A. Lincoln A Biography

Chapter 25
The Will of God Prevails March 1864–November 1864

IN THE PRESENT CIVIL WAR IT IS QUITE POSSIBLE THAT GOD’S PURPOSE IS SOMETHING DIFFERENT FROM THE PURPOSE OF EITHER PARTY—AND YET THE HUMAN INSTRUMENTALITIES, WORKING JUST AS THEY DO, ARE OF THE BEST ADAPTATION TO EFFECT HIS PURPOSE.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Meditation on the Divine Will [1864]

IN MARCH 1864, ABRAHAM LINCOLN EAGERLY LOOKED FORWARD TO meeting General Ulysses S. Grant for the first time. Lincoln had long admired the small man from Galena, Illinois, and could not wait to talk with him about what he hoped would become the war’s decisive campaign in the spring and summer of 1864.
Grant arrived in Washington on the afternoon of March 8, 1864, accompanied by his thirteen-year-old son, Fred. A planned official welcoming committee to meet him at the Baltimore and Ohio railway station never materialized, so Grant took a carriage with his son to the Willard Hotel. Dressed in a travel-stained duster that hid his uniform, he was not recognized by the hotel clerk, who assigned him to a small room on the top floor. When the clerk turned the register around and saw the name “U.S. Grant and son, Galena, Illinois,” his demeanor suddenly changed. The now-attentive clerk reassigned Grant Parlor Suite 6, the best rooms in the hotel—indeed, the same ones Abraham and Mary Lincoln had stayed in when they had arrived in Washington in February 1861.
A message from the president awaited General Grant: Would he join him that evening for the weekly reception at the White House?
After dinner at the Willard, where other guests gawked and gossiped about the famous general, Grant walked two blocks to the Executive Mansion. Directed through the foyer, he walked down the great corridor. When he entered the brightly decorated East Room, the guests fell silent. Grant saw the tall man at the far side of the room and walked toward him. Lincoln extended his hand. “Why, here is General Grant! Well, this is a great pleasure, I assure you.”
Only nine days before, on Leap Year Day, February 29, 1864, the Senate confirmed what the House had already passed: The rank of lieutenant general, last held by General George Washington in 1798, would be conferred upon Grant in grateful recognition of his military accomplishments.
Lincoln turned Grant over to Secretary of State Seward, who introduced him all around. Shouts went up, “Grant, Grant, Grant,” accompanied by cheer after cheer. It was one of the few times the president of the United States was not the center of attention, but, smiling, Lincoln seemed perfectly pleased to cede the spotlight. He hoped that the arrival of Grant as the new commander of all the Union armies would mean the beginning of the end of the war. Although quite willing to defer to his new military commander, as commander in chief, Lincoln also relished the opportunity to sit down with Grant to talk together about the upcoming campaigns.
TWO AND A HALF WEEKS LATER, on March 26, 1864, Lincoln received three visitors who had traveled all the way from Kentucky to give the president an earful about growing resentment in their native state over the recent recruiting of African-American troops. Kentucky governor Thomas E. Bramlette, former United States senator Archibald Dixon, and Albert G. Hodges, editor of the Frankfort Commonwealth, met with Lincoln for an unusually long Saturday morning interview. At the conclusion, Lincoln asked if he could make “a little speech.” He wanted them to understand why he had changed course from the pledge in his inaugural address that he would not interfere with slavery where it already existed, to his decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation and subsequently deploy black troops.
Lincoln’s “little speech” made such an impact on Hodges that the editor came back in the afternoon to ask if he could take a copy of the president’s remarks to Kentucky. Lincoln replied that what he had said was extemporaneous, but he told Hodges he would write him a letter re-creating his words.


Lincoln’s public letter to Kentucky editor Albert G. Hodges spoke of his attitude toward slavery and his own “agency” in the Civil War.

On April 4, 1864, Lincoln sent his promised letter, which, in the intervening nine days, had become a public letter meant for an audience beyond the three Kentucky leaders. The content and style rose to the level of the president’s best public rhetoric. His letter began forcefully: “I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I cannot remember when I did not so think, and feel.” These initial words were unambiguous. The president, who often acted as a moderator between extremes, now unequivocally owned his personal position as “anti-slavery.”
The words achieve additional resonance when we remember to whom Lincoln was speaking. He was not talking with strong abolitionists such as Senators Charles Sumner and Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, but with leaders from a key border state. Next, he spoke about the tension he felt between his loathing for slavery and his duty under the Constitution.
And yet I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling. It was in the oath I took that I would, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. I could not take the office without taking the oath. Nor was it my view that I might take an oath to get power, and break the oath in using the power. I understood, too, that in ordinary civil administration this oath even forbade me to practically indulge my primary abstract judgment on the moral question of slavery.
He reminded his audience that he had overruled attempts at emancipation by General John C. Frémont, former secretary of war Simon Cameron, and General David Hunter in South Carolina. He recalled his own three appeals for compensated emancipation in 1862, all of which the leaders of the border states rebuffed.
Lincoln reiterated this narrative in some detail so that the Kentuck-ians might appreciate that, in the latter part of 1862, he had been “driven to the alternative of either surrendering the Union, and with it, the Constitution,” or arming Southern slaves. If at the beginning of his letter Lincoln spoke of his antislavery beliefs in moral terms, by the middle of the letter he discussed the arming of black soldiers in strategic terms.
Lincoln was remarkably candid in admitting the uncertainty in his decision. “I hoped for greater gain than loss; but of this, I was not entirely confident.” Lincoln’s willingness to openly discuss his doubts is a distinguishing characteristic of his political leadership.
As Hodges came to the end of the “little speech,” he must have been surprised to see that the letter continued beyond what the president had said in their meeting. “I add a word which was not in the verbal conversation,” he wrote.
