Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (40 page)

This time almost nothing went right for Grant. At first he hoped simply to march overland from Corinth with a force of 72,000 men and quickly seize Vicksburg and its garrison, but once under way in November, Grant changed his mind and detached Sherman and 32,000 men to advance down the Mississippi in another combined army-navy operation. He might have saved himself the trouble: Confederate raiders under Earl Van Dorn struck at Grant’s supply base at Holly Springs, Mississippi, on December 20, destroying the bulk of Grant’s supplies and stopping his overland march in its tracks. Meanwhile, Sherman’s men arrived before Chickasaw Bayou, northeast of Vicksburg, on December 26 to find that the Confederate troops from Vicksburg had dug themselves in along the hills on the other side of the bayou. After a series of futile attacks, Sherman withdrew and the whole endeavor went up in smoke.
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Grant would not give up on Vicksburg that easily. He would admit only that the idea of an overland march on Vicksburg from above the city was impractical, and during the winter of 1862–63 he mounted no fewer than five attempts to find a way to move his men downriver, past Vicksburg, and land them on the other side of the city, where he could cut off supplies and reinforcements to the city from points south and east. None of his ideas (which included attempts to dig canals around Vicksburg, to navigate the back bayous, and to reroute the Mississippi) worked, though, and by March 1863 he was no closer to taking Vicksburg than ever. Finally, in April, Grant decided to gamble on the riskiest of all the possible approaches to Vicksburg. He ferried his men across the Mississippi, marched them down below Vicksburg on the Louisiana side of the river, and on the moonless night of April 16–17, 1863, ran a fleet of eight navy gunboats and three transports (plus some coal barges) past the four-mile-long line of Confederate naval artillery on the Vicksburg waterfront. Every one of the gunboats was hit, but only one transport was sunk, and once below Vicksburg they provided cover for Grant to safely ferry his men back across the Mississippi, this time
below
Vicksburg.
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Within a month Grant had cut off all of Vicksburg’s outside communications and had bottled up Vicksburg’s 30,000 Confederate
soldiers into an airtight siege. After six weeks the Confederates were reduced to near starvation, and on July 4, 1863, Vicksburg surrendered to Grant.

With Vicksburg the Confederacy had lost a citadel, an army, and an additional measure of its self-confidence. “The surrender was the stab to the Confederacy from which it never recovered,” remembered one of Vicksburg’s citizens. “No rational chance of its triumph remained after the white flag flew on the ramparts of the terraced city.”
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With Vicksburg, Ulysses Simpson Grant had redeemed a reputation. He also set a president to wondering whether he had at last found a general who could win his war for him.

At the beginning of the Civil War Abraham Lincoln was fifty-two years old, and the numerous photographs that were taken of him during his first year as president reveal a man thin and spare, but erect and powerful, with a strongly etched face and the familiar whiskers (which he had grown as a fashionable whim shortly after his election) encircling his jaw. By the end of the war, Lincoln’s face had grown aged and careworn, his cheeks sunken into ashen hollows, his coarse black hair showing tufts of white, and his beard shrunken to a pitiful tuft at the chin. As the conflict dragged on and the casualty lists began to lengthen, Lincoln descended deeper into a peculiar variety of religious mysticism in which he began to view himself as merely “a humble instrument in the hands of our Heavenly Father,” powerless to guide events on his own terms. As the off spring of parents who were hard-shell Calvinistic Baptists, Lincoln had already imbibed a brooding certainty that all human activity was predestined to some mysterious end. Now that sense of helplessness in the face of events intensified: “I have all my life been a fatalist,” Lincoln remarked to one congressman, and added, quoting Hamlet, “‘There’s a divinity that shapes our ends.’”
