I. GETTYSBURG: THE CONFEDERACY’S HIGH-WATER MARK
Lee moved north once again in late June 1863, pushing hard into Pennsylvania. With crisis looming, Lincoln accepted the petulant resignation of General Joe Hooker. He turned to General George G. Meade, a native of the Keystone State. Lincoln hoped that Meade could be relied upon to “fight well on his own dunghill.”1
When Lee encountered the federal main force at Gettysburg, he resolved “to whip them.” Lee was hampered by the absence of his great cavalry commander, General James Ewell Brown (J. E. B.) Stuart. Stuart had once humiliated the federals by riding completely around them. Now, he was ranging too far away, capturing badly needed Union supply wagons, but leaving Lee “blind” as to his enemy’s movements. Confederate generals Stuart and George Pickett had long since captured hearts throughout the South as dashing cavaliers; the former sported a full red beard, an ostrich plume in his hat, and a brilliant red sash around his middle, while the latter wore his hair shoulder length in perfumed ringlets. Pickett was the last man in the West Point class of 1846, but he made up for his dismal academic standing by his bravery and energy.
At thirty-four, Union officer Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain was tall and lean with a flowing mustache. He was a professor of classics in civilian life. He could speak eight languages—English, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Syriac, Hebrew, French, and German.2 It is doubtful any other man on the field that day was so learned. But many fine minds and brave hearts threw their bodies into the breach on those disputed grounds. Commanding the Twentieth Maine, Chamberlain knew he had to hold Little Round Top on the field at Gettysburg. If the Confederates gained that high point, they could pour artillery fire down onto Union troops below and very likely win the battle—maybe the war.
Chamberlain summoned his Maine farm boys and fishermen to hold off the rebel attack. His company had already lost a third of its men, and he had already been slightly wounded twice during the battle.3 Facing yet another attack, Chamberlain would later recall, “[M]y thought was running deep. . . . Five minutes more of such a defensive, and the last roll-call would sound for us. Desperate as the chances were, there was nothing for it but to take the offensive. I stepped to the colors. The men turned toward me. One word was enough—‘BAYONET!’ It caught like fire and swept through the ranks.”4
When his soldiers ran out of ammunition, Chamberlain could honorably have surrendered. Instead, he led his yelling men down from the heights of the Little Round Top, swinging about like a great gate on a hinge. Chamberlain drove the startled Alabamians before him. For his actions that day, the young Mainer was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Union lines wavered as General Meade’s forces were being hard-pressed on the Rose family farm. Places with prosaic names like the Wheatfield and the Peach Orchard there gained immortality in the annals of warfare. Meade was determined to hold. He ordered Major General Winfield Scott Hancock to support the Third Corps. Among General Hancock’s seasoned troops was the famous Irish Brigade. Under their brilliant green flags with their distinctive harps, these Fighting Irish prepared to go into action. Before turning to meet their foe, they turned to their priest for absolution. Standing on a boulder overlooking the earnest, upturned faces, Father William Corby gave the men his blessing. Then he warned them: “The Catholic Church refuses Christian burial to the soldier who turns his back upon the foe or deserts the flag.”5 Today, a monument to Father Corby stands on the boulder where he pronounced those words.
One Irish officer who missed Father Corby’s blessing was Colonel Patrick H. O’Rourke. He had graduated first in his class at West Point, just two years earlier. Paddy O’Rourke had bounded off his horse and was leading his Sixteenth Michigan with a hearty shout of “Down this way, boys!” as he was struck in the neck by a rebel bullet and killed. A New York soldier who came upon the pitiful scene said “that was Johnny’s last shot.” Companies A and G vied with each other to take down the beloved Paddy’s killer. That “Johnny Reb” was hit seventeen times.6
After two days of fierce fighting (July 1 and 2) in the stifling heat of a Gettysburg summer, Lee determined to attack the main body of the Union line. General James Longstreet opposed the move, recalling perhaps the devastation of the Union forces at Maryes’ Heights at Fredericksburg. But such was Marse Robert’s prestige that no one had the courage to challenge his judgment.* Seeing a startled rabbit run off the road, a “Southron” responded with grim good humor. “Run, ol’ hare!” the soldier yelled to his brothers lined up in a clump of trees awaiting the order to advance. “If ah was a ol’ hare, ah’d run, too.”**
When Pickett led his now-famous charge, rank upon rank of Confederates in gray and butternut brown marched straight into the teeth of the Union artillery. And they were cut to pieces. Thousands of men died in mere minutes. Union riflemen behind stone walls were completely protected. They marveled at the magnificent sight of the advancing Confederates. As Pickett’s charge failed, it broke like a great wave ebbing against the rocks. The cry went up from the Union lines that had held fast: “Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg!” Then the sky was rent with a deep, satisfied roar from the Union ranks. They had saved their country, and they knew it. For the rest of their lives, these Union veterans would pay tribute to the sheer courage and unquestioned dedication of the soldiers in gray.
