Authors: Stephen B. Oates
In April, 1863, Hooker launched his Chancellorsville campaign, boasting that “the rebel army is now the legitimate property of the Army of the Potomac.” Alas, “Fighting Joe” Hooker could not live up to his nickname. He lost his nerve at Chancellorsville and led the luckless Army of the Potomac to yet another defeat, sustaining 17,000 casualties in the process. Lincoln was in such a state of tension that he raced to Virginia to make certain the army was still intact. The army, of course, rocked with recriminations, and the country put up a howl that made Lincoln shudder. Yet he left Hooker in command until June, when Lee
unleashed his second invasion of the North. Finally Lincoln turned to snappish George Gordon Meade to lead the Potomac Armyâthe fifth general to do so.
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Meade was an excellent battlefield general, as he demonstrated at Gettysburg, the biggest and bloodiest engagement of the war, where he shattered Lee's army and forced him to retire. Like McClellan, though, Meade had no comprehension of what it meant to pursue and destroy an enemy army, and he let Lee escape. For Meade, it was enough that he had driven the invader from Union soil. “My God!” Lincoln exclaimed. “Is that all?” When he learned that Lee was safe in Virginia, Lincoln's “grief and anger,” said a friend, “were something sorrowful to behold.”
Lincoln did take heart when Grant captured Vicksburg after a protracted siege. Here, the President rejoiced, was a total victory, the conquest of a powerful rebel garrison on the Mississippiâand the elimination of its defenders as a fighting force. Lincoln loved Grant. He was the President's kind of general: a fighting, innovative officer who went after the insurrectionists with fierce determination and never once begged for reinforcements.
During the summer and autumn of 1863, Lincoln kept prodding his generals to fight in concert, to move against Confederate forces with coordinated attacks. He wanted to “hurt this enemy,” to “whip these people.” But it took Lincoln until 1864 before he found in Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman the right combination to implement his big-picture strategy. In the spring of that year, Lincoln made Sherman overall commander in the West and called Grant to the East as General-in-Chief of all Union armies. Now Lincoln had a command set-up that he hoped would produce victories. With Grant as General-in-Chief, Halleck functioned officially as chief of staff, integrating information and giving out advice. Grant, electing to travel with Meade and the Army of the Potomac, would coordinate its movements with those of armies in other theaters.
A terse, slight man who chewed cigars and walked with a lurch, Grant worked out with Lincoln a Grand Plan that called for simultaneous offensive movements on all battlefronts. In the East, Grant and Meade would attempt to obliterate Lee's force while Sherman's powerful army would punch into Georgia, seize Atlanta and its crucial railway nexus, and destroy rebel resources in the Atlanta area. In sum, the Union war machine would now utilize its vastly superior manpower and smash the Confederacy with concerted blows in all theaters.
Lincoln was delighted. The Grand Plan entailed exactly the kind of concerted action he had advocated since 1861. And though it was basically Grant's design, Lincoln helped forge it in weekly strategy sessions in the White House. So in May, 1864, Union armies on all fronts moved forward in the mightiest offensive of the war, battering the Confederacy from all directions and thrusting toward “a common center.” Alas, in East and West alike, the offensive mired down and Union casualties, especially in Virginia, were staggering. Yet Lincoln never lost hope. Even when Lee escaped to the redoubts of Petersburg and Grant settled in for a protracted siege, Lincoln urged him to “hold on with bull-dog grip, and chew & choke, as much as possible.”
The Grand Plan worked better in the western theater, where Sherman captured and burned Atlanta, and General George “Old Pap” Thomas smashed the Confederate Army of Tennessee, destroying it so completely that it could never fight again. What Lincoln had long desired had finally been accomplished.
