The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln (23 page)

The Lincoln of legend and sentiment reaches its height during 1863. 1862 belongs to McClellan; 1864 to Grant; for these were years of complicated military maneuvers. But 1863 was a year in which the two chief military movements came together at the same time in the Union victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg. And Gettysburg belongs to Lincoln even more than to the men who fought there. Lincoln was never more mistaken than when he said: “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.”

The year began inauspiciously enough. Burnside, who had made such a pathetic failure at Fredericksburg, was replaced by Joseph Hooker. Desertions from the army were heavy, and
recruits were almost impossible to get. Hooker, who was known as “Fighting Joe,” managed to reinvigorate the tired and apathetic soldiers. However, he had his own ideas on national administration and army policy which were at variance with Lincoln’s beliefs in the free methods of a democracy. When he appointed Hooker to his command on January 26, 1863, Lincoln wrote to him saying: “I have heard, in such a way as to believe it, of your recently saying that both the army and the government needed a dictator. Of course it was not for this, but in spite of it, that I have given you the command. Only those generals who gain successes can set up dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship.”

The general who was celebrated for his fighting abilities and his favoring of strong-arm methods lasted for just one battle—Chancellorsville—which was fought early in May on the outskirts of Fredericksburg, and which ended in the loss of 18,000 men and the full retreat of the Union army.

The South had won both Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, but she needed more than these victories to help her cause. The inexorable laws of economics were working to defeat her. Food was terribly scarce; there had been a bread riot in Richmond early in April; inflation was under way, and the food that could be had brought enormous prices. Butter sold for $4 a pound; tea for $10 a pound; brown sugar—white was unobtainable—for $1.50 a pound; eggs for $1.50 a dozen.

Lee, after consulting with Jefferson Davis, decided on a bold course of action. The Confederacy would carry the war into the North, invade Pennsylvania, relieve the hard-fought soil of Virginia, and press forward with a smashing drive against the Northern cities which had yet not tasted warfare. Early in June he started his armies on their journey north. Rumors of Lee’s intended invasion reached Washington and measures were taken to forestall it, but Hooker was too slow. Lee’s army, stretched out in a dangerously long line, passed up the
Shenandoah Valley, crossed the Potomac and Maryland, and entered Pennsylvania. An advance guard pushed north while the main army gathered just beyond the border. Confederate troops seized York and compelled the city to ransom itself with clothing and money. Some of the troops approached within four miles of Harrisburg and the people there could hear the sound of gunfire. The whole North was thrown into consternation. Refugees fled before the marching army; Eastern Governors desperately tried to raise volunteers for defense and pleaded with the authorities at Washington to put McClellan in charge again; citizens purchased arms; Philadelphia and New Jersey prepared themselves against invasion.

The Union army was rushed forward to meet the invader. Lincoln was afraid to trust his dictator-loving general at such a moment of crisis. He sought for some one else. McClellan was out of the question; almost every Northern commander of note had already been tried. At the last moment Lincoln decided upon an unforeseen choice. He picked General George G. Meade, a Corps commander in the Army of the Potomac. Meade had quarreled with the irascible Hooker a few hours before his notification of appointment arrived. “Am I under arrest?” he asked sleepily as he was awakened on the early morning of June 28, to be told that he had been made commander of the Army of the Potomac.

Meade hurried his forces into Pennsylvania. On July 1, the two armies, groping for each other, met almost accidentally at Gettysburg. The most spectacular battle of the war ensued. The widely dispersed forces were quickly concentrated, facing each other on the outskirts of the little town. The Confederates carried the first day, and were still supreme on the second. On the third day of battle, Lee issued orders for a tremendous assault on the Union lines. An artillery duel began at one o’clock in the afternoon. Then fifteen thousand Confederates led by General Pickett moved across the long valley separating the armies. They walked into a concentrated volley
of cannon and musketry fire that cut them down like wheat. This was the high-water mark of the Confederacy. Lee’s army, broken and defeated, started south the next day. The rain that so often follows a great battle came down in torrents as the Confederate army, transporting its wounded in wagons, headed back to the Shenandoah Valley.

On this same day, July 4, the fortified city of Vicksburg, which had been under siege for months, surrendered to General Grant. The last important Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi was in Federal hands. Lincoln said in picturesque phrase: “The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea.”

Had the War been fought by two countries it would probably have ended at this time. But it was a War between two divisions of the same people—determination was equal on both sides. The Confederacy, lacking in ammunition, money, supplies and men for her armies, nevertheless grimly decided to continue what seems to us now a hopeless struggle. It did not seem quite so hopeless then. Gettysburg, which might have been a decisive and final victory, turned out to be only a repulse of the invading Southern army. Lincoln tried to force Meade to follow up his success with a strong attack that would annihilate Lee, but the pursuit was not carried out efficiently. It was Antietam all over again, with Meade playing the part of the dilatory McClellan. Lee reached Central Virginia, where he remained quietly throughout the fall and winter.

Even in the summer of 1863, when the North was in the full flush of victory, many of its own people were doing their best to defeat its cause. Copperheadism was on the increase. Disaffected areas were rife with opposition to the Northern war policy; treason became commonplace. Recruiting had fallen off so badly that men had to be offered large bounties for enlistment. Even this did not help. Men had to be drafted into the army, and the resistance to this measure
became so great that in New York City it flared out into open violence only ten days after Gettysburg.