“Too bad, oh, too bad,” cried Robert E. Lee in anguish as the tattered remnants of Pickett’s division staggered back to their lines. He rode out to tell his men, “It’s all my fault.”
Instantly, he wired President Davis his resignation. Just as quickly, it was rejected. Lee was that rare figure in war—loved, even worshipped, by his soldiers, revered by the people of the South, and deeply admired by nearly all his adversaries in the North. “I wish he were ours,” said a young Pennsylvania girl who saw him on his ride to Gettysburg. She spoke for millions in the North. Lee had denounced slavery as “a moral and political evil.”7 He had even spoken against secession: “The framers of our Constitution never exhausted so much labor, wisdom, and forbearance in its formation if it was intended to be broken by every member of the [Union] at will.”8 Still, when Virginia seceded, Lee could see no other course than to support his state. Hundreds of thousands of brave and honorable Southerners reasoned the same way.
For the defeated Confederates, July 4, 1863, was a most mournful Independence Day, especially since some of them had come to speak of the war as the Second War for Independence.9 On the blood-soaked roads of Pennsylvania, in a drenching rain, Lee’s beaten army limped away. Dispirited and expecting a federal attack at any moment, the Army of Northern Virginia rushed to cross the rain-swollen Potomac. Lincoln was desperate for Meade to close with Lee and put an end to the rebellion. When Meade issued an order congratulating his men for driving “the invader” from our soil, Lincoln cried out, “Will our generals never get that idea out of their heads? The whole country is our soil.”10
On this same July 4 came an electrifying message from the West. General Ulysses S. Grant had accepted the surrender of the city of Vicksburg. Grant had conducted a smart, hard-driving campaign against indecisive and divided Confederate defenders. Vicksburg commanded the heights over the Mississippi River. It had been the last Confederate stronghold on the great waterway.
Grant had distinguished himself for bravery in the Mexican War. But then, he did not have responsibility for an army. Now, he was a general. He would later describe his feelings in his first taste of real combat while in command:
As we approached the brow of the hill from which it was expected we could see [the Confederate] Harris’ camp, and possibly find his men ready formed to meet us, my heart kept getting higher and higher until it felt to me as though it was in my throat. I would have given anything to have been back in Illinois, but I had not the moral courage to halt and consider what to do; I kept right on. When we reached a point from which the valley below was in full view I halted. The place where Harris had been encamped a few days before was still there and the marks of a recent encampment were plainly visible, but the [Southern] troops were gone. My heart resumed its place. It occurred to me at once that Harris had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him. This was a view of the question I had never taken before; but it was one I never forgot afterwards. From that event to the close of the war, I never experienced trepidation upon confronting an enemy.11
Here we may see the secret of Grant’s success: his unadorned style—so clear, so candid—his deadpan humor, his realistic view of himself and others. Above all, we see Grant’s self-deprecating wit and his bulldog determination: “I kept right on.”
After months of Grant’s siege, the starving Mississippians gave up. (Vicksburg would not celebrate the Fourth of July again until 1942!) The city’s fall gave control of the Mississippi River to the Union—splitting the Confederacy in two. U. S. Grant! Could anyone have had more symbolic initials? And to have united the upper and lower Mississippi River on the nation’s birthday made an indelible impression on the American people. President Lincoln wrote, “The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea.”
Back east, the mood was not so celebratory. President Lincoln had hoped for, prayed for General Meade to take the unconditional surrender of Lee’s army in Pennsylvania, just as Grant had totally conquered Vicksburg in the West. It was not to be so.
