategic retreat, waiting to fight another day at a time and place of his choosing.


General William Rosecrans, “Old Rosy,” commanded the Army of the Cumberland as it approached Chattanooga, the back door to Virginia and Georgia.

On September 19 and 20, 1863, Bragg hurled his troops at Rosecrans at Chickamauga Creek southeast of Chattanooga. A misguided move by Rosecrans on the second day allowed fifteen thousand Confederate troops to punch through on his right. General James Longstreet, Rose-crans’s roommate from the class of 1842 at West Point, arrived on September 20 with two divisions from the Army of Northern Virginia and helped sweep one-third of the Union forces from the field. Rosecrans and part of his army retreated back to Chattanooga, but General George H. Thomas stayed on the field, rallied his men on Snodgrass Hill, and blocked the further movement of the Confederate forces. For his heroism, Thomas earned the nickname “the Rock of Chickamauga.”
On September 20, 1863, Charles Dana, assistant secretary of war, but in truth Stanton’s spy, wired his boss, “Chickamauga is as fatal a name in our history as Bull Run. … [O]ur soldiers turned and fled. It was a wholesale panic.”
Lincoln stayed at the telegraph office late into the evening, wiring Burnside at 2 a.m., September 21,1863, “Go to Rosecrans with your force, without a moments delay.” Learning that Burnside had sent troops in the opposite direction to Jonesboro, in pursuit of small guerrilla forces, Lincoln returned to the telegraph office. “DamnJonesboro!” he exclaimed.
“Well, Rosecrans has been whipped, as I feared.” Lincoln walked into John Hay’s bedroom in the White House early on the morning of September 21, even before his young secretary was up. Sitting down on Hay’s bed, Lincoln continued, “I have feared it for several days. I believe I feel trouble in the air before it comes.”
At 11 a.m., Lincoln wrote Burnside again, “If you are to do any good to Rosecrans it will not do to waste time with Jonesboro.” Four days later, in exasperation, Lincoln wrote saying that the receipt of Burn-side’s most recent telegram “makes me doubt whether I am awake or dreaming.” Lincoln recounted Burnside’s protestations over the many days that he was preparing to move, but never seemed to do so. At one point, Lincoln called Burnside’s actions “incomprehensible.” Lincoln signed the letter, blotted the ink, endorsed the envelope, struggled to get control of his anger, and decided not to send it.
On the evening of September 23, 1863, shortly after Lincoln had gone to bed at the Soldiers’ Home, he was awakened by his secretary John Hay, who had ridden out in “splendid moonlight” to invite the president back to a hastily called midnight meeting convened by Stan-ton. A “considerably disturbed” Lincoln dressed and returned with Hay, where he found Halleck, Seward, and Chase had joined Stanton. They discussed the options for sending reinforcements to support Rosecrans. Stanton asked Halleck how long it would take for troops from the Army of the Potomac to reach Chattanooga. The general supposed sixty days, perhaps forty. Stanton responded that if traders could ship twenty thousand bales of cotton by railroad to Chattanooga in twenty days, let the Union send twenty thousand soldiers.
Lincoln was skeptical of the whole operation, pointing out that “you can’t get one corps into Washington in the time you fix for reaching Nashville.” He then proceeded to humorously illustrate this “impossibility,” but Stanton interjected that “the danger was too imminent & the occasion too serious for jokes.” The conversation continued until almost morning with the president and Halleck, originally opposed, finally offering their support for the plan.
Lincoln was wrong. The troops began moving to the railheads in twelve hours and boarded the trains on the morning of September 25, 1863. In a stunning example of the transportation revolution, Stanton elicited cooperation from railroad men so that five trains, each with thirty cars, left Washington. In the end, five sets of five trains traveled on a route of 1,233 miles. Lincoln had his doubts, but twenty-three thousand men, more than twenty thousand horses, plus artillery and equipment, rolled toward Chattanooga. They traveled on nine independently operated railroads with different gauge tracks over the Appalachians and across the Ohio River, where bridges had to be improvised twice, arriving eleven days later at a railhead near Chattanooga.
All of these reinforcements, including General William Sherman’s four divisions from Vicksburg, seemed neither to mollify nor strengthen Rosecrans. His army, back in Chattanooga, found itself besieged, with guns aimed at them from Missionary Ridge on the north and Lookout Mountain on the south. Lincoln wrote to Rosecrans in early October to stress the stakes. “If we can hold Chattanooga, and East Tennessee, I think the rebellion must dwindle and die.”
Even the president’s encouragement did not work. Charles Dana reported to Lincoln that Old Rosy “was for the present completely broken down.” The president, upon receiving this report, told John Hay that Rosecrans was “confused and stunned like a duck hit on the head” ever since the disaster at Chickamauga.