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Other burdens conspired to further drain Lincoln’s energies and blacken his impenetrable moods. He received a glut of hate mail, much of it threatening him with various kinds of death, which he filed in an envelope marked “Assassination.” “Soon after I was nominated in Chicago,” Lincoln said, “I began to receive letters threatening my life. The first ones made me feel a little uncomfortable; but I came at length to look for a regular installment of this kind of correspondence in every mail.” Eventually the threats preyed so much on his mind that he began to dream of assassination and funerals in the White House, and his friend Ward Hill Lamon pestered him so badly to protect himself that Lincoln made Lamon federal marshal
of the District of Columbia, and let him and Stanton provide regular guards. Lincoln himself made no attempt at protection. As he explained resignedly to Francis Carpenter, there was no security in this life from fate: “If… they wanted to get at me, no vigilance could keep them out. We are so mixed up in our affairs, that—no matter what the system established—a conspiracy to assassinate, if such there were, could easily obtain a pass to see me for any one or more of its instruments.” Besides, Lincoln added, democracy imposed a certain amount of risk on its leaders. “It would never do for a President to have guards with drawn sabres at his door, as if he fancied he were, or were trying to be, or were assuming to be, an emperor.”
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As it turned out, it was not for Lincoln that the bell tolled. In February 1862 Lincoln’s third son, William Wallace Lincoln, died of typhoid fever in the White House, and grief over the boy’s death nearly tipped Mary Todd Lincoln over the brink into insanity. Lincoln, himself “worn out with grief and watching,” could explain the death only as yet another visitation of the inscrutable power that held human destinies in a powerful and inescapable grip. “My poor boy,” Lincoln murmured, “he was too good for this earth… but then we loved him so. It is hard, hard to have him die.” After Willie Lincoln’s death, Lincoln’s own health began to suffer. Mary only made matters worse with spendthrift habits and a weakness for flattery by schemers and poltroons looking to acquire insider information about administration policies. “Many times,” recalled his old friend Orville Hickman Browning, “he used to talk to me about his domestic troubles” and “was constantly under great apprehension lest his wife should do something which would bring him into disgrace.” Unable to sleep, he paced the White House through the night, or sat up into the wee hours of the morning in the telegraph room of the War Department to receive the latest news of the war. He gradually lost weight, until his clothes seemed to hang from him, and in the fall of 1863 he contracted a mild form of smallpox. There was, he complained, a tired spot in him that no rest could ever touch.
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Over and above all these reasons for the haggard look of Lincoln’s face was the crushing weight of having to conduct what amounted to two separate wars. In addition to the shooting war, Lincoln was also compelled to wage a political war behind the lines to keep up civilian support and morale, to enable the armies to keep on fighting, and to implement the long-term agenda of domestic policies he had inherited from Henry Clay and cherished ever since his first days as a Whig politician. The initial consensus of 1861–62 was that Lincoln was no more successful in winning the
political war than he was in winning the military one. On the eve of his inauguration, one longtime Washingtonian shook his head over Lincoln: “He certainly does not seem to come much to the level of the great mission” before him “& I fear that a weak hand will command the ship.” “My opinion of Mr. Lincoln,” wrote Orestes Brownson to Charles Sumner at the end of 1862, “is that nothing can be done with him. … He is wrong-headed… the petty politician not the statesman &… ill-deserving the
sobriquet
of Honest.” The New York lawyer George Templeton Strong confided to his diary in 1862, “Disgust with our present government is certainly universal. Even Lincoln himself has gone down at last. Nobody believes in him any more.”
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Of course, the benefit of hindsight suggests that Lincoln’s critics were wrong and that Lincoln eventually succeeded in rallying the political morale of the North around even the most radical of his policies, emancipation. But it is also true that Lincoln accomplished that goal only very slowly, and at the cost of terrific political turmoil. The reasons lying behind that turmoil are twofold. The first is bound up with Lincoln’s inexperience in national politics. Although Lincoln had been involved in state and local politics for almost his entire adult life, he had never actually been elected to an office of any consequence in Illinois beyond the state legislature, and his only experience on the national level before 1861 consisted of his solitary and undistinguished term as a representative from Illinois’s Seventh District. Had there been such a thing as executive search firms in Lincoln’s day, none of them would have given him a second look. His work habits had been shaped by the experience of local politics and a two-man law practice, and as a result, Lincoln only grudgingly delegated even routine correspondence to his secretaries. “His methods of office working were simply those of a very busy man who worked at all hours,” Robert Todd Lincoln recalled.