In the late fall of 1864 red-haired Bill Sherman, a tall, lean man who spoke in picturesque phrases, proposed to take Lincoln's strategic notions a step further. Even more than Grant, Sherman realized that modern wars were won not simply by fighting enemy armies, but by destroying the very ability of the enemy to wage warâthat is, by wrecking railroads, burning fields, and eradicating other economic resources. “We are not only fighting hostile armies,” Sherman reasoned, “but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war.” “There
is many a boy here who looks on war as all glory,” Sherman later told his veterans, “but, boys, it is all hell.”
Those were Lincoln's sentiments exactly. And since war was hell, it should be ended as swiftly as possible, by whatever means were necessary. Thus, when Sherman proposed to visit total war on the people of the Deep South, Lincoln approved. With ruthless efficiency, Sherman's army stormed through Georgia and the Carolinas, tearing up railroads, pulverizing corn and cotton fields, assassinating cows and chickens, wiping out all and anything that might sustain Lee's army and all other rebel forces. At the same time, Union cavalry in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley burned a broad path of destruction clear to the Rapidan River. The Union's scorched-earth warfare earned Lincoln and Sherman undying hatred in Dixie, but it paid off: within five months after Sherman started his march through Georgia, the war was over.
It cannot be stressed enough that Lincoln, then deeply involved in matters of reconstruction, fully endorsed Sherman's scorched-earth policy. If Sherman was “a total warrior,” so was his Commander-in-Chief. Putting aside his own aversion to bloodshed and violence, Lincoln ended up pounding all his southern foes into submissionâcivilians and soldiers alike. And he did so because that was the surest way he knew to shorten the conflict, end the killing, and salvage his American dream.
When it came to reconstruction, the historical Lincoln was no saintly Father Abraham extending the conquered South a tender and forgiving hand. He was not locked in a feud with “vindictive radicals” like Sumner and Stevens, who wanted to carve Dixie up
in an ecstasy of revenge. This is a potent myth,
à la
Carl Sandburg, which most Americans still regard as historically accurate. Yet it scarcely fits with the President who sanctioned total war against southern insurrectionaries. In fact, a body of modern scholarship has persuasively demonstrated that Lincoln became a pretty tough reconstructionist, too. Not only did the historical Lincoln side with Sumner and Stevens on most crucial reconstruction issues; by 1865 he was prepared to reform and reshape the South's shattered society with the help of military force. Again, as in his harsh war measures, Lincoln's evolving approach to reconstruction became inextricably linked to his vision of what this conflict was about: on the Union side, as he said, it was a struggle to preserve for all humanity a system of government whose mission was to elevate the conditions of all its people, to afford all equal privileges in the race of life.
During the course of the war, Lincoln went through three phases in his efforts to reconstruct the rebel South, that is, to restore federal authority and establish loyal state regimes in captured Confederate territory. In phase one, which began with the start of the fighting, Lincoln relied on pro-Union elements within a state to create loyal governments. But, as he should have remembered from the Sumter crisis, Unionist sentiment was too weak for such a policy to work. So in the spring and summer of 1862, the President initiated a second phase of reconstruction and installed military governors in the occupied portions of Tennessee, North Carolina, Louisiana, and Arkansas, instructing them to restore those states to their former places in the Union. As in his plan of voluntary, state-guided emancipation, which he was promoting at this time, Lincoln sought merely to advise his military governors and not interfere directly in their efforts to establish loyal state regimes. But even so, as one scholar has observed, Lincoln's use of military governors was “a radical extension of federal authority into the internal affairs of the states”âand a harbinger of what was to come in the President's evolving reconstruction policy.
Phase two of that policy proved a failure, because the military
governors floundered in their attempts to harmonize conflicting Unionist sentiment and woo back disaffected rebels. The lesson here became as clear to Lincoln as that about slavery: he had to reconstruct Dixie himself. The impetus, direction, and purpose of southern restoration had to come from above, from the chief executive. As he had assumed control of emancipation, so he must take direct charge of restoring conquered rebel states to their “proper practical relation with the Union.”