Lincoln now knew he needed to replace Rosecrans. But timing was everything. Lincoln decided to delay doing anything until after the Ohio elections, knowing that Rosecrans and his chief of staff, James Garfield, were both natives of Ohio and enjoyed immense popularity in their home state.
THE ISSUES LINCOLN FACED in the border state of Missouri did not go away, but became even more contentious in the summer and fall of 1863. Lincoln believed he had a friend in Missouri in Hamilton R. Gamble, a conservative former Whig who had been elected as the provisional governor in 1861 and who remained in office. Throughout the Civil War, however, the state was locked in internal warfare and political factionalism exacerbated by continual changes in civilian and military leadership. In 1863, the president became caught between radicals and conservatives battling over emancipation, each attacking him for not taking their side.
Lincoln did not know Missouri well, but the way he dealt with the state’s complex problems revealed his political dexterity. When a conflict arose at the end of 1862 over who would appoint and organize Union troops in Missouri, the governor or the War Department, Lincoln told Attorney General Edward Bates, himself from Missouri, “I therefore think it is safer when a practical question arises, to decide that question directly, and not indirectly, by deciding a general abstraction supposed to include it.” This directive lifted up the central core of Lincoln’s political philosophy. He embraced a pragmatic approach to politics and had become wary of politicians whose ideology, be it conservative or liberal, blinded them to the practical considerations inherent in local conditions.
In September 1862, General John M. Schofield was replaced by General Samuel R. Curtis as commander of the Department of Missouri. Curtis had achieved fame by leading outnumbered Union forces to victory at Pea Ridge, Arkansas, on the Arkansas-Missouri border on March 7–8, 1862. Curtis soon sided with Missouri’s antislavery forces, which led to a clash with Governor Gamble. In December, Curtis arrested the Reverend Samuel B. McPheeters, minister of the Pine Street Presbyterian Church in St. Louis, charging him with sympathy for the enemy and ordering him to stop preaching in his church and leave the state. Lincoln, following a detailed investigation, wrote Curtis informing him that he was suspending his order. He told Curtis that after speaking with McPheeters, “I tell you frankly, I believe he does sympathize with the rebels,” but a larger point was at issue. “The U.S. government must not… undertake to run the churches.” Lincoln then stated a policy that he adhered to all during the war: “Let the churches, as such take care of themselves.”
By May 1863, having had enough of Curtis’s continuing to side with the radicals, Lincoln decided to reappoint John Schofield, who he believed would be more evenhanded. He told Schofield that the people of Missouri had entered into “a pestilent factional quarrel among themselves.” He knew he was handing him “a difficult role,” so he offered him advice: “If both factions, or neither, shall abuse you, you will probably be about right.”
Lincoln’s appointment of Schofield brought a testy letter from a group of “Union people” asking Lincoln to “suspend that appointment until you hear from us.” The president replied that day. “It is very painful to me that you in Missouri cannot, or will not, settle your factional quarrel among yourselves. I have been tormented with it beyond endurance for months, by both sides.” What upset Lincoln the most: “Neither side pays the least respect to my appeals to your reasons.”
In the summer and fall of 1863, both sides stepped up their attacks on Lincoln. Although a number of issues were in play, including patronage, the central problem was emancipation. The radicals, called “Charcoals,” favored immediate emancipation. The conservatives, known as “Snowflakes,” resisted interference with the institution of slavery. The “Claybanks,” so called because their position was purportedly colorless, occupied the middle ground, calling for gradual emancipation.
Lincoln tried to distinguish for the combatants the difference between ends and means. He favored emancipation, but in a state long wedded to slavery, he believed that immediate emancipation would produce too much of a backlash. He would have backed a plan for gradual emancipation, but the Snowflakes proposed a plan stating that slavery not end until 1870, and that peonage, a system where blacks would continue to labor in servitude until their debts were paid, could go on from eleven years to life. Lincoln told John Hay that he disliked this proposal because it ended up “postponing the benefits of freedom to the slave instead of giving him an immediate vested interest therein.”
When the Missourians could not get their way, they traveled to Washington to protest. Governor Gamble called on Lincoln at the White House wishing to enlist Lincoln’s support against the radicals’ plan for immediate emancipation. When he did not receive that support, he wrote angrily to Attorney General Bates, “I express to you my profound conviction that the President is a mere intriguing, pettifogging, piddling politician.”