Robert Todd Lincoln had never seen his father cry. But Abraham Lincoln wept bitter tears in the aftermath of the battle of Gettysburg. He could not believe Meade was allowing Lee to escape. Lee’s retreat was even blocked by the rain-swollen river, and still Meade did not descend upon him to crush the rebellion once and for all. Porter Alexander, the Confederate artillery chief, described Meade’s desultory pursuit: “As a mule goes on the chase of a grizzly bear—as if catching up with us was the last thing he wanted to do.”12
Lee did escape, but Lincoln did not remove Meade. Meade—called “a goggle-eyed old snapping turtle” by his men—thought himself ill-used by an ungrateful commander in chief after so great a victory. He submitted his resignation. Lincoln immediately wrote a reply which, although he never sent it, reveals so much of his anguish:
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. If you could not safely attack Lee last Monday, how can you possibly do so South of the river, when you can take with you very few more than two thirds of the force you then had in hand? 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.13
Not only does this unsent letter show Lincoln’s deepest yearning to put an end to the bloodletting, but it also reveals his keen strategic sense. Lincoln had become the best strategist either side produced during the Civil War. He alone understood from the earliest days that the destruction of Lee’s army—and not the capture of Richmond—was the primary objective of Union arms. Where others panicked as Lee invaded the North in 1862 and 1863, Lincoln saw it as a heaven-sent opportunity to cut Lee off from his base of supply and to capture his ragged army of barefoot warriors. “If I had gone up there, I could have whipped them myself,” Lincoln told his young secretaries, John Hay and John Nicolay.14
In this instance, however, Lincoln may have been wrong. The task of pursuing and crushing Lee’s defeated army surely looked easier from Washington than it did to General Meade on the ground at Gettysburg.15
If Meade had launched a counterattack to finish off Lee’s retreating ranks, he might have been the one surprised. Confederate General James Longstreet rode out after Pickett’s failed charge to inspect. “Old Peter,” as he was called, was taking a big chance. This was exactly what Stonewall Jackson had done after his great victory at Chancellorsville two months before—and paid for it with his life.
Old Peter was surprised to find an artillery battery in place after he had ordered all his guns pulled back. “Whose are these guns?” he demanded to know, scowling. A pipe-smoking rebel officer came up to the general and answered mildly, “I am the captain. I am out here to have a little skirmishing on my own account, if the Yanks come out of their holes.”16
Lee had taken great care—as he did in most things—to prepare his line of retreat. But he could not compensate for the terrible losses to his officer corps. In the three days of Gettysburg alone, Lee had lost seventeen of fifty-two generals—nearly a third of his finest officers.17 This could not last.
Robert E. Lee understood this. But he was also an avid reader of Northern newspapers. He was well aware of the war-weariness of the Northern people. He knew, too, of the outright opposition of many Northern politicians to the war. If only, Lee reasoned, he could win some striking victory—especially one deep in Northern territory—the people of the North might cry out for peace. Some of the Democratic politicians in high offices did exactly that.
Lee was George Washington’s step-grandson-in-law. He knew as well as any man in America how Washington had fought many a losing battle only to triumph in the end. Yorktown had been that decisive victory that convinced a war-weary British public they could never subdue America. Lee constantly hoped that he could keep his ragged army going and make the cost of putting down the rebellion too high for the people of the North to bear.
This may explain his determination to win a major battle on Northern soil. He had won spectacular victories in Virginia. Fredericksburg was a triumph. Chancellorsville is still studied in military colleges as a textbook example of courage and skill.18
Lincoln in these days began to appreciate what General Meade had accomplished. The people of the North rejoiced in the Gettysburg and Vicksburg victories, and the president seemed to share in their mood. After days of distress, Lincoln sent a dispatch intended for Meade’s eyes. This time, he said, “A few days having passed, I am now profoundly grateful for what was done, without criticism for what was not done. General Meade has my confidence as a brave and skillful officer, and a true man.” George Gordon Meade would command the Army of the Potomac until the last day of the war.
Lincoln contacted Grant in the same days. Noting that he’d never even met his western commander, Lincoln telegraphed: “I thought you should go down the river and join Gen. Banks; and when you turned Northward East of the Big Black, I feared it was a mistake. I now wish to make the personal acknowledgement that you were right and I was wrong.” Presidents are not always known for such grace, such affecting humility. Not only was Grant a man he’d never met, he was also very possibly a rival for the presidency in 1864!
Despite the victories, Lincoln’s immeasurable distress would soon deepen. Within days of winning the ground at Vicksburg and Gettysburg, New York City erupted into the worst riots in U.S. history. The draft—conscription—was widely hated in this city of immigrants. Poor Irish laborers had no way to pay the $300 that exempted a man from service in the Union army.*
They lived in crowded, ill-lit tenements. Even their low wages and low-skilled jobs were threatened when Yankee Protestants employed free black stevedores as strikebreakers. The promises of American freedom seemed hollow to these struggling immigrants. New York Governor Horatio Seymour had attacked the Lincoln administration’s emancipation and conscription policies in a demagogic Fourth of July speech to city Democrats. When conscription officers began drawing names for the draft on July 11, it was the spark that kindled the flames of rebellion. Mobs attacked black people, lynching six black men and burning a colored orphanage. The editor of the New York Times had to defend his offices by installing three newly invented Gatling guns.19
Archbishop John Hughes had loyally traveled to Europe to stave off recognition of the Confederacy by Catholic powers, even as he warned against making the war an “abolition war.” Now, as rioting began, the archbishop and his Irish priests appealed to their flocks for order. And New York’s Finest—its fearless police force (also largely Irish)—battled the rioters. The police were overwhelmed as hundreds died.
