The Civil War: A Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian (126 page)

Others not only disagreed, but some among them formed a delegation to call on Lincoln with a protest against Grant’s dereliction and a demand for his dismissal from command. What rebel could be trusted? they asked, and predicted that within the month Pemberton’s men would violate their parole and be back in the field, once again doing their worst to tear the fabric of the Union. Referring to his callers as “crossroads wiseacres,” though they must have included some influential dignitaries,
Lincoln afterwards described to a friend his handling of the situation. “I thought the best way to get rid of them was to tell the story of Sykes’s dog. Have you ever heard about Sykes’s yellow dog? Well, I must tell you about him. Sykes had a yellow dog he set great store by—” And he went on to explain that this affection was not shared by a group of boys who disliked the beast intensely and spent much of their time “meditating how they could get the best of him.” At last they hit upon the notion of wrapping an explosive cartridge in a piece of meat, attaching a long fuze to it, and whistling for the dog. When he came out and bolted the meat, cartridge and all, they touched off the fuze, with spectacular results. Sykes came running out of the house to investigate the explosion. “What’s up? Anything busted?” he cried. And then he saw the dog, or what was left of him. He picked up the biggest piece he could find, “a portion of the back with part of the tail still hanging to it,” and said mournfully: “Well, I guess he’ll never be much account again—as a dog.” Lincoln paused, then made his point. “I guess Pemberton’s forces will never be much account again as an army.” He smiled, recalling the reaction of his callers. “The delegation began looking around for their hats before I had got quite to the end of the story,” he told his friend, “and I was never bothered any more after that about superseding the commander of the Army of the Tennessee.”

Now as always he shielded Grant from the critics who were so quick to come crying of butchery, whiskey, or incompetence. “I can’t spare this man. He fights,” he had said after Shiloh, and more than a month before the surrender of Vicksburg he had called the campaign leading up to the siege “one of the most brilliant in the world.” In a sense, this latest and greatest achievement was a vindication not only of Grant but also of the Commander in Chief who had sustained him. Perhaps Lincoln saw it so. At any rate, though previously he had corresponded with him only through Halleck, even in the conferring of praise and promotions, this curious hands-off formality, which had no counterpart in his relations with any of the rest of his army commanders, past or present, ended on July 13, when he wrote him the following letter:

Though in time, when news of the fall of Port Hudson arrived, a congratulatory dispatch also went to Banks, expressing Lincoln’s “thanks for your very successful and very valuable military operations this year”—“The final stroke in opening the Mississippi never should, and I think never will, be forgotten,” he wrote—no such letter went to Meade, nor did Lincoln mention him by name in responding to a White House serenade on the evening of July 7, tendered in celebration of the double victory. “These are trying occasions,” he said, adding a somber note to the tone of jubilation, “not only in success, but also for want of success.” He withheld personal praise of Meade because he was waiting for a larger occasion that did not come, though he kept hoping against hope. Finally, his hopes dwindling, he turned cynical. On July 12, when the general wired that he would attack the flood-stalled Confederates next day “unless something intervenes to prevent it,” Lincoln ventured a prediction: “They will be ready to fight a magnificent battle when there is no enemy there to fight.” Nevertheless, the news two days later that Lee had made a getaway came as an awful shock to him. “We had them in our grasp,” he groaned. “We had only to stretch forth our hands and they were ours. And nothing I could say or do could make the army move.” He told his son Robert, home from Harvard: “If I had gone up there, I could have whipped them myself.” So great was his distress, he adjourned a cabinet meeting on grounds that he was in no frame of mind for fit deliberation. Nor was he. In his extremity—having passed in rapid succession from cynicism, through puzzlement and exasperation, to the edge of paranoia—he questioned not only the nerve and competence of Meade and his subordinates, but also their motives. “And that, my God, is the last of this Army of the Potomac!” he cried as he walked out with the Secretary of the Navy. “There is bad faith somewhere. Meade has been pressed and urged, but only one of his generals was for an immediate attack, was ready to pounce on Lee; the rest held back. What does it mean, Mr. Welles? Great God, what does it mean?”

