Lincoln, the unknown Read online

  McClellan, too, was envious of Grant's popularity; so he sent Halleck what, in the light of history, is the most amazing telegram of the Civil War: "Do not hesitate to arrest him [Grant] at once if the good of the service requires it, and place C. F. Smith in command."

  Halleck immediately took Grant's army away from him, virtually placed him under arrest, and then leaned back in his chair and scratched his elbows with savage satisfaction.

  The war was almost a year old now, and the only general who had won a considerable victory for the North stood stripped of all power and in public disgrace.

  Later Grant was restored to command. Then he blundered woefully at the Battle of Shiloh; if Johnston, the Confederate general, had not bled to death during the fighting, Grant's entire army might have been surrounded and captured. Shiloh was, at that time, the greatest battle that had ever been fought on this continent, and Grant's losses were staggering—thirteen thousand men. He had acted stupidly; he had been taken by surprise. He deserved criticism, and it came roaring down upon him. He was falsely accused of being intoxicated at Shiloh, and

  millions believed it. A tidal wave of popular indignation swept over the country, and the public clamored for his removal. But Lincoln said:

  "I can't spare this man. He fights."

  When people told him Grant drank too much whisky, he inquired: "What brand? I want to send a few barrels to some of my other generals."

  The following January Grant assumed command of the expedition against Vicksburg. The campaign against this natural fortress, perched on a high bluff two hundred feet above the Mississippi, was long and heartbreaking. The place was heavily fortified, and the gunboats on the river couldn't elevate their cannon high enough to touch it. Grant's problem was to get his army close enough to attack it.

  He went back to the heart of Mississippi and tried to march on it from the east. That failed.

  Then he cut away the levees of the river, put his army on boats, and tried to float through the swamps and get at the place from the north. That failed.

  Then he dug a canal and tried to change the course of the Mississippi. That failed.

  It was a trying winter. Rain fell almost continuously, the river flooded the whole valley, and Grant's troops floundered through miles of swamps, ooze, bayous, tangled forests, and trailing vines. Men stood up to their waists in mud, they ate in the mud, they slept in the mud. Malarial fever broke out, and measles and smallpox. Sanitation was well-nigh impossible, and the death-rate was appalling.

  The Vicksburg campaign was a failure—that was the cry that went up everywhere. A stupid failure, a tragic failure, a criminal failure.

  Grant's own generals—Sherman, McPherson, Logan, Wilson —regarded his plans as absurd, and believed they would end in black ruin. The press throughout the country was vitriolic, and the nation was demanding Grant's removal.

  "He has hardly a friend left except myself," Lincoln said.

  Despite all opposition, Lincoln clung to Grant; and he had his faith richly rewarded, for, on July 4, the same day that the timid Meade let Lee escape at Gettysburg, Grant rode into Vicksburg on a horse taken from the plantation of Jefferson Davis, and won a greater victory than any American general had achieved since the days of Washington.

  After eight months of desolating failure, Grant had captured forty thousand prisoners at Vicksburg, placed the entire Mississippi River in the hands of the North, and split the Confederacy.

  The news set the nation aflame with enthusiasm.

  Congress passed a special act in order that Grant could be made lieutenant-general—an honor that no man had worn since the death of Washington—and Lincoln, calling him to the White House, made a short address appointing him commander of all the armies of the Union.

  Forewarned that he would have to reply with a speech of acceptance, Grant drew out of his pocket a little wrinkled piece of paper containing only three sentences. As he began to read, the paper shook, his face flushed, his knees trembled, and his voice failed. Breaking down completely, he clutched the shaking paper with both hands, shifted his position, took a deep breath, and began all over again.

  The hog-and-hide buyer from Galena found it easier to face bullets than to deliver a speech of eighty-four words before an audience of eleven men.

  Mrs. Lincoln, eager to make a social event out of Grant's presence in Washington, had already arranged a dinner and a party in the general's honor. But Grant begged to be excused, saying he must hasten back to the front.

  "But we can't excuse you," the President insisted. "Mrs. Lincoln's dinner without you would be 'Hamlet' without Hamlet."

  "A dinner to me," replied Grant, "means a million dollars a day loss to the country. Besides, I've had about enough of this show business, anyway."

  Lincoln loved a man who would talk like that—one who, like himself, despised "fizzlegigs and fireworks," and one who would "take responsibility and act."

  Lincoln's hopes rose and towered now. He was sure that, with Grant in command, all would soon be well.

  But he was wrong. Within four months the country was plunged into blacker gloom and deeper despair than ever, and once more Lincoln was pacing the floor throughout the night, haggard and worn and desperate.

  I

  n May 1864, the triumphant Grant plunged across the Rap-idan River with 122,000 men. He was going to destroy's Lee's army forthwith and end the war at once.

  Lee met him in the "wilderness" of North Virginia. The place was well named. It was a jungle of rolling hills and swampy swales smothered with a dense second growth of pine and oaks and matted with underbrush so thick that a cottontail could hardly crawl through it. And in those gloomy and tangled woods, Grant fought a grim and bloody campaign. The slaughter was appalling. The jungle itself caught on fire and hundreds of the wounded were consumed by the flames.