Only when troops from Pennsylvania’s battlefield arrived in the city was the worst race riot in American history finally put down.20 Unfair as it was, the draft proceeded because the government could not afford to let the opposition prevail. It is a tribute to Lincoln that he did not clap Governor Seymour in prison for inciting the riot.
When the civic leaders of Pennsylvania decided to dedicate a military cemetery at Gettysburg, they sought America’s greatest orator as their leading speaker. Edward Everett, former president of Harvard, former U.S. secretary of state, was the natural choice. Republican Governor Andrew Curtin was then in a tough reelection race, and a major event commemorating the battle could only help him. The battlefield, though, was still a scene of horror three weeks after the battle. The young Gettysburg banker, David Wills, who was to chair the event, reported to the governor: “In many instances arms and legs and sometimes heads protrude and my attention has been directed in several places where the hogs were actually rooting out the bodies and devouring them.”21 Simply to bury the dead among the 22,807 Union and 28,000 Confederate casualties was an overwhelming task. Once Everett had confirmed as the day’s primary orator, President Lincoln was asked to make “a few appropriate remarks.” The event was viewed primarily as a state occasion. Since Washington was only ninety miles away, the president was asked, almost as an afterthought, to attend.22
Everett had been the vice presidential running mate on the Constitutional Union ticket in 1860, with John Bell. In effect, event organizers had invited one of the president’s opponents and had given him star billing. They also invited New York’s Democratic Governor Horatio Seymour, whose state had contributed so much to the victory. Lincoln’s “remarks” were never thought of as an address before he delivered them. Now, when it is recognized as one of the greatest speeches ever delivered in the English language, it is the Gettysburg Address that comes to mind whenever the word address is used:
Fourscore and seven years ago, 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 have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave 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 poor power to add or detract. 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 which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. 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 gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Here, Lincoln speaks of no North, no South, impugns no man’s motives, makes no charges, sounds no note of triumph. But he explains in 266 spare words the meaning of the war. And his words will live as long as the idea of America lives.
Lincoln did not “refound” the nation. Nor did he remake America. He would have rejected such a notion. Every act of his was simply an effort to defend “the proposition” that had been central to the Founders’ vision. If all men are not created equal, then they have no God-given right to freedom and no claim to self-government. For Lincoln, this was axiomatic.
Happily, the very Honorable Edward Everett recognized the genius of Lincoln’s speech. He sent the president this gracious note shortly afterward: “I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes.”23
II. THE AGONY OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN
We have only to see Lincoln’s photographs from 1860 and compare them with those taken at the end of the war to see the effects of those five years on him. He was fifty-one when he was elected. During the war years, he seems to have aged a quarter of a century. Lincoln described himself as “old” in his farewell address to his neighbors in Springfield, Illinois, as he departed on the special train for Washington, D.C.
The ravages of war took their toll on him. The loss of his beloved son, Willy, in 1862 was a cruel blow. After that, Lincoln’s relationship with his wife, Mary, suffered. She was driven nearly mad with grief. She even invited spiritualists into the Executive Mansion who claimed to be able to communicate with her dead son. Lincoln attended at least one of these séances. He appears to have placed little stock in necromancy. Avid student of Shakespeare that he was, Lincoln would have read the line in which “the sheeted dead did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets.”* Burdened as he was by the cares of the war, it is most likely that Lincoln indulged his emotional, extravagant, and unsteady wife.
Lincoln and his family spent their summers during the Civil War at the Soldiers Home in northeast Washington. Three miles from the President’s House, this refuge was cooler and less hectic than the Executive Mansion. There, few office seekers could pursue the overworked president. And overworked he surely was. Lincoln usually breakfasted on coffee and toast and often skipped lunch. He visibly wasted during his presidency. His clothes, always ill-fitting, now seemed to hang on his six-foot-four-inch frame. Often, Lincoln would ride alone the three miles to his office. Ominously, his movements did not go unobserved. He risked death by assassination every day he served as president.
Lincoln faced death with a fatalistic resolve. He believed that anyone could kill him if he was willing to give up his own life.* Despite the violent emotions that had been unleashed by the war, and by the inflamed political rhetoric that had led to it, many Americans discounted the possibility of assassination. It had never happened in America, after all.