In telling this tale I attempt no complement to my own sagacity. I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me. Now, at the end of three years struggle the nation’s condition is not what either party, or any man devised, or expected. God alone can claim it. Whither it is tending seems plain. If God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that we of the North as well as you of the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find therein new cause to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God.
Some observers have used one sentence from this paragraph, “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me,” to emphasize the overall passivity of Lincoln’s leadership. They have suggested, with this sentence given as proof, that Lincoln’s essential nature was more responsive than initiatory.
But if one reads the whole paragraph, it is clearly not about passivity. Lincoln, as if a lawyer in a courtroom, began his case with three negative statements:
“no complement to my own sagacity”;
“I claim not to have controlled events”;
“the nation’s condition is not what either party, or any man devised or expected.”
These negative assertions, building in crescendo from a singular negation of Lincoln himself, to the wider negation of “either party,” to a universal negation of “any man,” were meant to prompt the question: What was the source of “the nation’s condition”?
Lincoln answered in four positive assertions that more than balanced the three negative ones.
“God alone can claim it”;
“If God now wills the removal of a great wrong”;
“wills that we of the North as well as you of the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong”;
“to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God.”
The central meaning of the paragraph becomes clear. By employing the verb “devised,” Lincoln spoke about the agency—the politicians and generals—responsible for carrying out the war. He did not exempt himself. The trajectory of the paragraph meant to underscore the “agency” of God. Crafted with a lawyer’s logic, the letter pointed beyond Lincoln as president to God as the primary actor. Lincoln was quite willing to acknowledge his passivity as a way to emphasize the larger truth of the activity of God.
Hodges received Lincoln’s letter with delight. Lincoln, in person and now by letter, made such a strong impression on the influential Kentucky editor that he began to correspond regularly with the president, supplying information and opinions about affairs in Kentucky. Starting on April 22, he would write twelve letters to Lincoln in 1864 and two more in 1865.
The ideas and language of the last paragraph of the letter to Hodges did not stay put. Eleven months later, that final paragraph would become the basis of the opening sentences of the third paragraph of Lincoln’s finest speech.
AT SOME POINT during the latter part of his presidency, Lincoln put his pencil to a small piece of lined paper to ruminate on the question of the presence of God in the Civil War.
The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party—and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose. I am almost ready to say that this is probably true—that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By his mere great power, on the minds of the now contestants, He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And, having begun He could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds.


Lincoln’s private reflection “Meditation on the Divine Will,” unknown during his life, is a signpost revealing his developing beliefs about the activity of God in the Civil War

A question is often asked of Lincoln’s speeches: As a shrewd politician, did he use religion in his speeches because he knew it would play well with the largely churchgoing American public? This private reflection is critical in answering that question, for its theological ideas were never meant for public consumption.
As in his letter to Hodges, he started with an unambiguous affirmation. Lincoln brooded here not on an abstract problem in philosophy or theology; the impetus for his musing grew out of the very real forces of war pressing in upon him as president. He had received claims on a regular basis from delegations telling him that “God is on our side.”
In this reflection, Lincoln weighed the validity of these claims. His first response: “Both may be, and one must be wrong.” This language is typical of Lincoln as he thinks his way into a problem. At first he is tentative in his judgments. His tendency is to look at all sides of a problem. The rational Lincoln, as if working through the logic of a syllogism, comes to the conclusion that both of the claimants may be wrong and one must be wrong. Why? “God cannot be for, and against the same thing at the same time.” His answer presumed something about the nature and purposes of God. For Lincoln, this God was not the original first cause of Jefferson. Lincoln’s meditation is about a God who acts in history.
One sentence may be the best clue to Lincoln’s understanding of God’s purposes in the Civil War. “In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party—and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose.” Lincoln appears to be seeking an equilibrium between God’s action and human actions. Forced by the war to think more deeply, Lincoln emerged broader than his contemporaries in discerning the ways of God. While nearly everyone else, North and South, was declaring “God is on our side,” Lincoln wrote that “God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party.” As the war was beginning to turn in the Union’s favor, Lincoln had arrived at a remarkable declaration about God’s purposes.
On the trip from Springfield to Washington in 1861, Lincoln had called himself one of those “human instrumentalities” on several occasions. In this reflection, he adds that “human instrumentalities” are “the best adaptation” to do God’s work in the world. The noun “adaptation” suggests the act or process of adjustment to external conditions. With the word “almost,” Lincoln suggested a point of view to which he was only now arriving. He qualified this affirmation further by the use of the second adverb, “probably.”
Even more surprising was his judgment that God “wills that it shall not end yet.” In public, Lincoln, as commander in chief, was working night and day to bring the war to an end; in private, he was writing that God seemed to be deciding that the war should continue.
Who, then, is this God of whom Lincoln speaks? Four times, in the brief 147 words of the reflection, Lincoln described God as a God who “wills.” Lincoln’s repetitive use of that active verb underscored the main point of his meditation: God is the primary if “quiet” actor in the war.
The content of this private reflection illuminates how far Lincoln had traveled on his journey from fatalism to providence. The modern suggestion that fatalism and providence are part of a continuum would have surprised Protestant theologians in the nineteenth century. The two constellations of ideas had different origins and different outcomes. In fatalism, events unfolded according to certain laws of nature. In 1859, Francis Wharton, author of A Treatise on Theism and Modern Skeptical Theories, described fatalism as “a distinct scheme of unbelief.” Wharton, an Episcopal minister, who after the Civil War would become a professor at the new Episcopal Theological Seminary in Cambridge, Massachusetts, singled out fatalism as an opponent of Christianity because it did not acknowledge a God who acted in history. Wharton contrasted fatalism with the God of Christianity known by “his watchful care and love.”
Lincoln’s brief contemplation would remain unknown during his lifetime. John Hay would find it after Lincoln’s death. In 1872, Hay gave it the title “Meditation on the Divine Will.” But in 1865, this private musing, along with the letter to Hodges, would form the core of what would become Lincoln’s best address.