In late September 1863, Lincoln welcomed a delegation of radicals fresh from an emancipation convention in Jefferson City. Charles D. Drake, their firebrand leader, had been a Whig, a Know-Nothing, and a Democrat; he was now a radical Republican. Lincoln knew that the resolutions passed at their convention included removing both Gamble and Schofield. Lincoln kept them cooling their heels for three days in Washington before meeting them on September 30. Confident that they could pressure the president to remove Schofield and accede to their demands, the group was surprised when he did not. Instead, he told Drake that he had had enough of their tough tactics. Restraining his anger, he told them he would write them his decisions.
On October 5, 1863, he wrote that he would retain Schofield and would instruct him to place Missouri again under martial law. With time to collect his thoughts, Lincoln laid out for them what happens when “all being for the Union. … each will prefer a different way of sustaining the Union.” A pattern developed: “At once sincerity is questioned, and motives are assailed. Actual war coming, blood grows hot, and blood is spilled. Thought is forced from old channels into confusion. Deception breeds and thrives. Confidence dies, and universal suspicion reigns.” No psychologist could have described it better.
Both sides, true to Lincoln’s analysis, could not hear. Both Gamble and Drake went home angry. Lincoln, in the fall of 1863, decided, despite his best efforts, he could not solve the problems of Missouri. In late October, he told Missourian Bates, he “had no friends in Missouri.”
LINCOLN HAD ONE EYE TRAINED on the military battlefield and another on the election battlefield in the fall of 1863. Although the spring elections in Massachusetts and Connecticut had gone well, he knew the fall elections offered an opportunity for Democrats to vote against his policies. Governors were to be elected in Maine, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Kentucky, and California. Lincoln understood that Democrats, having scored gains in the 1862 midterm elections, wished to demonstrate that voting in 1863 could set the tone for the national elections of 1864.
The political practice of the day prevented Lincoln from campaigning. He did encourage his close friends, both in Washington and in the states, to campaign vigorously. The president worked closely with Secretary of War Stanton to arrange furloughs for soldiers so they could return home and vote, and, in some instances, vote in the field. Confined to Washington, Lincoln monitored the elections closely from the War Department telegraph office.
In Ohio, John Brough, a tough-talking Republican, was running under a Union ticket against the outspoken Clement Vallandigham, the Democratic peace candidate exiled in Canada. In Pennsylvania, Governor Andrew G. Curtin faced a tough challenger in Democratic Pennsylvania chief justice George W. Woodward, who was holding hearings on the constitutionality of Lincoln’s controversial March Conscription Act.
Ohio and Pennsylvania voted on Tuesday, October 13, 1863. During the day, Lincoln told Welles he felt “nervous” about the contests. In the evening, an anxious Lincoln telegraphed Columbus. “Where is John Brough?” Learning that Brough was in the telegraph office, Lincoln asked, “Brough, what is your majority now?” He replied, “Over 30,000.” Lincoln requested Brough to remain in the telegraph office in Columbus during the night as would he in Washington. The majority rose to over 50,000 at midnight, and by five o’clock the next morning, over 100,000. Vallandigham had been decisively defeated. Chase, who had used his considerable influence campaigning in his home state, wired Lincoln: “The victory is complete, beyond all hopes.” Lincoln, ecstatic, wired back, “Glory to God in the highest. Ohio has saved the Nation.”
On election night, Lincoln also heard welcome news from the Keystone State. Even though Curtin won by just twenty thousand votes, an exuberant supporter wrote to Lincoln, “Pennsylvania stands by you, keeping step with Maine and California to the music of the Union.” The next day, Welles met the president, “who is in good spirits and greatly relieved from the depression of yesterday.” Lincoln told the secretary of the navy “he had more anxiety in regard to the election results of yesterday than he had in 1860 when he was chosen.”
James F. Moorhead, a congressman from Pennsylvania, wrote Lincoln to suggest the larger meaning of the election victories. “Let me congratulate you on the glorious result in Ohio & Penna, who now declare for A Lincoln in 1864.”
THREE DAYS AFTER THE VICTORIES in the crucial fall elections, Lincoln acted to win the victory on the military battlefield. On October 16, 1863, he directed Halleck to inform Grant, “You will receive herewith the orders of the President of the United States placing you in command of the Departments of the Ohio, Cumberland, and Tennessee.” Lincoln decided to combine these three separate commands under his best general. He further gave Grant the option of changing the organization of these departments “as you deem most practicable.” Grant was told he had the option to keep William Rosecrans or put George Thomas in his place. Thomas became commander of the Army of the Cumberland. Immediately upon receiving his new command, Thomas wrote Grant from Chattanooga, “I will hold the town till we starve.”
Lincoln, receiving mail from eastern Tennessee, replied to two concerned citizens of Knoxville, “You do not estimate the holding of East Tennessee more highly than I do.”