Lincoln was savaged in the press—Northern, Southern, and foreign. Openly racist articles and cartoons were published. A London paper famously cartooned him as a disheveled, uncouth card player about to throw into a losing game the ace of spades. The face on the card was, not surprisingly, that of a young black man. Lincoln’s winning opponent in that continental card game was an elegant, confidently smiling Jefferson Davis. It may have been the origin of our term—playing the race card. If some hostile newspapers did not show Lincoln as black, he was nonetheless mockingly depicted in the company of black people, dancing and socializing with them. The cartoons were used to stir up racial animosities against the president.
“That giraffe,” was the dismissive way the prosperous Pennsylvania railroad lawyer Edwin M. Stanton had referred to the Illinoisan before the war. But when he needed him, Lincoln did not hesitate to bring that able War Democrat into his cabinet. And so he was with most people. He had lived with their condescension all his life—and had used it to master them in the slippery game of politics. Stephen Douglas, William Seward, Roger B. Taney, Charles Sumner, Salmon P. Chase, George B. McClellan—these were but a few of the powerful men who underestimated Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln sought some relief from his sorrows in humor, his own and that of others. He would always share a funny story or amusing anecdote with visitors to his office. Often, they would come expecting an office or some other favor, then be escorted to the door by the president, pumping their hand and sharing some old “chestnut.” Lincoln’s penchant for humorous stories was viciously caricatured by the cartoonist who showed the president standing among the Union dead at Antietam, with the caption: “This reminds me of a little story.”
The day he assembled his cabinet to hear the Emancipation Proclamation, he tried to break the ice with a clever story from Artemis Ward, his favorite humorist.* Significantly, he told them, “With the fearful strain that is upon me night and day, if I did not laugh, I should die, and you need this medicine as much as I do.”24 There is little indication they appreciated his ministrations that day.
III. LINCOLN TURNS TO GRANT
Lincoln searched with mounting desperation for a fighting general. McDowell had failed him early. McClellan stayed with Lincoln for more than a year but failed him. So did Pope and Burnside. And Hooker. Meade proved more successful, at least on the defensive. But he, too, complained. He never enjoyed Lincoln’s full confidence.
Grant was different. Lincoln liked him from the start. Grant was an Illinoisan. He was quiet—and businesslike. Lincoln hoped that Grant shared his ideas for political reconstruction of the Union, but it was far more important that Grant should be on the same page on military matters. Grant had one advantage over all his fellow Union generals: he didn’t complain. He took the resources he was given and he fought.
Lincoln had waited so long for a military hero, for someone he could brag about. Even before the fall of Vicksburg, Lincoln was ecstatic about his fellow Illinoisan: “Whether Gen. Grant shall or shall not consummate the capture of Vicksburg, his campaign from the beginning of this month [May 1863] up to the twenty-second day of it, is one of the most brilliant in the world.”25 It wasn’t the most brilliant—but it wasn’t bad, either. And when compared with the handiwork of Lincoln’s other generals, it certainly looked brilliant.
Lincoln was dismayed to hear renewed complaints about Grant’s drinking. Discreetly, he sent Assistant Secretary of War Charles Dana to visit Grant. Ostensibly, Dana was there to inspect Grant’s army. Grant soon figured out that Dana was there to look him over. Shrewdly, Grant opened up his headquarters to Lincoln’s “spy.” It proved a smart move. Dana wrote back glowing reports about Grant’s intelligence, skill, and devotion to the Union cause.26
After the fall of Vicksburg, Lincoln wanted Grant to attend to the situation in Tennessee. After a promising start, Union General William S. Rosecrans had been hit hard by the rebels at the Battle of Chickamauga. To Lincoln, Rosecrans seemed “like a duck hit on the head.” Grant quickly dispatched Rosecrans and replaced him with General George Thomas. It was a smart move that would pay off for the Union cause. Thomas, a Virginian, had stood firm during the battle—earning him the title “the Rock of Chickamauga.” But his men fondly referred to him as “Pap.” Advancing toward Chattanooga, Tennessee, Grant ordered General Joe Hooker to take Lookout Mountain. And Hooker did it in a hard-fought “battle above the clouds.” Then Grant directed Thomas to seize the Confederate positions at the base of Missionary Ridge and hold up. Thomas’s high-spirited troops took those works—and pressed on to take Missionary Ridge. Grant—and Lincoln—rejoiced.27
Always, Lincoln searched desperately for a military commander who could, in his words, “face the arithmetic.” By this, Lincoln meant a general who could face the heavy casualties that would be suffered by Union forces as they closed in on Lee’s army. The president understood what Lee and some of the Confederate leaders understood: given the vastly superior resources of the North in men and materiel, it would be only a matter of time before the North would grind the South down. Grant was by far the most savvy, the most resourceful, the most courageous of Lincoln’s generals. Surely he could face the arithmetic. Lincoln brought him back East and gave him command over all the Union armies. Grant was promoted to lieutenant general, a rank Congress had last bestowed on George Washington.