WHAT WERE THE SOURCES of Lincoln’s thinking about the purposes of God? Phineas Densmore Gurley, the minister of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, an often-overlooked person in the Lincoln story, is a chief resource. Lincoln’s attendance at New York Avenue Presbyte rian coincided with his deepening struggles to understand the meaning of God’s activity in the war.
Beginning in March 1861, Abraham and Mary sat in their reserved pew eight rows from the front of the church sanctuary. Attorney General Edward Bates noted their attendance, as did Illinois senator Orville Browning. Noah Brooks, correspondent for the Sacramento Daily Union, observed the Lincoln’s from the gallery at New York Avenue “where they habitually attended.” He wrote, “Conspicuous among them all, as the crowd poured out of the ailes, was the tall form of the Father of the Faithful, who is instantly recognizable.”
As a young adult, Lincoln had reacted against his father’s Baptist tradition with its low tolerance for questions and doubts. As president, he was drawn to Gurley’s learned preaching with its steady punctuation of questions. Lincoln’s Illinois friend Leonard Swett said of Lincoln, “The whole world to him was a question of cause and effect.”
One of Lincoln’s requirements for choosing a minister and a church was politics, or the lack thereof. In consulting Montgomery Blair, who may have recommended New York Avenue, Lincoln is reported to have said, “I wish to find a church whose clergyman holds himself aloof from politics.” When asked about Gurley and his sermons, Lincoln is said to have replied, “I like Gurley. He don’t preach politics. I get enough of that through the week.”
Many times Lincoln heard Gurley preach sermons that were both intellectual and theological. Over and over again, Gurley highlighted God’s loving providence in the world. Gurley’s chief mentor at Princeton Seminary, Professor Charles Hodge, taught that the recognition of the personality of God was the key to the distinction between providence and fatalism. In his three-volume Systematic Theology, Hodge said of providence that “an infinitely wise, good, and powerful God is everywhere present, controlling all events great and small, necessary, and free, in a way perfectly consistent with the nature of his creatures and his own infinite excellence.” In Christian theology, according to Hodge, God’s divine power is able to embrace human freedom and responsibility.
A fellow minister described Gurley’s ministry as “Calvinism presented in his beautiful examples and spirit and preaching.” In Gurley’s Calvinist emphasis on providence, he acknowledged, as Lincoln would increasingly do, elements of ambiguity and mystery. The Presbyterian minister called attention to the potential logical contradiction of free agency and God’s governance. By the use of various metaphors, he heightened, not lessened, this paradox. “Man devises; the Lord directs.” Or “man proposes; God disposes.” And, “man’s agency, and God’s overruling sovereignty.” This theme of human agency and God’s sovereignty, Gurley said, was the best way to understand “the probable fruits and consequences of the terrible struggle in which the nation has been engaged.”
The president was present on August 6, 1863, when Gurley preached a sermon in response to Lincoln’s recent call for a national day of public humiliation, prayer, and fasting. Gurley’s sermon, “Man Projects and God Results,” was based on a text from Proverbs 16:9: “A man’s heart deviseth his way; but the Lord directs his steps.”
“Man is a rational, a free, and, therefore an accountable moral agent,” Gurley preached, adding, “while this is true, it is also true that God governs the world.” Gurley went on to affirm, “He accomplishes His fixed and eternal purposes through the instrumentality of free, and accountable, and even wicked agents.” That these themes in Gurley’s preaching struck a responsive chord in Lincoln would become clear in the coming months.
IN LINCOLN’S NEWFOUND WILLINGNESS to speak outside Washington, he welcomed the invitation to address a sanitary fair in Baltimore on April 18, 1864. The Sanitary Commission had become a chief organization aiding soldiers, and Lincoln decided to lend his presidential hand in raising money for it. The memory of passing through Baltimore in disguise on his way to Washington in February 1861 remained one of the lowest moments in his life. He told the crowd he accepted the invitation because “the world moves,” and he came to Baltimore to mark the moving. He reminded his audience that at the beginning of the war three years ago, Union “soldiers could not so much as pass through Baltimore.”
In his speech, Lincoln offered compelling remarks on the meaning of liberty. “The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are in want of one.” Lincoln believed in clear definitions. “We all declare for Liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing.” Lincoln explained: “With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleased with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor.” Lincoln underlined the tragic truth that these two “incompatable things” were called by the same name—liberty.”
He drove his point home with a metaphor whose meaning no one could miss. “The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty, especially if the sheep was a black one.”
As Lincoln came to the end of his speech he abruptly changed his tone. “A painful rumor, true I fear, has reached us of the massacre, by rebel forces, at Fort Pillow,” a fort high above the Mississippi River forty miles north of Memphis.
Everyone in his audience had recently learned about the massacre. Early on the morning of April 14, 1864, Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest attacked Fort Pillow. Forrest was a guerrilla fighter revered in the South. Possessing no military education, he despised the West Point doctrine that called for holding one-third of one’s forces in reserve. He achieved a reputation as the master of cavalry, using horses for lightning attacks by which his outnumbered troops could suddenly gain the advantage. To General William Sherman he was “that devil Forrest,” who should be “hunted down and killed if it costs 10,000 lives and bankrupts the [national] treasury.” Union major Lionel F. Booth had defended the fort with 580 troops, 292 of whom were African-American.
What followed became the subject of controversy, not just for weeks, but for years. The surviving Union soldiers reported that as the defenders of the fort were overwhelmed, the soldiers threw up their hands to surrender. They charged that the Confederate troops, disregarding the clear signs of surrender, proceeded to massacre the black soldiers. General Forrest’s own report to his superior, General Leonidas Polk, stated, “The river was dyed red with the blood of the slaughtered for 200 yards.”
In Baltimore Lincoln announced plans for a congressional investigation. He concluded his speech forcefully. “It will be a matter of grave consideration in what exact course to apply the retribution; but in the supported case, it must come.” Lincoln, who up to this point in the war had downplayed all cries for revenge, plainly was caught up in the escalating talk of retribution.