LINCOLN SURPRISED HIS CABINET when he accepted an invitation to travel to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to be the secondary speaker at the dedication of the nation’s first national military cemetery. They had watched as Lincoln turned down all invitations to speak outside Washington. When the president had left Washington, he did so only to visit the Army of the Potomac at the front.
In late September, Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner reminded Lincoln of the letter from John Murray Forbes, a Boston industrialist who had written on September 8, 1863, to commend the president for his letter to the Springfield rally. Forbes wrote, “My suggestion then is that you should seize an early opportunity and any subsequent chance to teach your great audience.” After a series of successful public letters, Lincoln became more open to opportunities to speak outside Washington.
Within days after the battle of Gettysburg, plans were set in motion that would lead to a national soldiers’ cemetery. In previous wars, American soldiers were buried where they fell in battle. This remained the pattern into the first two years of the Civil War. Graves were marked in makeshift ways that too often were not permanent. Everything began to change on the battlefields in 1862, and reached a new dimension at Gettysburg in the fall of 1863.
David Wills, a successful Gettysburg attorney, directed plans for the national cemetery. Wills and his committee made the decision that a national cemetery required a national dedication. The planners set October 23, 1863, for the dedication, a fall day that would still ensure good weather. Exactly one month before, on September 23, Edward Everett, the most celebrated speaker in the United States, was invited to offer the central address. Everett replied immediately that a month would not be sufficient time for the research and preparation of a totally new address. He responded that he would not be ready to deliver such an important address until November 19. Thus, Everett set the date for the dedication ceremonies.
Wills also invited some of the leading literary artists of the day to participate. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, and William Cullen Bryant were requested to prepare a poem or ode for the occasion. Each declined.
Abraham Lincoln was the last speaker invited. Wills wrote to the president on November 2, 1863, just seventeen days before the event. “I am authorized by the Governors of the different states to invite you to be present, and participate in these ceremonies, which will doubtless be very imposing and solemnly impressive.” Wills’s invitation included a brief word about the nature of the remarks the president should give. “It is the desire that, after the Oration, You as Chief Executive of the Nation formally set apart these grounds to their Sacred use by a few appropriate remarks.”
On Wednesday, November 18, 1863, Lincoln arrived at the little depot on Carlisle Street in Gettysburg at sundown. Stepping from the train, he observed hundreds of coffins lined up on the station platform. He was met by Wills, Everett, and Ward Hill Lamon, who had been appointed marshal in chief for the dedication.
The president was driven to the Wills residence, the most splendid home on the town square, or “the Diamond,” as the locals called it. Lincoln was shown up the steep front stairs to his bedroom on the second floor, where he intended to spend some time finalizing his speech. Lincoln appreciated the hospitality he received that evening, but his heart was back in Washington. Young Tad had fallen seriously ill, and he knew that Mary, never forgetting the death of Willie, would be as deeply fearful as he was.
On November 19, 1863, Ward Hill Lamon, acting as marshal, struggled to assemble the dignitaries outside the Wills home on the Diamond. Lincoln appeared at the appointed hour of 10 a.m. dressed in a black suit with a frock coat. He wore his usual tall silk hat, to which he had added a wide mourning band in memory of Willie. Lincoln was assigned a bay horse so small that the president’s long legs nearly touched the ground.


Lincoln rode in a parade along Baltimore Street in Gettysburg on the morning of November 19, 1863.

American flags could be seen everywhere along the route up Baltimore Street. Buildings were pockmarked with bullet holes, evidence of the battle less than five months before. Children were selling cookies and lemonade, as well as souvenir bullets, and even cannonballs.
At least fifteen thousand people had come from many parts of the country to be present at the dedication. The proceedings began with an invocation and hymn. Edward Everett then stepped forward to deliver his oration. Lincoln respected Everett, protégé of Daniel Webster, because the New England orator had delivered a lecture on George Washington nearly 150 times across the nation, donating close to $100,000 to the restoration of Washington’s home at Mount Vernon.
Lincoln followed Everett’s address attentively. The president stirred when Everett, losing his footing, spoke of “General Lee;” Lincoln, turning to Seward, whispered a correction—“General Meade.” Everett, after speaking for two hours and eight minutes, finally concluded.
Lamon introduced Lincoln. The crowd had become restless after such a long oration. A photographer who had pitched his equipment directly in front of the platform busily adjusted his camera as he prepared to take a photograph of the president speaking. Lincoln rose, adjusted his spectacles, and took out of the left breast pocket of his coat his dedicatory remarks. Beyond the sprawling crowd, Lincoln could see row upon row of soldiers’ graves. He shifted his speaking text to his left hand, and began: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”


New England politician Edward Everett was invited to be the featured speaker at Gettysburg.