  At the end of the second day even the stolid Grant was so shaken that he retired to his tent and wept.

  But after every battle, no matter what the results, he gave the same order: "Advance! Advance!"

  At the end of the sixth bloody day he sent the famous telegram: "I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer."

  Well, it did take all summer. Moreover, it took all autumn, and all winter, and a part of the next spring.

  Grant had twice as many men in the field now as the enemy had, and back of him, in the North, lay a vast reservoir of manpower upon which he could draw, while the South had almost exhausted its recruits and supplies.

  "The rebels," said Grant, "have already robbed the cradle and the grave."

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  Grant held that the quick way and the only way to end the war was to keep on killing Lee's men until Lee surrendered.

  What if two Northern soldiers were shot for every one the South lost? Grant could make up the wastage, but Lee couldn't. So Grant kept on blasting and snooting and slaying.

  In six weeks he lost 54,926 men—as many as Lee had in his entire army.

  In one hour at Cold Harbor he lost seven thousand—a thousand more than had been killed on both sides in three days during the Battle of Gettysburg.

  And what advantage was achieved by this ghastly loss?

  We shall let Grant himself answer the question: "None whatever." That was his estimate.

  The attack at Cold Harbor was the most tragic blunder of his career.

  Such slaughter was more than human nerves and human bodies could endure. It broke the morale of the troops; the rank and file of the army were on the verge of mutiny, and the officers themselves were ready to rebel.

  "For thirty-six days now," said one of Grant's corps commanders, "there has been one unbroken funeral procession past me.

  Lincoln, broken-hearted though he was, realized that there was nothing to do but keep on. He telegraphed Grant to "hold on with a bull dog grip and chew and choke." Then he issued a call for half a million more men, to serve from one to three years.

  The call staggered the country. The nation
was plunged into an abyss of despair.

  "Everything now is darkness and doubt and discouragement," one of Lincoln's secretaries recorded in his diary.

  On July 2 Congress adopted a resolution that sounded like the lamentations of one of the Hebrew prophets of the Old Testament. It requested the citizens to "confess and repent of their manifold sins, implore the compassion and forgiveness of the Almighty, and beseech him as the Supreme Ruler of the world not to destroy us as a people."

  Lincoln was being cursed now almost as violently in the North as in the South. He was denounced as a usurper, a traitor, a tyrant, a fiend, a monster, "a bloody butcher shouting war to the knife and knife to the hilt, and crying for more victims for his slaughter pens."

  Some of his most bitter enemies declared that he ought to be killed. And one evening as he was riding out to his summer headquarters at the Soldiers' Home, a would-be assassin fired at him and put a bullet through his tall silk hat.

  A few weeks later the proprietor of a hotel in Meadville, Pennsylvania, found this inscription scratched on a window-pane: "Abe Lincoln Departed this Life August 13, 1864, by the effect of poison." The room had been occupied the night before by a popular actor named Booth—John Wilkes Booth.

  The preceding June the Republicans had nominated Lincoln for a second term. But they felt now that they had made a mistake, a woeful mistake. Some of the most prominent men in the party urged Lincoln to withdraw. Others demanded it. They wanted to call another convention, admit that Lincoln was a failure, cancel his nomination, and place another candidate at the head of the ticket.

  Even Lincoln's close friend Orville Browning recorded in his diary in July, 1864, that the "nation's great need is a competent leader at the head of affairs."

  Lincoln himself now believed that his case was hopeless. He abandoned all thought of being elected for a second term. He had failed. His generals had failed. His war policy had failed. The people had lost faith in his leadership, and he feared that the Union itself would be destroyed.

  "Even the heavens," he exclaimed, "are hung in black."

  Finally a large group of radicals, disgusted with Lincoln, called another convention, nominated the picturesque General John C. Fremont as their candidate, and split the Republican party.

  The situation was grave; and there is hardly a doubt that if Fremont hadn't withdrawn from the race later, General Mc-Clellan, the Democratic candidate, would have triumphed over his divided opponents and the history of the nation would have been changed.

  Even with Fremont out of the race, Lincoln received only 200,000 more votes than McClellan.

  Notwithstanding the vitriolic condemnation poured upon him, Lincoln went calmly on, doing his best and answering no one.

  "I desire," he said, "to so conduct the affairs of this administration that if, at the end, when I come to lay down the reins of power, I have lost every other friend on earth, I shall at least have one friend left, and that friend shall be deep down inside

  of me. ... I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live up to the light I have."

  Weary and despondent, he often stretched himself out on a sofa, picked up a small Bible, and turned to Job for comfort: "Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me."

  In the summer of 1864, Lincoln was a changed man, changed in mind and body from the physical giant who had come off the prairies of Illinois three years before. Year by year his laughter had grown less frequent; the furrows in his face had deepened; his shoulders had stooped; his cheeks were sunken; he suffered from chronic indigestion; his legs were always cold; he could hardly sleep; he wore habitually an expression of anguish. He said to a friend: "I feel as though I shall never be glad again."