On April 22, 1864, the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War began public hearings. In a highly charged atmosphere, their report mixed fact-finding and propaganda. The cries to execute Confederate prisoners in eye-for-eye reprisals grew.
On May 3, 1864, Lincoln asked his cabinet “to give me in writing your opinion as to what course the government should take in this case.” He received long and quite different replies. Seward, Chase, Stan-ton, and Welles argued that Confederate troops equal in number to the Union troops massacred should be held as hostages and killed if the Confederate government admitted the massacre. Bate and John P. Usher, who had succeeded Caleb Smith as secretary of the interior, advocated no retaliation against innocent hostages, but argued execution of the offenders if apprehended.
There is no record of Lincoln’s opinion in response to the recommendations of the members of his cabinet. He rarely had a heart for revenge and may have simply allowed the discussion of retaliation for Fort Pillow to be overtaken by more pressing events on the battlefield demanding his attention in the spring of 1864.
MEANWHILE, LINCOLN’S NEW COMMANDER, Ulysses S. Grant, pressed ahead. Grant had told his best friend, General William Sherman, that he feared if he came to Washington he would get stuck behind a desk, so he established his headquarters in the field at Culpeper Court House in Virginia. What a contrast to George McClellan’s command from his opulent rented Washington home. Lincoln met with Grant three times at the White House in March and April and anticipated accepting Grant’s invitation for a fourth meeting at Grant’s Virginia headquarters in April, but the president was unable to keep that date.
Grant’s plan for the 1864 spring offensive directed his senior commanders to move simultaneously on five fronts. In the past, Confederate generals, although almost always outnumbered, had shifted their interior lines to meet the often disjointed attacks of the Union forces. In the East, Grant ordered General George Meade’s Army of the Potomac to cross the Rapidan River in northern Virginia and attack Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia without letting up. General Franz Sigel would drive his army south up the Shenandoah Valley and apply pressure on Richmond from the west, while General Benjamin Butler, coming up from Fort Monroe at the tip of the Virginia peninsula, would push toward Richmond from the south. In the West, Grant directed William Tecumseh Sherman, his successor as leader of the armies of the Cumberland, Ohio, and Tennessee, now one hundred thousand strong, to slice southeast through Georgia to capture Atlanta, a valuable railroad center. In a secondary move, Nathaniel Banks would overcome Mobile, Alabama, and push north to unite with Sherman.
Grant told Meade, “Lee’s army will be your objective point. … Wherever Lee goes, there you will go also.” He instructed Sherman “to move against Johnston’s army, to break it up.” Lincoln backed Grant’s plan. Finally, Lincoln had found a commander who believed with him that opposing armies, not Richmond or Atlanta, should be the real focus of the Union armies.
At the end of April, as the military campaign was about to begin, Lincoln wrote Grant, “Not expecting to see you again before the Spring campaign opens.” The president expressed “entire satisfaction with what you have done up to this time.” He added, “You are vigilant and self-reliant; and pleased with this, I wish not to obtrude any constraints or restraints upon you.” Lincoln had waited a long time to be able to declare such confidence in his commanding general. At the beginning of the war, Lincoln had expressed deference to his commanding generals because he recognized what he did not know. Now, after three years during which he taught himself a great deal about military strategy, he gladly expressed a new kind of deference, not because he did not know or have an opinion, but because of his implicit trust in Grant.
IN THE EARLY MORNING HOURS of May 4, 1864, the Army of the Potomac broke their winter camp and crossed the Rapidan River seventeen miles west of Fredericksburg in northern Virginia. The politicians and the public believed that with Grant now in charge, the war would be over by the fall of 1864. Indeed, the Army of the Potomac was confident, well clothed, and equipped with ample ammunition. Days before, Robert E. Lee had withdrawn his army from the Rapidan, ill-clad, ill-equipped, but also confident in themselves and their ability to fight on their home ground, and in their leader. If Grant and Meade’s tactics were to press forward at all times, Lee’s tactic now was to defend and delay. He hoped to defeat an enemy at least twice his size by exacting such losses that the Northern public and politicians would finally come to believe victory was not worth the cost.
Lee pulled his forces back from the Rapidan River into “the Wilderness,” twelve miles wide and six miles deep, a part of the area where the battle of Chancellorsville had been fought a year before. He chose this dense forest of second-growth scrub oak and dwarf pines, interlaced by streams and roads and trails, so that Union superiority in numbers could be neutralized, and Union artillery rendered practically useless. On May 5 and 6, 1864, firefights erupted in the thick undergrowth, often setting it on fire, as both sides gave no quarter in this forbidding landscape.
As Lincoln huddled with Secretary Stanton at the War Department, reports came in from the Wilderness of two days of terrible, confusing fighting. Lee’s forces, although outnumbered two to one, believed they won a victory in the Wilderness, but Grant did not consider the battles a defeat. He did not retreat north of the Rapidan as Joe Hooker had done a year earlier after the battle of Chancellorsville. Both sides paid dearly in the battle of the Wilderness as the Union suffered eighteen thousand casualties and the Confederates close to eleven thousand.
In the midst of the battle of the Wilderness a young cub reporter for the New York Tribune arrived at the White House with a message from General Grant for the president: “There will be no turning back.” Lincoln put his long arm around the young man and “pressed a kiss on his cheek.”
The next day, Schuyler Colfax, Speaker of the House of Representatives, called on Lincoln. “I saw [Lincoln] walk up and down the Executive Chamber, his long arms behind his back, his dark features contracted still more with gloom.” As they met, “I thought his face the saddest one I had ever seen.” Yet Lincoln “quickly recovered” when the conversation turned to General Grant. “Hope beamed on his face.”