In his Gettysburg Address of November, 1863, Lincoln signaled the nation that something new was afoot, that something more was needed to win this historic war between the forces of liberty and the forces of reaction in the world. With emancipation now under way in occupied areas of Dixie, with 100,000 former slaves now serving the Union war effort, and with a new plan of reconstruction taking shape in his mind, Lincoln stood on Cemetery Hill south of Gettysburg and called for a national rededication to the proposition that all men are created equal, a new resolve to fight for that proposition and salvage America's experiment in popular government for all humankind. Let Union people of all colors and conditions come together in a new commitment to freedom and a new national crusade. Let them cease their petty quarrels, put aside their differences, and vow that “these honored dead” had not died in vain.
Two and a half weeks later, in his Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, Lincoln promulgated a new plan for constructing loyal, slaveless regimes in occupied Dixie, thus inaugurating phase three of his approach to that difficult problem. First, Lincoln made it clear that he intended to control the reorganization of civilian government in conquered Dixie, that he regarded this as chiefly an executive responsibility to be carried out by the army. In fact, Lincoln was adamant about the role of the army in the reconstruction process, contending that it was indispensable in safeguarding the freedom of the very slaves it liberated. It was also necessary in protecting the loyal southern minorityâharried little bands of Unionist Whigs and antisecessionists on whom Lincoln's
entire efforts depended. In sum, Lincoln would employ the army to oversee the task of building free-state governments in the occupied South, designating generals there as the “masters” of reconstruction.
Second, Lincoln offered a solution to one of the most perplexing difficulties of southern restoration: “how to keep the rebellious populations from over-whelming and outvoting the loyal minority,” as he put it, and returning the old southern ruling class to power. For now, the President's solution was to guard the loyal minority with the army, offer an oath that separated “the opposing elements, so as to build from the sound,” and virtually outlaw the old and current leaders in rebel Dixie. To accomplish the latter, Lincoln refused to pardon the following classes, thus preventing them from voting or holding political office in the occupied South: all men who had held Confederate civilian and diplomatic posts, all who had served as rebel officers above the rank of colonel in the army and lieutenant in the navy, all who had resigned from the U.S. armed forces or left Congress or judicial positions to help the rebellion, and all who had treated Union soldiers other than as prisoners of war. Apart from these, he fully pardoned all other southerners who had engaged in rebellion so long as they took an oath of allegiance to the Union, swearing “henceforth” to support it. Lincoln considered this a fair and liberal test “which accepts as sound whoever will make a sworn recantation of his former unsoundness.” Once a number of people equal to ten percent of those who had voted in 1860 had taken the oath, these people could establish a loyal civilian government and elect U.S. representatives, and their state would be restored to the Union with full federal protection.
Third, all reconstructed regimes must accept and obey the emancipation proclamation and all congressional laws bearing on slavery. “To now abandon them would be not only to relinquish a lever of power,” Lincoln said, “but would also be a cruel and an astounding breach of faith.” Far from being a lenient plan as
many have claimed, Lincoln's Proclamation made emancipation the very basis of reconstruction, thus placing him again on the side of Sumner and the advanced and moderate members of his party (conservative Republicans and Democrats, recall, still wanted to restore the rebel South with slavery preserved). Moreover, the President indicated that he intended to control the affairs of emancipated blacks in conquered Dixie.
As for the old southern ruling class, Lincoln agreed with Sumner that it should be eradicated, and the President's emancipation and reconstruction policies were calculated to do just that. Emancipation, as we have seen, would obliterate the very institution on which the southern master class depended for its existence. And Lincoln's Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction excluded nearly all rebellious southern leaders from participating in his reconstructed governments. True, Lincoln said he might modify his classes of pardons if that seemed warranted, and he did let disqualified individuals apply to him for clemency. But in his Message to Congress in December, 1864, he warned that the time might comeâprobably would comeâwhen “public duty” would force him to “close the door” on all pardons and adopt “more rigorous measures.” At all events, Lincoln had no intention of allowing prewar southern leadersâa class he had once castigated as slavedealers in politicsâto regain power in postwar Dixie.