Lincoln, in this enlarged photograph taken before his address, is in the center, hatless, with part of his face covered by the hat of a soldier.

In the four and a half months since Lincoln’s response to the victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, his earlier words at the White House, “eighty odd years,” became “Four score and seven years ago” at Gettysburg. This was not a simple way to say “eighty-seven.” Lincoln asked his audience to calculate backward to discover that the nation began with the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Lincoln’s opening words found their root in Psalm 90: “The days of our years are threescore years and ten; And if by reason of strength they be fourscore years.” Lincoln never named the Bible, or quoted directly from it in his remarks, but the whole of his speech would be suffused with biblical content and cadence.
Lincoln built the architecture of the Gettysburg Address upon a structure of past, present, and future time. He started in the past by placing the dedication of the battlefield in the larger context of American history. His opening words highlighted historical continuity. He began with a biblical allusion that accented permanence, and yet at the same time noted the nation’s continuity had already surpassed the biblical time frame for life and death. In speaking of “our fathers” Lincoln invoked a common heritage of the founding fathers, and at the same time identified himself with his audience.
Lincoln’s first sentence took flight with the Declaration of Independence’s American truth that “all men are created equal.” Lincoln had sounded this note in his recent letter to the Springfield meeting. When Lincoln reaffirmed this truth at Gettysburg, he was asserting the war to be about both liberty and union.
“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives, that that nation might live.” After his long introductory sentence, Lincoln traveled rapidly forward from the Revolution to the Civil War. With quick brushstrokes, he recapitulated the meaning of the war. As a speaker, he was usually spare with his adjectives, but on this occasion he modified both Civil War and battlefield with “great.” Unlike Everett, he spent none of his words on the details of the battle. His purpose was to transfigure the dedication with a larger meaning of the purpose of the “nation,” a word he would use five times in his address. The Civil War was a “testing” of the founding ideals of the nation to see whether they can “endure.”
“It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.” His words “but, in a larger sense” were his clue to the audience that he was about to expand the parameters of his intentions for this day. With this transition, he began his appeal from the past battle to the present dedication.
But before he lifted their eyes beyond the battlefield, Lincoln told his audience what they could not do: “we cannot dedicate,” “we cannot consecrate,” “we cannot hallow.” At this point Lincoln employed a dramatic antithesis by contrasting “The brave men” with “our poor power.”
In the last three sentences of the address Lincoln shifted the focus a final time.
The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it cannot forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Lincoln now opened out the future and spoke to the responsibility of the hearers. He pointed away from words—there had been more than two hours of words already—to deeds. He contrasted “what we say here” with “what they did here.”
Lincoln’s concluding paragraph, in a speech known for its brevity, was a surprisingly long, complex sentence of eighty-two words. In his closing paragraph Lincoln continued his use of repetition: “to be dedicated,” “to be here dedicated,” “we take increased devotion,” “the last full measure of devotion.” Repetition reiterated the accountability of the audience.
Lincoln, who always took much time in choosing his words, here used religious ones—“dedicate” and “devotion”—which conjured up the call to commitment present in the revival services of the Second Great Awakening and in the Presbyterian and other Protestant churches Lincoln was attending in Washington.
At this point, Lincoln made his only addition to his speaking text. He added the words “under God.” This addition was uncharacteristic for a speaker who did not trust extemporaneous speech. It is not known what impelled Lincoln to add these two words, and after the Gettysburg Address there was no apology for this interjection. Lincoln included “under God” in all three copies of the address he prepared at later dates.
Lincoln, the Whig and the Republican, had always insisted that the American nation drew its breath from both political and religious sources. His words were consistent with invocations of God in almost all of his major presidential speeches. Lincoln, as president, walked back and forth across the line between religion and politics.
The phrase “a new birth of freedom” was layered with both political and religious meanings as well. He was no longer, as in his inaugural address, defending an old Union, but proclaiming a new Union. The old Union had attempted to contain slavery. The new Union would fulfill the promise of liberty, the crucial step into the future that the founders had been unwilling to take.
The “new birth” also pointed to a paradox in both politics and religion. Lincoln had come to see the Civil War as a ritual of purification. The old Union had to die. Death became a transition into a new Union and a new humanity.
As Lincoln approached the unexpected climax of his address, he uttered the words that would be most remembered from his address: “and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Investigations to unearth the sources of the Gettysburg Address have centered on similar words by politician Daniel Webster and New England Unitarian minister Theodore Parker. There is no doubt Lincoln knew their earlier words. But this sleuthing has overshadowed the fact that Lincoln built on his own words. In his inaugural address he declared, “The chief Magistrate derives all his authority from the people.” In his message to Congress in special session on July 4, 1861, he had asked the question, “Whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy—a government of the people, by the same people—can, or cannot, maintain its territorial integrity against its own domestic foes.” As president, Lincoln worked with a definition of democracy that he continued to expand and refine.