Grant was now determined to stay on the offensive. He moved his army around Lee’s right flank and pushed south toward Richmond. Lincoln told John Hay, “I believe that if any other General had been at the Head of that army it would have been on this side of the Rapidan.” Lincoln summed up his confidence in Grant: “It is the dogged pertinacity of Grant that wins.”
At Spotsylvania Court House, twelve miles to the southeast of the Wilderness, Union forces ran into a fierce Southern defense: a complex system of breastworks, trenches, and artillery emplacements that allowed the outnumbered Confederates to engage in a strong defensive fight. As the battle was about to begin, Elihu Washburne, the congressman from Grant’s home district who sometimes traveled with the general, decided to return to Washington. Washburne asked Grant if he could take a message to Lincoln and Stanton. The general, realizing he was in a much tougher fight than he had imagined, did not want to paint too positive a picture, which could be misinterpreted by a public hungry for news of victories. Chomping on his cigar, he wrote, “I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.”
Nonetheless, the initial reports of Grant’s successes at Spotsylvania, including the capture of three thousand prisoners, produced euphoria in the North. Yet subsequent news from Spotsylvania told of twenty consecutive hours of fighting at the Bloody Angle, the top of the U of Lee’s defensive formation, in which bodies stacked up five feet deep. Lincoln could see the cost of the battle in the streets of Washington as the wounded arrived throughout the day and night. Attorney General Edward Bates wrote in his diary on May 15, 1864, “For the last 8 or 10 days, the most terrible battles of the war have occurred in Virginia. The carnage has been unexampled.” After so much bloodshed, questions began to rise about the price of victory. Grant and Meade had suffered sixty thousand casualties in one month of fighting, almost the size of Lee’s entire army.
The carnage increased as Grant attacked the crossroads called Cold Harbor at the beginning of June. Lee, for whom Grant had increasing respect, was turning this war into a war of attrition, and so Grant decided to mount a massive assault. On the morning of June 3, 1864, hundreds of troops pinned their names and addresses to their uniforms in a premonition of what lay ahead. In the next hours, Union soldiers charged forward and were met by a withering hail of bullets. Grant lost 7,000 men, while Lee, fighting from trenches, suffered 1,500 casualties. At the end of the day Grant stopped the attack, admitting defeat. The Union army learned that day what European armies would learn a half century later in World War I: the deadly horrors of trench warfare. General George Meade wrote to his wife, “I think Grant has had his eyes opened, and is willing to admit now that Virginia and Lee’s army is not Tennessee and Bragg’s army.”
The public began to turn against Grant, but Lincoln did not. The president told Noah Brooks, “I wish when you write and speak to people you would do all you can to correct the impression that the war in Virginia will end right off victoriously.” He continued, “To me the most trying thing in all this war is that people are too sanguine; they expect too much at once.” Lincoln, who would not make predictions, told Brooks, “As God is my judge, I shall be satisfied if we are over with the fight in Virginia within a year.”
EVEN WITH SALMON CHASE’S WITHDRAWAL from the Republican field for president in March, the anti-Lincoln sentiment among Republican radicals did not go away. On May 31, 1864, four hundred radicals, in what Henry Raymond of the New York Times called “the bolter’s convention,” gathered in Cleveland’s Chapin Hall to nominate an alternative candidate for president. Passionate speeches called for suppressing the South and confiscating all the territory under federal authority. Some speakers called for suffrage to be expanded to blacks. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other women’s rights advocates led a contingent of women to the convention. General John C. Frémont, with a deep personal animus toward Lincoln, was nominated as the presidential candidate on this third-party ticket.
Lincoln, in the telegraph office, received the announcement of Frémont’s nomination. He asked for a Bible and fingered through the Old Testament to 1 Samuel 22:2, the story of David standing before the cave of Adullam. “And every one that was discontented, gathered themselves unto him; and he became a captain over them; and there were with him about four hundred men.”
In the first week of June, well-wishers and office seekers came through Washington to shake the hand of the president on their way to the National Union Party convention in Baltimore. The distressing news from Cold Harbor blighted what should have been anticipation of Lincoln’s nomination, by now a foregone conclusion, for a second term. Lincoln, following nineteenth-century protocol, would not be present in Baltimore, but that did not mean he had not been working behind the scenes to help shape the convention. On June 5, 1864, John Nicolay and Simon Cameron traveled to the convention on behalf of the president. Leonard Swett, always ready to help, traveled in from Illinois. Henry J. Raymond, editor of the New York Times, who had become a chief Lincoln supporter among newspaper editors, had been writing a first history of Lincoln’s administration, a full 496 pages containing a brief biographical sketch but composed mostly of Lincoln’s letters, speeches, and proclamations, which he published on the eve of the convention.
At twelve noon on June 7, 1864, New York senator Edwin G. Morgan, national chairman of the Republican Party, gaveled the convention to order at the Front Street Theatre. Morgan had been a Seward man at Chicago in 1860, but during the past four years his admiration for Lincoln had grown steadily. Now, after huddling with the president in Washington before the convention, he told the delegates what they wanted to hear. “In view of the dread realities of the past … and with the knowledge … that this has been caused by slavery,” Morgan, with Lincoln’s strong approval, proposed as the chief plank in the convention platform “an amendment of the Constitution as will positively prohibit African slavery in the United States.”
The next day, Raymond presented the planks of the platform. In a convention that Lincoln hoped would bring a National Union Party together, the sixth resolution steered the boat in the other direction. The plank called for a purge of any cabinet member who did not “cordially endorse the principles proclaimed in these resolutions.” The plank was clearly aimed at Montgomery Blair, whom the radicals had grown to disdain for his attacks on them. Beneath the formal language, the plank demanded the president fire Blair.
Vice President Hamlin waited to hear news that he, too, would be renominated, but he waited in vain. Over the past four years, Hamlin had moved steadily toward the camp of the radicals. For months, word had been gossiped that Lincoln preferred Andrew Johnson, War Democrat governor of Tennessee. When various emissaries before and during the convention tried to get Lincoln to name his preference, he said he would leave it up to the convention. Hay wired Nicolay that the president wished “not to interfere in the nomination even by a confidential suggestion.”