He never dictated correspondence; he sometimes wrote a document and had his draft copied by either [John] Nicholay [
sic
] or [John] Hay; sometimes he himself copied his corrected draft and retained the draft in his papers. … He seemed to think nothing of the labor of writing personally and was accustomed to make many scraps of notes or memoranda. In writing a careful letter, he first wrote it himself, then corrected it, and then rewrote the corrected version himself.
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That same inexperience made many of the old Republican hands look at him askance, as a quirk in an electoral process that ought to have elected a Seward, a Chase, or a Douglas instead. Elihu Washburne, meeting Lincoln on the railroad
platform when the president-elect arrived in Washington on February 23, 1861, could not help thinking that Lincoln “looked more like a well-to-do farmer from one of the back towns… than the President of the United States.” Fully as much as George McClellan, Republican senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio dismissed “Old Abe” as a “fool,” and curtly declined an invitation to a White House ball in February 1862 with the acid question, “Are the President and Mrs. Lincoln aware that there is a civil war?” Newspaper editors foamed angrily over Lincoln’s election, asking, “Who will write this ignorant man’s state papers?” The historian George Bancroft burst out, in a letter to his wife, “We suffer for want of an organizing mind at the head of the government. We have a president without brains.”
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Although Lincoln was elected president as a Republican, he still carried over into the Republican Party many of the political principles of the old Whigs, and chief among those principles was the Whiggish suspicion of putting too much power into the hands of the national president. The Whigs, wrote John Pendleton Kennedy, “fearing this administrative arm, and believeing [
sic
] that the safety of free institutions is best secured by watching and restraining the Executive, disdain to seek its favor by any act of adulation or by any relaxation of their distrust,” and “naturally put great faith in the National Legislature.” Lincoln, of course, wanted to act the Whiggish part. In his first major political speech in Springfield in 1838, Lincoln had warned his hearers against the emergence of a “towering genius” who would disdain the “beaten path” of republican institutions and erect a despotism on the ruins of “the temple of liberty,” and it was plain that Lincoln had Democrats such as Jackson in view. After his own election as president, Lincoln insisted in consistently Whiggish terms that he intended to take a backseat to Congress in running the country. “My political education strongly inclines me against a very free use of… the Executive, to control the legislation of the country,” Lincoln declared in 1861. “As a rule, I think it better that congress should originate, as well as perfect its measures, without external bias.”
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However, a civil war changed all normal expectations, and Lincoln reserved to himself exactly how to construe that “use” of the Executive. What deceived political spectators about Lincoln was his preference for moving indirectly, relying on private embassies performed by staffers or old Illinois friends such as Leonard Swett. Even before arriving in Washington, Lincoln sent Swett ahead to map the political landscape,
and Swett dutifully reported back, “From all I can learn of the Town I think by the time you had been here a week you would either be bored to death or in a condition in which you never could sensibly determine any thing.” Swett “tried by all means in my power, to induce” one politician “to adopt the course you requested”; another proposal couldn’t even be discussed by letter and “any decisive measures” would have to wait “until I arrive for I think I have important considerations to present to you.” Other old friends were converted into listening posts to gauge public opinion, particularly in Kentucky, where long-time friend Joshua Speed’s ears were close to the political wires. Lincoln’s private secretaries, Nicolay and Hay, were sent on missions to Missouri, South Carolina, Ohio, Florida, New York, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee, as well as up to Capitol Hill whenever any business in Congress was pending. “When the President had any rather delicate matter to manage at a distance,” recalled Hay, “he … sent Nicolay or me.” In critical cases, Lincoln called senators to the White House for some presidential talking-to.
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The wise heads in the Senate criticized Lincoln’s “back-kitchen way of doing this business.” So did the wise heads in the cabinet, since Lincoln hardly ever involved his cabinet secretaries in policy-making decisions, except to confirm a conclusion he had already reached. Though he gave his cabinet secretaries wide enough room to use their own talents in managing those responsibilities, it was plain that Lincoln regarded them as little more than clerks, rather than partners in the great business of managing the war. This was not, of course, what his cabinet had expected: from Jefferson’s day forward, cabinet secretaries had been growing in power and independence, to the point where under Franklin Pierce’s secretary of war—a figure no less than Jefferson Davis—had been regarded as a greater power in the administration than Pierce himself.
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