Lincoln did not use one first-person singular pronoun in his entire address. It was as if Lincoln disappeared so that transcendent truths could appear.
He concluded his address before the photographer could begin.
Newspapers in the major cities had set up their page forms with type set in advance with Everett’s text, which they had had for days. They therefore pasted in Lincoln’s words below Everett’s address without comment. In the days following, newspapers traditionally supportive of Lincoln found much to praise in his remarks at Gettysburg. The Chicago Tribune declared, “Half a century hence, to have lived in this age will be fame. To have served it as well as Lincoln, will be immortality.”
One of the first editors to grasp the importance of Lincoln’s succinct address was Josiah Holland, associate editor of the Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican. On November 20, 1863, he wrote, “Surprisingly fine as Mr. Everett’s oration was in the Gettysburg consecration, the rhetorical honors of the occasion were won by President Lincoln.” He continued, “His little speech is a perfect gem, deep in feeling, compact in thought and expression, and tasteful and elegant in every word and comma.”
Criticism from Lincoln’s political opponents in the press was instant. The Chicago Times responded, “The cheek of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the filly, flat, and dishwatery utterances of a man who has to be pointed out to intelligent foreigners as the President of the United States.” Thirty-six miles from Gettysburg, the Harrisburg Patriot and Union spoke acrimoniously, “We pass over the silly remarks of the President; for the credit of the nation, we are willing that the veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them and that they shall no more be repeated or thought of.”
Far away, the Times of London, which did not like much that was American, did not appreciate Lincoln’s American eloquence either. The Times editorialized, “The ceremony was rendered ludicrous by some of the sallies of that poor President Lincoln.”
America’s greatest orator, however, did appreciate Lincoln’s words. Edward Everett wrote to Lincoln on the following day. “Permit me … to express my great admiration of the thoughts expressed by you, with such eloquent simplicity & appropriateness, at the consecration of the Cemetery.” Everett, who three years earlier confided to his diary his criticisms of Lincoln’s speaking abilities on the president-elect’s train trip from Springfield to Washington, now told Lincoln, “I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”
WITHIN DAYS OF RETURNING FROM GETTYSBURG, Lincoln lay sick in the White House. Doctors diagnosed his illness as varioloid, a mild form of smallpox. Tad remained sick but showed clear signs of getting better. Lincoln used his enforced confinement to work on his third message to Congress, scheduled to convene on December 8, 1863.


Edward Everett who early in Lincoln’s presidency doubted his abilities as a speaker wrote a generous letter commending Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

Lincoln could not walk to the telegraph office, but he wanted to learn all he could about Grant’s intentions in the West. In the month following Grant’s assumption of command in October, “Fighting Joe” Hooker arrived with twenty thousand men from the Army of the Potomac, and William Tecumseh Sherman, Grant’s trusted sidekick, arrived with seventeen thousand troops. Whereas Grant enjoyed the confidence of his officers and men, Confederate general Braxton Bragg’s effort suffered from bickering within his command, his tenure continued by the vote of the only man that counted—Jefferson Davis—who traveled by train to Bragg’s headquarters to try to hold things together. Davis, who often acted precipitously as Confederate commander in chief, instructed Bragg to detach James Longstreet’s fifteen thousand men in an attempt to recapture Knoxville.
Hooker’s men began the campaign to retake Chattanooga on November 24, 1863, with a daring and courageous attack up the northern slope of Lookout Mountain, raising the American flag at the moment of a total eclipse of the moon. The next day, Sherman attacked Missionary Ridge but was stopped by determined Confederate forces. At that point, George Thomas’s Army of the Cumberland, which Grant had assigned a secondary role because he believed they still might be shell-shocked from their courageous stand at Chickamauga Creek, crossed an open plain against a murderous barrage and stormed up Missionary Ridge. Grant, crunching his cigar, asked, “Thomas, who ordered those men up the ridge?”
“I don’t know,” Thomas replied. They both looked on in wonder as Thomas’s men continued their victorious charge, regimental flags flying, shouting at the top of their lungs, “Chickamauga, Chickamauga.” In less than three days, Grant’s army, consisting of three armies that had never fought together before, drove the Confederate army thirty miles south toward Atlanta. The door was opened to Georgia. Then on November 29, 1863, Longstreet was driven off from Knoxville back into Virginia.