Lincoln and Johnson formed an unlikely duo that elicited much comment after the convention. The Richmond Examiner reported that the Union Party had nominated the “Illinois rail-splitter” and the “Tennessee tailor.” By contrast, Charles Sumner, representing the sentiment of the convention, called Andrew Johnson the “faithful among the faithless” and “the Abdiel of the South,” referencing the figure in the Bible and in John Milton’s Paradise Lost who denounces Satan. Lincoln appreciated Johnson’s courage in standing against his native state in support of the Union. But, as time and different circumstances would reveal later, Lincoln and Johnson were quite different in temperament and perspective on the South.
On June 9, 1864, a committee composed of one delegate from each state present at the convention called on the president at the White House to offer official notification of his nomination. Lincoln replied, “I will neither conceal my gratification, nor restrain the expression of my gratitude, that the Union people … in their continued effort to save, and advance the nation, have deemed me not unworthy to remain in my present position.” Lincoln then took the unusual step of saying he could “not declare definitely” he would accept the nomination until he read the platform. He took this opportunity to say to the committee that his first priority would be “amending the Constitution as to prohibit slavery throughout the nation.” He concluded his acceptance, “In the joint names of Liberty and Union,” reflecting how the aim of the war had changed in the space of four years.
FOLLOWING THE CONVENTION, Montgomery Blair offered Lincoln his resignation. The president refused to accept it. He valued Blair ’s loyalty and was not about to have his advisers prescribed by others. Blair’s resignation was undated and he told the president to use it whenever he needed to relieve the pressure from the radicals.
The larger burr under Lincoln’s saddle was Salmon Chase. Although Lincoln knew Chase took many opportunities to criticize him behind his back, up until now Lincoln found no fault with how Chase ran the Treasury Department. His ability to raise and manage money lay behind the expansion and mobilization of the Union army. Lincoln was sympathetic to Chase’s efforts, often in the face of a Congress that refused to raise adequate taxes to support the war effort. Twice in three years Chase had submitted his resignation, but Lincoln had not accepted it.
In June 1864, Lincoln found himself between the strong-willed Chase and the wishes of New York senator Edwin Morgan over a key appointment. When Chase nominated Maunsell B. Field as assistant treasurer in New York, Lincoln wrote him, “I can not, without much embarrassment, make this appointment, principally because of Senator Morgan’s firm opposition to it.” Lincoln then proceeded to give Chase three options of qualified persons from which he could choose. These names had been suggested by Morgan, and Chase instantly recognized them as allies of his longtime rival, Seward, and, from his perspective, having little financial experience.
Chase objected. The next day he asked for a private meeting with the president. Lincoln, probably wanting to avert another debate with Chase, replied immediately that he could not meet with him “because the difficulty does not, in the main part, lie within the range of a conversation between you and me.” Lincoln was saying, as politely as he could, that the leaders of New York had a right to offer their judgment on whoever would serve as the assistant treasurer of their state.
Chase, acting impulsively and with rising anger, resigned. He wrote Lincoln on June 29, 1864, “I cannot help feeling that my position here is not altogether agreeable to you; and it is certainly too full of embarrassment and difficulty and painful responsibility to allow in me the least desire to retain it.”
Lincoln, who usually did not act impulsively, accepted Chase’s resignation. Lincoln wrote, “Of all I have said in commendation of your ability and fidelity, I have nothing to unsay; and yet you and I have reached a point of mutual embarrassment in our official relation which it seems can not be overcome, or longer sustained, consistently with the public service.”
After writing out his brief letter, Lincoln called for Hay. “When does the Senate meet today?”
“Eleven o’clock.”
“I wish you to be there when they meet. It is a big fish. Mr. Chase has resigned & I have accepted his resignation. I thought I could not stand it any longer.”
THE NATIONAL UNION PARTY convention had adjourned on an upbeat note in June, but back in Washington everything had seemed to deteriorate. Discontent with Lincoln simmered just below the surface of outward enthusiasm. Discouraging news from Grant and Meade’s spring offensive grew apace and began to diminish the earlier optimism about Lincoln’s chances for reelection. Sherman seemed stuck in Georgia with little communication about his movements. Lincoln had undergone other seasons of despair—after the first battle of Bull Run in the summer of 1861, the discouraging battles on the Virginia peninsula in the spring and summer of 1862, after Fredericksburg in December 1862, and following the defeat at Chancellorsville in May 1863—but the spirits of Lincoln and the North descended to their lowest point yet in the summer of 1864. Detractors in the North, including one in the White House, Mary Lincoln, began calling Lincoln’s commander “Grant the Butcher.” The Northern public began to ask if victory was worth the enormous cost in human life.
By the middle of June, Grant’s advance corps reached Petersburg, twenty miles southeast of Richmond. After achieving some early success, Meade and Grant expected a breakthrough, but it was not to be. Ending seven weeks of forward movement, they settled in for a long siege. By the time Grant reached Petersburg, he had lost so many officers and troops that he found himself relying on fatigued veterans and inexperienced new volunteers.
Lincoln accepted another invitation to another sanitary fair, this one in Philadelphia, because he knew he needed opportunities to speak to a discouraged public.
On June 16, 1864, he got right to the point. “War, at the best, is terrible, and this war of ours, in its magnitude and duration, is one of the most terrible.” He described what those in his audience were experiencing. “It has damaged business. … It has destroyed property, and ruined homes; it has produced a national debt and taxation unprecedented.” Most of all, “it has carried mourning to almost every home, until it can almost be said that the ‘heavens are hung in black.’ ” Lincoln told the people in Philadelphia that “it is a pertinent question” to ask: “When is the war to end?” He would not make any predictions, which could only lead to “disappointment” when the projected date is not met. In a subdued tone, Lincoln declared, “We accepted this war for an object, a worthy object, and the war will end when the object is attained.”