Grant’s manner of taking command of the armies of the United States was typical of him. He came back to Washington and immediately checked into the famed Willard Hotel—just a few blocks from the Executive Mansion. A bored hotel clerk told him that there was only one small room—on the top floor under the eaves—for the general and his fourteen-year-old son. Grant said he’d take it. Only when he signed the hotel register simply as “U. S. Grant and son, Galena, Illinois,” did the clerk realize who his powerful guest was. Sputtering, he quickly assigned the new lieutenant general the best room in the house.28 The other guests in the lobby began to applaud.
In short order, Grant locked horns with Lee in Virginia. It was a rolling, horrific engagement, with wounded men screaming as the woods caught fire and were consumed. Around Spotsylvania Court House, Grant tenaciously pursued Lee, taking terrible casualties and inflicting many more. “If you see the president,” Grant told a colleague, “tell him there will be no turning back.”29 And there was no turning back.
Not for Grant.
Or Lincoln.
Or the United States of America.
Initially, the North thrilled to hear this man of few words say, “I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.” But soon, as the long lists of dead and wounded appeared in Northern newspapers, the horror of close engagement in the Virginia woodlands sank in. Hooker and Burnside had traveled this road before him. They had always turned back. True to Lincoln’s assumption, Grant faced the arithmetic and pressed on. But at what cost! Doomed Union soldiers sewed their names inside their coats the night before Cold Harbor.* They wanted their bodies identified after the battle.30
“I regret this assault more than any I have ever ordered,” Grant said of his orders to attack at Cold Harbor. He lost seven thousand Union soldiers killed or wounded in just thirty minutes on the morning of 3 June 1864.31
Soon, the word butcher began to be thrown at Grant. But Lincoln stood by his general. Grant did his job, efficiently and with focused resolve. He did not meddle in politics. He did not demand more support than Lincoln could give him. He even found a new way to handle the pressures—trading his bottle for a knife and whittling stick.
Grant’s cool confidence and lack of dramatic flair impressed many. George S. Boutwell, a leading Massachusetts Republican, said, “It is difficult to comprehend the qualities of a man who could be moved by a narrative of individual suffering, and yet could sleep surrounded by the horrors of the battles of the Wilderness.”32
Horrors they surely were. What must have been the thoughts of young Union soldiers marching, fighting, then bedding down in “ghoulhaunted woodlands” that their older brothers had fought over (and many died in) during the previous two years? Herman Melville captured the eerie feeling in a poem, “The Armies of the Wilderness”:
In glades they meet skull after skull
Where pine-cones lay—the rusted gun,
Green shoes full of bones, the mouldering coat
And cuddled-up skeleton;
And scores of such. Some start as in dreams,
And comrades lost bemoan:
By the edge of those wilds Stonewall had charged—
But the Year and the Man were gone.
Lincoln grieved at the toll the grinding trench warfare was taking on the Union forces—and the entire Union. For Lincoln did not simply mourn Northern losses. He believed the entire country was one, North and South. As reports came back of the trenches around Petersburg, Virginia, the whole country understood what it meant. Southern boys as young as thirteen were found dead there, lying next to fallen white-bearded grandfathers. Whose heart could remain untouched at such a loss?
Few families North or South were untouched by the hand of death. The Lincoln family was no different. When Lincoln’s favorite sister-in-law, Emilie Helm, was detained at Fort Monroe, Virginia, she refused to take an oath of allegiance to the United States. Ben Helm had married Mary Lincoln’s younger half-sister, Emily. He had been killed at Atlanta fighting for the Confederacy. “Send her to me,” Lincoln telegraphed the Union officers who had stopped the young widow whom Lincoln and his wife thought of as the daughter they never had.33 When she arrived at the Executive Mansion, Emilie was embraced by the president and the First Lady. “‘You know, Little Sister,’” Emilie Helm later reported his saying to her, “‘I tried to have Ben come with me.’ Mr. Lincoln put his arms around me and we both wept.”34 In a sense, Lincoln wrapped his arms around the entire country.