An attack was made on an office where names were being drawn for the draft. The building was burned, and police and soldiers were assaulted. The mob then surged through the city for four days terrorizing the populace, burning a Negro orphan asylum and running down and killing Negroes wherever they could be found. Nearly one thousand people were killed or wounded, and property damage ran into several millions of dollars.

Copperheadism in New York and in certain sections of the Middle West was, of course, not truly representative of Northern opinion. The victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg did restore the confidence of many Northern people in their own cause, and they had a great influence on the elections held in the fall of 1863. These elections were for state officers, but the results could be taken as an indication of public attitude on the administration’s handling of the War. In Illinois the election was regarded as so important that the President was asked to come to Springfield to address a Republican meeting that was to be held there. Lincoln could not leave Washington during such critical days, so he wrote instead a remarkable letter of policy to James C. Conkling, a Springfield lawyer who was his personal friend. In this letter, dated August 26, 1863, Lincoln put forth his views on the War, Emancipation and the Negro. His message was effective in shaping sentiment in favor of the administration which was under heavy attack from both Radical Republicans and Democrats, but what really decided the issue was an almost unnoticed ground-swell of public opinion. Intellectuals had stood with the President almost from the first, and even those who had held back at first were now being won over. And the people of the Northern states, by some strange kind of intuitive judgment, were making up their minds that Abraham Lincoln was a
good man and an honest one despite everything that was being said about him by his enemies.

Citizens who had visited the President at the White House went to their far-scattered homes to tell their neighbors what “Old Abe” was really like; soldiers carried the word home when they returned on furlough or were sent back from the front wounded; wives and widows of soldiers helped to spread the gospel—all over the country the voice of the people was speaking, but as has often happened, the politicians were too busy listening to the sound of their own voices to hear it. They heard it when the votes were counted. The country went for Lincoln and elected the men who had supported him.

Shortly after the elections, a ceremony was held for the dedication of a national cemetery for the men who had died at Gettysburg. After the battle, the bodies of the dead had been hastily buried in shallow graves. These bodies were now being recovered and were slowly being reinterred in the new cemetery. Various celebrated people were invited to attend the ceremony, the President among them. The chief oration of the day had been assigned to Edward Everett, a noted speaker in the great classic tradition then popular. At the last moment it was decided to ask the President to deliver “a few appropriate remarks” after Everett had finished.

The request for these few appropriate remarks was received at the White House on November 2, hardly more than two weeks before the scheduled date of the dedication ceremony, November 19, 1863.
²²
But it was naturally expected that the President would say only a few words that would need no especial preparation. Everett’s speech was the main event of the day, and anything that came after it would necessarily be anti-climactic.

Lincoln went to Gettysburg by train, but he had no opportunity to work on his speech during the journey. He had already completed the first half in Washington; he added the last few lines in Gettysburg on the morning of the day on which the ceremony was to be held. Shortly before eleven o’clock in the morning he left the town on horseback to go to the new cemetery on its outskirts. An official procession accompanied him across the battlefield which still showed marks of the terrible struggle that had taken place there only four months before. Dead horses were still lying on the field and the sick sweet odor of decay tainted the crisp November air. The graves in front of the speakers’ stand were only partly filled; the audience stood scattered among them, and many of its members became impatient and wandered away to see the famous battleground while Everett delivered his two-hour discourse. Everett was late in beginning and he did not finish until two o’clock in the afternoon. By that time the audience was hungry and restless. After Everett’s oration, a funeral dirge was sung. Then Ward Lamon stepped forward to introduce the President of the United States.

Most of the people were more eager to see what the President looked like than to hear what he had to say. They applauded him dutifully. The tall angular man on the platform adjusted his spectacles and shuffled the two bits of paper in his hands. A photographer in the crowd leisurely prepared his camera in order to take a picture of the President while he was speaking.

The thin high voice rose over the field of Gettysburg where the dead were lying in their temporary graves. The crowd was still taking the President’s measure, paying little attention to his words.

“Fourscore and seven years ago,” he began, “our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. 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 battlefield of that war. We are met to dedicate a portion of it as the final resting-place for those who have given their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our power to add or detract.”

There was a polite burst of applause, but the President went on. “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work that they have thus far so nobly carried on. 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 here gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation shall, under God, have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
²³

And then it was all over. The people who had just begun to listen were astonished when the President stopped so soon. The man with the camera was still trying to get his unwieldy instrument ready. But the speech was finished, and not one among all those who had heard it realized that he had been present at the birth of an immortal prose poem. The general effect was that of disappointment; the President himself considered his address a failure. Nor did newspaper comment the next day make him feel any better about it. Many of the most important journals did not even mention his speech, and
the hostile Democratic papers denounced it as silly and unworthy of the occasion.

Exultation in the North over the midsummer victory at Gettysburg died down even before the men who had fallen there were buried in their final resting place. A Union victory was being won in Tennessee, where battles raged around Chattanooga during the fall until Federal troops finally repulsed the Confederates late in November, leaving the city and the greater part of the state in Union hands. But Western victories never received their due appreciation in the East—to the people of the Atlantic states, where the majority of the population of the North lived, the War was being fought in Virginia, and the importance of the Western campaigns was always seriously underestimated by them.