In early July, the terror of war came to the front door of Washington. General Jubal Early led fifteen thousand Confederate troops down the Shenandoah Valley and across the Potomac River into Maryland on July 6, 1864. Pushing aside a Union force east of Frederick on July 9, they set their sights on Washington. The irony of this fourth summer of war was not lost on anyone: Union fear for Washington suddenly replaced Confederate anxiety about the defense of Richmond. Lincoln, for all his faith in Grant, quickly realized that there were few men left to defend Washington—convalescent troops and old men in the Home Guard—because Grant had commandeered the regular army troops for the attack on Richmond. On July 11, Jubal Early reached the outskirts of Washington near Silver Spring and burned the home of Postmaster General Montgomery Blair. On July 12, as Early’s troops came within five miles of the White House, Lincoln, in top hat, traveled to Fort Stevens to see the combat in person. As he peered out over a parapet, a sharpshooter’s bullet came perilously close. According to legend, a young army captain, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who would later serve on the Supreme Court, yelled out, “Get down, you damn fool, before you get shot.”
Throughout this summer of despondency, Lincoln appeared weary, his tall and thin frame visibly sagging. As casualties escalated, the cumulative effect of more than three years of war began taking its physical toll on the president.
In addition to the bad news from the battlefield, Lincoln began receiving pessimistic reports from his advisers about his prospects for reelection. Henry B. Raymond, editor of the New York Times, wrote Lincoln from the Republican National Committee at the Astor House in New York City on August 22, 1864, with disturbing news, telling Lincoln that New York “would go 50,000 against us tomorrow.” Raymond reported that Illinois congressman Elihu Washburne believed that if the election were “to be held now in Illinois we should be beaten.” Simon Cameron, Lincoln’s former secretary of war, predicted “Pennsylvania is against us.”
Why this dismal turn of events? Raymond wrote candidly about Lincoln’s difficulty. “The want of military success, and the impression in some minds, the fear and suspicion in others, that we are not to have peace in any event under this Administration until Slavery is abandoned.” Lincoln, long criticized by abolitionists and radical Republicans for going too slowly on slavery, now was being arraigned for standing his ground on the moral imperative of getting rid of slavery in the new Union. In sum, Raymond told Lincoln, “The tide is setting strongly against us.”
By early August, Lincoln was convinced that he could not be reelected. On August 23, 1864, six days before the Democratic convention would select his opponent, Lincoln wrote a private memorandum stating his feelings.
This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so cooperate with the President-elect as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he cannot possibly save it afterwards.
Lincoln brought his message to that day’s cabinet meeting. He presented it to his colleagues, folded so that none of the text was visible, and asked each of them to sign the back of the document. Lincoln never explained why he did not read or show the members of his cabinet the contents of his memo. Lincoln surely believed that if a Democrat was elected president, that person would end the war on the terms that guaranteed Confederate independence.
THE DEMOCRATS HEADED for Chicago at the end of August for their ninth national convention. Eleven railroad lines, each overflowing with delegates, converged on the new capital of the Midwest. Noah Brooks, dispatched by Lincoln to be his observer, caught a train from Washington on August 25, 1864, quickly finding himself “burdened with Copperheads.” Before the Sacramento writer departed, Lincoln predicted to Brooks, “They must nominate a Peace Democrat on a war platform, or a War Democrat on a peace platform; and I personally can’t say I care much which they do.”


On August 23, 1864, Lincoln wrote a memo for his cabinet revealing his belief that he could not be reelected for a second term as president.

The Democrats fulfilled Lincoln’s prediction. They sought to find middle ground between the two wings of their party. The War Democrats succeeded in nominating Lincoln’s former top military commander General George B. McClellan for president. The Peace Democrats, most notably Clement Vallandigham, wrote a platform that declared “after four years of failure to restore the Union by the experiment of war, …justice, humanity, liberty and the public welfare demand” an end to the war “on the basis of the Federal Union of States.” August Belmont, who called the convention to order on August 29, 1864, warned his fellow Democrats that dissension in their ranks had cost them the 1860 election. At the end of the convention the two branches of the Democratic Party had arrived at a compromise. But would it last?
The Democrats had waited to hold their convention until the end of the summer, hoping that the continuing bad news would be good news for their candidate. Now they waited some more. For days, George McClellan, at his home in Orange, New Jersey, struggled to determine how to run as a War Democrat on a peace platform. He stayed out of sight as he worked on draft after draft of an acceptance letter. Advice poured in from every quarter as to how the general could reconcile the war and peace branches of his party and go on the offensive against Lincoln.
But before McClellan would speak, General William Tecumseh Sherman spoke. The fall political campaign had barely begun when, on September 3, 1864, a telegram arrived from General Sherman announcing, “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won.” The victory at Atlanta, an important railroad and manufacturing city, against two Confederate armies, was one of the most important military accomplishments of the war. Sherman took Atlanta by surrounding the city with overwhelming force and persuading its defenders to evacuate and retreat rather than fight and risk heavy loss of life, both military and civilian.
Sherman’s victory at Atlanta changed everything overnight. “Glorious news this morning—Atlanta taken at last!!!” wrote George Templeton Strong in New York. He understood the impact of this event. “It is the greatest event of the war.” The mood of pessimism broke immediately. A revival of Unionist fervor began to sweep through the North. Lincoln’s spirits were buoyed.
After this turn of events, McClellan released a letter at midnight on September 8, 1854. After declaring he had not sought the nomination, he affirmed, “The preservation of our Union was the sole avowed object for which the war was commenced.” What he did not say, loudly, was that the war should never have been fought to overthrow slavery. He obviously struggled over the peace platform and renounced it when he said: “I could not look in the face of my gallant comrades of the army and navy who have survived so many bloody battles, and tell them their labors and the sacrifices of so many of our slain and wounded brethren had been in vain.” McClellan was saying for all who would hear that he was not willing to end the war at any price. With these words, he hoped he could garner the large soldiers’ vote.