Halleck did not exaggerate in wiring Meade of Lincoln’s “great dissatisfaction” on that day; Welles recorded in his diary that “on only one or two occasions have I ever seen the President so troubled, so dejected and discouraged.” Meade’s request to be relieved of command, submitted promptly in response to Halleck’s wire, shocked Lincoln into recovering his balance. For this was more than a military matter; it was a downright political threat, with sobering implications. The Administration simply could not afford to be placed in the position of
having forced the resignation of the man who, in three hard days of fighting, had just turned back the supreme Confederate effort to conquer a peace: an effort, moreover, launched hard on the heels of Union defeats at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, which had been fought under leaders now recognized as hand-picked incompetents, both of whom had been kept in command for more than a month after their fiascos. No matter what opinion the citizenry might have as to whether or not the rebels had been “invaders,” politically it would not do to make a martyr of the hero who had driven them from what he called “our soil.” After instructing Old Brains to decline the general’s request to be relieved, Lincoln sat down and wrote Meade a letter designed to assuage the burning in his breast. So great was his own distress, however, that the words came out somewhat differently from what he had intended. In the end it was Lincoln’s burning that was assuaged, at least in part. For example, yesterday’s letter to Grant had begun: “My dear General,” whereas today’s bore no salutation at all, merely the heading: “Major General Meade.” He opened by saying, “I am very—
very
—grateful to you for the magnificent success you gave the cause of the country at Gettysburg, and I am sorry now to [have been] the author of the slightest pain to you. But I was in such deep distress myself that I could not restrain some expression of it.” Whereupon he proceeded to extend that expression of dissatisfaction in a review of the events of the past ten days. Meade had “fought and beat the enemy,” with losses equally severe on both sides; then Lee’s retreat had been halted by the swollen Potomac, and though Meade had been substantially reinforced and Lee had not, “yet you stood and let the flood run down, bridges be built, and the enemy move away at his leisure, without attacking him.” The words were cutting, but those that followed were sharper still. “Again, my dear general, I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee’s escape. He was within your easy grasp, and to have closed upon him would, in connection with our other late successes, have ended the war. As it is, the war will be prolonged indefinitely.… It would be unreasonable to expect, and I do not expect you can now effect much. Your golden opportunity is gone, and I am distressed immeasurably because of it.”

He ended with a further attempt at reassurance: “I beg you will not consider this a prosecution or persecution of yourself. As you had learned that I was dissatisfied, I have thought it best to kindly tell you why.” But on reading the letter over he could see that it was perhaps not so “kindly” after all; that, in fact, rather than serve the purpose of soothing the general’s injured feelings, it was more likely to provoke him into resubmitting his request to be relieved of his command. So Lincoln put the sheets in an envelope labeled “To General Meade, never sent or signed,” filed it away in his desk, and having thus relieved his spleen contented himself with issuing next day a “Proclamation of Thanksgiving,”
expressing his gratitude, not to Grant or Meade or Banks or Prentiss, but to Almighty God for “victories on land and on the sea so signal and so effective as to furnish reasonable grounds for augmented confidence that the Union of these States will be maintained, their Constitution preserved, and their peace and prosperity permanently restored.” He further besought the public to “render the homage due to the Divine Majesty, for the wonderful things He has done in the nation’s behalf, and invoke the influence of His Holy Spirit to subdue the anger which has produced and so long sustained a needless and cruel rebellion, to change the hearts of the insurgents, to guide the counsels of the Government with wisdom adequate to so great a national emergency, and to visit with tender care and consolation throughout the length and breadth of our land all those who, through vicissitudes of marches, voyages, battles, and sieges, have been brought to suffer in mind, body, or estate, and finally to lead the whole nation, through the paths of repentance and submission to the Divine Will, back to the perfect enjoyment of Union and fraternal peace. In witness whereof,” the Proclamation ended, “I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.”