“The storming of the Ridge by our troops was one of the greatest miracles in Military history,” wrote Charles Dana to Secretary of War Stanton on November 26, 1863. “No man who climbs the ascent, by any of the roads that wind along its front, can believe that eighteen thousand men were moved up its broken and crumbling face, unless it was his fortune to witness the deed.”
A grateful president wrote to General Grant on December 8, 1863. “I wish to tender you, and all under your command, my more than thanks—my profoundest gratitude—for the skill, courage, and perseverance, with which you and they, over so great difficulties, have effected that important object. God bless you all. A. Lincoln.”
ON THE SAME DAY, December 8, 1863, Lincoln offered his annual message to Congress. Ill and confined to his bedroom during its preparation, he exhibited his political agility if not his literary grace in this third annual message. He sought the advice of Secretary of War Stanton and Treasury Secretary Chase, but their assistance consisted of information, for Lincoln knew that he needed to assert his authority at a crucial transitional moment in the war.
Victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, and now at Chattanooga, sparked a widespread conversation on what politicians had begun to call “Reconstruction.” Lincoln took heart in the summer and fall by what informants told him was disaffection with the Confederacy and a resurgent Union spirit. Amistad Burwell, a prominent Mississippi businessman, wrote Lincoln that if one were to walk through Vicksburg, where he once lived, in disguise, one would hear “Jeff Davis … cursed from the bottom of the heart, & with the whole soul.” Burwell wanted Lincoln to know “there are many bold and talented men, once men of wealth and influence, who at all hazards are willing to raise the old standard, and follow it to the death.”
Events in Arkansas and North Carolina offered further encouragement. In September, Lincoln learned, after federal occupation of Little Rock and Fort Smith, a series of Union meetings urged the restoration of a civil government loyal to the Union. A peace movement headed by William Woods Holden, editor of the Raleigh Standard, led the way in efforts to disconnect North Carolina from the Confederacy. Many radical Republicans were suspicious of these reports, but Lincoln was not.
Congress, already chafing against what many believed to be Lincoln’s expansion of presidential power, determined to assert their right to determine the guidelines for Reconstruction. But they found themselves in escalating disagreement about the purpose and terms of policies that would follow the end of the war.
Conservatives, including Democratic senator Reverdy Johnson of Maryland, wanted Lincoln to withdraw the Emancipation Proclamation as the precursor for a policy of amnesty that would invite Southern states to once again send representatives to Congress in fulfillment of their long-held dictum: “The Union as it was and the Constitution as it was.” Lincoln had heard all this before.
The real battle, however, was an intramural family squabble among Republicans. Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, a spokesman for the radicals, published “Our Domestic Relations” in the Atlantic Monthly in October. Though it was unsigned, everyone knew from its content and tone that Sumner had written it to get in a first word that the prerogative for organizing the South after the war belonged solely to Congress, and not the president. Sumner’s larger point was that “as a restraint upon the lawless vindictiveness and inhumanity of the Rebel States,” Congress should divide the liberated lands “among patriotic soldiers, poor whites, and freedmen.”
Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, speaking for the far-flung Blair family who had a foot in all three major border states, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, addressed Sumner and the radicals in a shrill October speech at Rockville, Maryland. Long believing the radicals to be audacious and arrogant, Blair asserted that the imminent peace was “menaced by the ambition of the ultra-Abolitionists, which is equally despotic in its tendencies” to the Southern despotism about to be overthrown. Blair, giving voice to the fears of Republican conservatives, stated that the “abolition party whilst pronouncing philippics against slavery, seek to make a caste of another color by amalgamating the black element with the free white labor of our land.” Sumner had spoken of “state suicide” in arguing that Southern states had lost all their rights by rebelling. Blair argued that this notion was absurd, for treason could only apply to individuals. Blair bid his fellow Republicans to trust the course of Reconstruction to the “safe and healing policy of the President.”
With this backdrop to his annual message, Lincoln determined not to be drawn into this infighting in his party, and tried to stay above the fray. He recognized the “uneasiness among ourselves” so much in evidence in 1863. He voiced his presidential realism when he stated, “The policy of emancipation, and of employing black soldiers, gave to the future a new aspect, about which hope, and fear, and doubt contended in uncertain conflict.” He saluted the fact that “of those who were slaves at the beginning of the rebellion, full one hundred thousand are now in the United States military service.” To his critics who wished to return to the Union as it was, Lincoln responded, “I shall not attempt to retract or modify the emancipation proclamation; nor shall I return to slavery any person who is free by the terms of the proclamation, or by any of the acts of Congress.”