McClellan’s published letter both electrified and disappointed Democrats. War Democrats became convinced they had their candidate, a man who could garner the soldiers’ votes and push Lincoln out of office. But New York Democratic mayor Fernando Wood was not so sure. Realizing McClellan’s no-win position, he suggested reconvening the Democratic convention “either to remodel the platform to suit the nominee, or nominate a candidate to suit the platform.” Henry Raymond, discouraged with Lincoln’s chances in August, now editorialized in September, “Well, we see at last Gen. McClellan practices his favorite strategy—with bold front he fights shy.” Raymond described McClellan as “all ambition and no courage, all desire and no decision.”
IN KEEPING WITH CAMPAIGN PROTOCOL, neither Lincoln nor McClellan campaigned in person but left it to surrogates to make their cases to the public. By September, cartoonists disparaged General McClellan in comparison to Lincoln. Frank Bellew, in Harper’s Weekly, drew a visual contrast between a large Lincoln and a small McClellan. The caption heightened the contrast. A political cartoon portrayed McClellan as the one man keeping Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis from continuing to attack each other. Another portrayed McClellan as a traitor to the ideals of liberty and yet another showed Lincoln as a dictator. A cartoon popular with Democrats portrayed Lincoln presiding at a ball where white men were dancing with black women. A new word, “miscegenation,” had been coined by two reporters for the New York World in 1863, and now was used to attack Lincoln. The two Latin roots, miscere, to mix, and genus, race, replaced the old word, amalgamation, and instantly produced more loathing and disgust. A tract called “The Lincoln Catechism” claimed that Lincoln’s ultimate goal was miscegenation.


The illustration “This reminds me of a little joke” appeared in Harper’s Weekly on September 17, 1864.



This anti-Republican satire, “The Miscegenation Ball,” was a campaign cartoon meant to tie Lincoln to radical abolitionism. The artist portrays the fear of racial intermingling—white men are dancing with black women in a large hall. Above the musicians’ stage hangs a portrait of Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln and the Republicans campaigned on a theme of “No Peace Without Victory.” Posters, ribbons, ferrotypes, medals, and tokens in the 1864 presidential campaign became visible everywhere. An 1864 campaign ribbon captured the now clearly understood twin goals of the war: “Union and Liberty.” Another medal was inscribed: “Freedom to All Men / War for the Union.” The theme of human rights was captured in tokens. One side read “Lincoln,” while on the other side was inscribed “Proclaim Liberty Throughout the Land.” Another read “Lincoln and Liberty” on one side and on the other, “Freedom/Justice/ Truth.”


This cartoon depicts General George McClellan as the one peace figure who can keep President Abraham Lincoln and President Jefferson Davis apart.

The change in the fortunes of battle energized the Lincoln reelection campaign. Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman captured the public’s imagination, and both were known to admire Lincoln. But something more began to emerge across the North. Despite the politicians’ wariness about Lincoln, the people were not suspicious but enthusiastic. Lincoln had communicated his love for the Union in his public letters and at Gettysburg. They believed in him. The commander in chief, better known to his troops as Father Abraham, found an admiration and affection among the troops that seemed ready to translate into votes on the first Tuesday in November.
JUST AS THE FALL political campaign began, after a lapse of more than a year, Lincoln resumed his correspondence with Mrs. Eliza Gurney, the Quaker leader who had called on him in his office in the fall of 1862. Gurney wrote the president in August 1863, but there is no record of his reply. Lincoln received scores of delegations of religious leaders, but for a reason never explained, he felt free to share his deepest thoughts with this Quaker woman. On September 4, 1864, writing right after Lincoln learned of the capture of Atlanta, he seemed more confident of the purposes of God than he had been two years earlier in his first letter to Gurney. “The purposes of the Almighty are perfect,” he now wrote. The president believed these purposes “must prevail, though we erring mortals may fail to accurately perceive them in advance.” He expressed to Mrs. Gurney both his hopes and his resignation. “We hoped for a happy termination of this terrible war long before this; but God knows best, and has ruled otherwise.”
With the terrible violence unleashed by Grant and Sherman during this period, Lincoln strove to understand how good could come from a terrible war. “Meanwhile we must work earnestly in the best light He gives us, trusting that so working still conduces to the great ends He ordains. Surely He intends some great good to follow this mighty convulsion, which no mortal could make, and no mortal could stay.”
ELECTION DAY, November 8, 1864, dawned dark and rainy in Washington. McClellan had been counting on the soldiers’ votes, but Republicans, in control of all the state legislatures except New Jersey, Indiana, and Illinois, determined to provide absentee ballots in hopes the soldiers would vote for the commander in chief.
At seven in the evening, Lincoln walked to the telegraph office with John Hay and Noah Brooks to follow the returns. Initial returns from Philadelphia brightened everyone’s spirits. Lincoln had the results taken to Mary, who, he acknowledged, “is more anxious than I.” The telegraph chatter continued to signal good news. At a midnight supper, Lincoln, in a jubilant mood, passed out oysters to everyone.
The final election results revealed that Lincoln had won an overwhelming victory. He received 2,203,831 votes to McClellan’s 1,797,019. He won the electoral vote even more decisively, 221 to 21, winning every state except New Jersey, Delaware, and Kentucky. Lincoln won, but even Republicans admitted that, for many, the vote was against McClellan as much as for Lincoln. The president did feel a sense of relief and pride, however, in the soldiers’ vote: 116,887 for him and only 37,748 for General McClellan.
Lincoln would approach his second inauguration vindicated personally and expecting final victory on the field of battle.


Alexander Gardner took this photograph on February 5, 1865, one month before Lincoln’s second inaugural address. The photograph shows the tremendous aging that had taken place in just four years.