IV. “LONG ABRAHAM A LITTLE LONGER”
Despite the great Union victories of 1863, a growing war-weariness among the people of the North was the last remaining hope of the Confederacy. The Emancipation Proclamation had broken the unity of the Northern public. The Democratic Party loudly denounced it. When Democrats captured the legislatures of Illinois and Indiana, they passed resolutions demanding the revocation of the proclamation as a condition for their states’ continued support of the Union war effort.
After issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln opened the ranks of the U.S. military to black soldiers and sailors. Frederick Douglass responded enthusiastically, traveling throughout the North to encourage enlistments. His perennial speech topic: “Why should the colored man enlist?” “You will stand more erect, walk more assured, feel more at ease, and be less liable to insult than you ever were before,” Douglass said. “He who fights the battles of America may claim America as his country—and have that claim respected,” he told his avid listeners.35
Not just self-respect was at stake. Douglass wanted nothing less than full civil and political equality for black people. “Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters, U.S.; let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder, and bullets in his pocket,” he told a Philadelphia crowd, “and there is no power on earth or under the earth that can deny he has earned the right of citizenship in the United States.” With his own massive dignity and with the moral force he brought to his cause, he challenged his hearers: “I say again, this is our chance, and woe betide us if we fail to embrace it.”36 Black Americans would heed the abolitionist’s call; by war’s end, more than two hundred thousand of them would “rally ’round the flag.”
Eighteen sixty-four was an election year. Most blacks could not vote, but sullen and resentful whites could. Lincoln had to respond to the rising antiblack sentiment expressed by many Democrats. He did so in a widely circulated letter:
You say you will not fight to free Negroes. Some of them seem willing to fight for you; but, no matter. Fight you, then exclusively to save the Union. I issued the proclamation on purpose to aid you in saving the Union. . . .
I thought that in your struggle for the Union, to whatever extent the Negroes should cease helping the enemy, to that extent it weakened the enemy in his resistance to you. Do you think differently?. . . . Peace does not seem so distant as it did. I hope it will come soon. . . . [Then] there will be some black men who can remember that, with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet, they have helped mankind on to this great consummation; while, I fear, there will be some white ones, unable to forget that, with malignant heart, and deceitful speech, they strove to hinder it.37
Once again, we see Lincoln’s use of overpowering logic to deflate his opponents. How could they claim to be loyal to the Union while being willing to leave black Southerners in bondage to harvest the crops that would feed rebel armies?
When Lincoln brought Grant east and gave him overall command of the Union armies, great things were expected. In a strategy conference, Lincoln saw the force of Grant’s plan for simultaneous army assaults on the stricken South. The anaconda of the Union blockade was taking its toll by this third winter of war. Lincoln exclaimed at Grant’s plan: “I see it. Those not skinning can hold a leg.” This frontier metaphor was not lost on Grant, a tanner’s son. It meant that even if one or more Union armies were not on the move, they could still help the main thrust by “holding a leg” to prevent the Confederacy from reinforcing by using internal lines of communication.
Yet Grant was seemingly stalemated in the trenches before Petersburg. His assault on Lee’s ragged remnant at Cold Harbor had been thrown back with terrible Union casualties.
Some Republicans’ dissatisfaction with Lincoln’s direction of the war was expressed by the radical wing. They wanted a harder, more punitive prosecution of the war. When Lincoln was renominated by the Republicans in June 1864, the radicals in Congress were unenthusiastic. Desperate to gain support from prowar Democrats, the party nominated for vice president Tennessee’s military governor, Andrew Johnson, a Jackson Democrat.
The Democrats nominated Lincoln’s former general, George B. McClellan, in the same Chicago convention center—the Wigwam—where Lincoln had himself been nominated in 1860. McClellan had his own problems with party unity. Many Democrats clamored to end the war and sign a peace treaty with the Confederacy. As the election approached, it looked as though Lincoln would go down to defeat.
Military victories changed the political picture. First, U.S. Navy Admiral David Glasgow Farragut steamed through mine-infested waters to seize Mobile, Alabama. “Damn the torpedoes,” he said. “Full speed ahead.”38 Then General Phil Sheridan, the Union’s greatest cavalry chieftain, put Virginia’s bountiful Shenandoah Valley to the torch. The valley was the “breadbasket of the Confederacy.” No longer could the Confederates look to the Shenandoah for their cornmeal and hardtack. Now, said, Sheridan, “A crow flying over it would have to carry its own provender.”