Lincoln’s third annual message summed up where he believed events stood at the end of 1863. It lacked the forward-looking energy of his annual message of 1862. Although he recognized the service of blacks, his affirmation of their contributions lacked the praise for their valor so evident in his message to the Springfield meeting three months earlier.
Lincoln accompanied his third annual message with a Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, which indicated how much his thinking had changed in the previous two and a half years. At the outset of the war, he had believed there existed in the South a strong if largely silent Unionist sentiment waiting to be encouraged. He began his presidency reiterating his stance that he did not intend to touch slavery where it already existed in the South; he now stated that adherence to the Emancipation Proclamation would be the price of admission to his determination to “think anew” about a newly constituted Union. Lincoln’s painful journey into political realism meant that if a small minority, 10 percent, started the process toward Reconstruction, he would consider this an adequate beginning. The alternative, already being voiced in the South, would be that Confederates, realizing the war was a lost cause, would simply try to return to the Union admitting nothing and gaining everything.
The enthusiastic reception to Lincoln’s annual message and proclamation testified to the president’s dexterity in appealing to all sides in the growing debate over Reconstruction. John Hay, ever alert to responses to his boss, wrote in his diary, “Men acted as if the Millennium had come.” He wrote that “Sumner is beaming, while at the other political pole Dixon & Reverdy Johnson said it was highly satisfactory.” To top it off, Massachusetts senator “Henry Wilson came to me and laying his broad palms on my shoulders said, ‘The President has struck another great blow.’ ”
AS 1863 TURNED INTO 1864, conversation about the next presidential election picked up. At the end of the year, the Chicago Tribune spoke for many when it stated, “Mr. Lincoln has the inside track. He has the confidence of the people, and even the respect and affection of the masses.” The president’s popularity extended beyond Republicans. Albert Smith, a former Democratic member of Congress, wrote, “You have touched & taken the popular heart—and secured your re-election.”
Yet for all of Lincoln’s growing popularity with the people, politicians continued to question the desirability, if not the electability, of Abraham Lincoln for a second term. He had not been the leading candidate for the Republican nomination in 1860, and a significant number of disparate groups of Republicans were not certain he was the best choice for 1864. The fact that no one had been inaugurated for a second term since President Andrew Jackson in 1832 added some historical bulk as the scales began to be weighed at the beginning of the year.
The question in the minds of the detractors became, who would be the best challenger? In the corridors of power, Republicans talked about a not surprising list of potential candidates, including William Seward and Edward Bates. Some wanted John C. Frémont again, who was known to dislike Lincoln and was popular with radicals. The new military hero, Ulysses S. Grant, brought to mind the election of past generals as president.
One man stepped forward. Talented and experienced as governor, senator, and secretary of the treasury, Salmon P. Chase had long desired the highest office of all. He also chafed in Lincoln’s cabinet, especially after his embarrassing defeat as the leader of the mutiny against Secretary of State William Seward in December 1862. Chase would admit that Lincoln treated him with respect, yet he felt that his work as secretary of the treasury went unappreciated. His chief complaint against Lincoln was that he was too cautious. Chase, as president, would have moved more quickly toward emancipation and the use of black troops.
In September 1863, Lincoln read aloud to Chase an unfinished letter explaining why he felt the need to include exceptions in his Emancipation Proclamation. As was Lincoln’s style, he then posed for Chase a series of questions to demonstrate the many sides to the question of emancipation. One month later, Chase wrote to an Ohio newspaper editor, “Oh! that the President could be induced to take the positive responsibility of prompt action as readily as he takes the passive responsibility of delay and letting bad enough alone.”
As was the custom, Chase campaigned for Lincoln in Ohio and Indiana at the time of the October state elections. His speeches on behalf of the president, however, did not fool Attorney General Edward Bates, who confided to his diary, “That visit to the west is generally understood as Mr. Ch[a]se’s opening campaign for the presidency.”
Lincoln’s response to Chase’s ambition was never to join the criticisms of the secretary of the treasury voiced by the president’s friends. Lincoln’s own secure sense of self meant he did not become defensive against Chase’s criticisms. By 1863, John Hay, while barely twenty-five, had become a confidant of the president. The observant Hay complained to the president about the ways Chase undercut Lincoln’s leadership. The president responded, “It was in very bad taste, but that he had determined to shut his eyes to all these performances: that Chase made a good secretary and that he would keep him where he is.” Lincoln added, “If he becomes Pres all right. I hope we may never have a worse man. I have seen all along clearly his plan of strengthening himself.”
By mid-December, Kansas senator Samuel Pomeroy headed up a covert Chase presidential campaign. Prominent supporters included Senators B. Gratz Brown of Missouri and John Sherman of Ohio.


Anthony Berger took this seated portrait on February 9, 1864.