  When Augustus Saint-Gaudens saw a life-mask of Lincoln that had been made in the spring of 1865, the famous sculptor thought that it was a death-mask, insisted that it must be, for already the marks of death were upon his face.

  Carpenter, the artist who lived at the White House for months while he was painting the scene of the Emancipation Proclamation, wrote:

  During the first week of the battle of the Wilderness, the President scarcely slept at all. Passing through the main hall of the domestic apartment on one of those days, I met him, clad in a long morning wrapper, pacing back and forth, his hands behind him, great black rings under his eyes, his head bent forward upon his breast—the picture of sorrow and care and anxiety. . . . There were whole days when I could scarcely look into his furrowed face without weeping.

  Callers found him collapsed in his chair, so exhausted that he did not look up or speak when they first addressed him.

  "I sometimes fancy," he declared, "that every one of the throng that comes to see me daily darts at me with thumb and finger and picks out his piece of my vitality and carries it away."

  He told Mrs. Stowe, the author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," that he would never live to see peace.

  "This war is killing me," he said.

  His friends, alarmed at the change in his appearance, urged him to take a vacation.

  "Two or three weeks would do me no good," he replied. "I cannot fly from my thoughts. I hardly know how to rest. What is tired lies within me and can't be got at."

  "The cry of the widow and the orphan," said his secretary, "was always in Lincoln's ear."

  Mothers and sweethearts and wives, weeping and pleading, rushed to him daily to obtain pardons for men who had been condemned to be shot. No matter how worn he was, how exhausted, Lincoln always heard their stories, and generally granted their requests, for he never could bear to see a woman cry, especially if she had a baby in her arms.

  "When I am gone," he moaned, "I hope it can be said of me that I plucked a thistle and planted a flower wherever I thought a flower would grow."

  The generals scolded and Stanton stormed: Lincoln's leniency was destroying the discipline of the army, he must keep his hands off. But the truth is he hated the brutal methods of brigadier-generals, and the despotism of the regular army. On the other hand, he loved the volunteers on whom he had to depend for winning the war—men who, like himself, had come from the forest and farm.

  Was one of them condemned to be shot for cowardice? Lincoln would pardon him, saying, "I have never been sure but what I might drop my gun and run, myself, if I were in battle."

  Had a volunteer become homesick and run away? "Well, I don't see that shooting will do him any good."

  Had a tired and exhausted Vermont farm boy been sentenced to death for falling asleep on sentinel duty? "I might have done the same thing, myself," Lincoln would say.

  A mere list of his pardons would fill many pages.

  He once wired to General Meade, "I am unwilling for any boy under eighteen to be shot." And there were more than a million boys under that age in the Union armies. In fact, there were a fifth of a million under sixteen, and a hundred thousand under fifteen.

  Sometimes the President worked a bit of humor into his most serious messages; as, for example, when he wired Colonel Mulligan, "If you haven't shot Barney D. yet, don't."

  The anguish of bereaved mothers touched Lincoln very deeply. On November 21, 1864, he wrote the most beautiful and famous letter of his life. Oxford University has a copy of this letter hanging on its wall, "as a model of pure and exquisite diction which has never been excelled."

  Although written as prose, it is really unconscious and resonant poetry:

  Executive Mansion, Washington, Nov. 21, 1864. To Mrs. Bixby, Boston, Mass. Dear Madame:

  I have been shown in the files of the War Department A statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts That you are the mother of five sons Who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel How weak and fruitless must be any words of mine Which would attempt to beguile you from the grief Of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain From tendering to you the consolation that may be

  found In the thanks of the Republic they died to sa
ve. I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage The anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only The cherished memory of the loved and lost, And the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid So costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom. Yours very sincerely and respectfully,

  A. Lincoln.

  One day Noah Brooks gave Lincoln a volume of Oliver Wendell Holmes's verses. Opening the book, Lincoln began reading the poem "Lexington" aloud, but when he came to the stanza beginning:

  Green be the grass where her martyrs are lying! Shroudless and tombless they sunk to their rest,

  his voice quavered, he choked, and handing the volume back to Brooks, he whispered: "You read it. I can't."

  Months afterward he recited the entire poem to friends in the White House, without missing a word.

  On April 5, 1864, Lincoln received a letter from a brokenhearted girl in Washington County, Pennsylvania. "After long

  hesitation through dread and fear," she began, "I have at last concluded to inform you of my troubles." The man to whom she had been engaged for some years had joined the army, had later been permitted to go home to vote, and they had, as she put it, "very foolishly indulged too freely in matrimonial affairs." And now "the results of our indulgences are going to bring upon us both an unlawful family providing you do not take mercy upon us and grant him a leave of absence in order to ratify past events. ... I hope and pray to God that you will not cast me aside in scorn and dismay."

  Reading the letter, Lincoln was deeply touched. He stared out the window with unseeing eyes in which there were doubtlessly tears. . . .