Though it was in large part a reaction to the knowledge that the suffering and bloodshed of the past two years would continue indefinitely past the point at which he believed they could have been stopped, Lincoln’s extreme concern over the fact that one of his two great victories had been blunted was also based on fear that if he did not win the war in the field, and soon, he might lose it on the home front. There appeared to be excellent grounds for such apprehension. Ever since the fall elections, which had gone heavily against him in certain vital regions of the country, the loyal and disloyal opposition had been growing, not only in size but also in boldness, until now, in what might have been his hour of triumph, he was faced with the necessity for dealing with riots and other domestic troubles, the worst of which reached a climax in the nation’s largest city on the day he issued his Proclamation of Thanksgiving. Though he could assign a measure of the blame to Meade, whose timidity had cost him the chance, as Lincoln saw it, of ending the war with a single stroke, he knew well enough that the discontent had been cumulative, the product of an almost unbroken seven-month sequence of military reverses, a good many of which he had engineered himself, and that the failure might be defined more reasonably as one of leadership at the top. Indeed, many did so define it, both in speeches and in print. During the past two years, while healing the split in his cabinet and winning the respect of those who were closest to him, he had grown in the estimation of the great mass of people who judged him solely from a distance, by his formal actions and utterances and by the gathering aura of his honesty and goodness. There were, however, senators and congressmen, together with other federal and
State officiais of varying importance, who saw him only occasionally and were offended by what they saw.

“The lack of respect for the President in all parties is unconcealed,” Richard Dana, a U.S. district attorney from Massachusetts, had written home from the national capital at the beginning of a visit in late February. Author of
Two Years Before the Mast
, a founder of the Free Soil party and now a solid Republican, Dana spent two weeks looking and listening, then delivered himself of a still harsher judgment based on what he had seen and heard: “As to the politics of Washington, the most striking thing is the absence of personal loyalty to the President. It does not exist. He has no admirers, no enthusiastic supporters, none to bet on his head. If a Republican convention were to be held tomorrow, he would not get the vote of a State. He does not act, or talk, or feel like the ruler of a great empire in a great crisis. This is felt by all, and has got down through all the layers of society. It has a disastrous effect on all departments and classes of officials, as well as on the public. He seems to me to be fonder of details than of principles, of tithing the mint, anise, and cummin of patronage, and personal questions, than of the weightier matters of empire. He likes rather to talk and tell stories with all sorts of persons who come to him for all sorts of purposes than to give his mind to the noble and manly duties of his great post. It is not difficult to detect that this is the feeling of his cabinet. He has a kind of shrewdness and common sense, mother wit, and slipshod, low-leveled honesty, that made him a good Western jury lawyer. But he is an unutterable calamity to us where he is. Only the army can save us.”

If there was some perception here, there was also much distortion, and in any event the judgment was merely personal. More serious were the signs of organized obstruction. “Party spirit has resumed its sway over the people,” Seward had lamented in the wake of the fall elections, and Sumner had written a friend soon after the turn of the year: “The President tells me that he now fears ‘the fire in the rear’—meaning the Democracy, especially at the Northwest—more than our military chances.” When the Bay State senator spoke of “the Democracy” he meant the Democrats, particularly that wing of the party which opposed the more fervent innovations of his own: Emancipation, for example, and the draft. At any rate Lincoln’s anxiety seemed well founded. “I am advised,” Governor Oliver P. Morton of Indiana had wired the Secretary of War, “that it is contemplated when the Legislature meets in this State to pass a joint resolution acknowledging the Southern Confederacy and urging the States of the Northwest to dissolve all constitutional relations with the New England States. The same thing is on foot in Illinois.” The same thing, or something resembling it, was indeed on foot in the President’s home state, where the legislature had likewise gone Democratic in the fall. However, though the Illinois house passed resolutions praying for an armistice and recommending a convention of all the
states North and South to agree upon some adjustment of their differences, the senate defeated by a few votes the proposal to discuss the matter; Governor Richard Yates was not obliged to exercise the veto. On the other hand, Morton did not allow matters to progress even that far in Indiana. He had spies in the opposition ranks, and when he saw what he believed was coming he dissolved the legislature by the simple expedient of advising the Republican minority to withdraw, which left the body without a quorum. The trouble with this was that it also left the Hoosier governor without funds for running the state for the next two years. But he solved the dilemma by strenuous and unconstitutional efforts. After obtaining loans from private sources and the counties, amounting to $135,000 in all, he appealed to Lincoln for the necessary balance. Lincoln referred him to Stanton, who advanced him $250,000 from a special War Department fund. Morton had what he needed to keep Indiana loyal and going, though it bothered him some that the law had been severely bent if not broken in the process. “If the cause fails, you and I will be covered with prosecutions, imprisoned, driven from the country,” he told Stanton, who replied: “If the cause fails I do not wish to live.”