Farther south, General William Tecumseh Sherman was on the offensive, pushing from Tennessee into Georgia. Sherman was a tall, red-haired, cigar-chomping West Pointer who brooked no nonsense. Early in the war, he had suffered a nervous breakdown. Many still thought him crazy. He was one of the few who had predicted a long, bloody, very destructive war. Sherman looked like an unmade bed. Although he was older than Grant, and had outranked Grant in the Old Army, he was fully willing to put himself wholly under Grant’s command. “Grant stood by me when I was crazy,” Sherman said, “and I stood by him when he was drunk. Now we stand by each other always.”39
Sherman is credited with being the first “modern” warrior in America, the first practitioner of “total war.” And destructive he was. His plan was to expose the weakness of the Confederacy for the world to see as he pushed into the South. “My aim [is] to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and to make them fear and dread us,” he declared.40
On September 2 came the news that would reelect Lincoln. Sherman telegraphed: “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won.”41 Sherman then proceeded on his storied “March to the Sea.” He left a trail of burned-out, blackened plantation houses sixty miles wide. He burned public buildings. He tore up all railroad lines. His men heated, then twisted the iron rails around telegraph poles—they called them “Sherman bowties.” Sherman wanted to make war so terrible that generations would pass before Southerners would resort to it again.*
When election day came, it must have been especially gratifying to Lincoln that he carried the “soldier vote” against that darling of the Army of the Potomac, General McClellan. Lincoln won 212 electoral votes and 2,213,635 popular votes (55.1 percent). McClellan garnered only 21 electoral votes from Delaware, Kentucky, and New Jersey, and 1,805,237 popular votes (44.9 percent). Eighty electoral votes not cast—representing the states still in rebellion—would not have elected McClellan.
Cartoonists had a field day. One showed an elongated president holding a sheet of paper, labeled “four more years.” “Long Abraham a Little Longer” was the caption.
General Sherman wired the president. He presented him with the seaport of Savannah, Georgia, as a Christmas gift. Thankfully, beautiful Savannah had surrendered and was spared the torch. Also spared was elegant Charleston, which had jubilantly greeted the Ordinance of Secession. Columbia, South Carolina’s capital, was not so fortunate. There, for thirty years, fire-eating politicians had plotted to break up the Union. When he learned that Columbia had burned, Lincoln’s reply was grave and biblical, taken from the gospel of Matthew: “The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light.”
He was seeing many things in spiritual terms as this most terrible of all wars ground on. To a friend he wrote in this fateful year of 1864: “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.”42 This is an astonishing statement from a man who placed such store in human reason, in an “all conquering mind.” Lincoln was a driven man. His Springfield, Illinois, law partner, Billy Herndon, said his ambition was a little engine that knew no rest. Lincoln had to know his intellect greatly surpassed that of other men. He was physically strong too. He had been a champion wrestler in his youth. Even as an older man he could still hold a double-blade axe at arm’s length. And keep it there. Lincoln also was accused of being a dictator. Even his staunchest defenders concede that no other president ever exercised such great power. Yet here was Lincoln, confessing to a friend his own sense of being controlled by events. It was as if an angel rode in the whirlwind.
V. THE UNION VICTORIOUS
Lincoln’s landslide reelection doomed the Confederacy. Now, there was no hope of foreign intervention. The anaconda squeeze of the U.S. Navy blockade was strangling the Southern war effort. The guns of the USS Kearsarge remorselessly pounded the great Confederate commerce raider CSS Alabama, sending her to the bottom off Cherbourg, France. Everywhere Jefferson Davis looked, the Confederacy was crumbling.
Davis even had to swallow the bitterest pill of all: Robert E. Lee’s suggestion that slaves be recruited for the army with the promise of freedom if the South gained her independence. “If slaves will make good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is wrong,” responded Georgia’s Howell Cobb.43
The famed Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment had proved itself at Fort Wagner in South Carolina. This “colored” regiment—the U.S. Army would remain segregated until 1948—had been led into battle by the brave young Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, scion of a Boston Brahmin family. When Colonel Shaw fell in the assault, his body was contemptuously thrown into a ditch with those of his dead black troops. Shaw’s father was a leading lawyer in Massachusetts. He declined an offer to have his son’s body disinterred, saying Robert was honored to be buried with his men. Stories like this worked a profound change in Northern opinion.*
President Lincoln had been disappointed in many of his generals, as we have seen, until he found the winning team of Grant and Sherman. But he never had occasion to complain of one staunchly loyal Georgian. Montgomery Cunningham Meigs was the Union Quartermaster General. Virginian Winfield Scott had insisted on Meigs’s appointment early in 1861 to compensate for the chaos and corruption of Secretary of War Simon Cameron. General Meigs soon brought order to the Union army’s procurement of nearly everything from horses to pup tents. He constructed massive numbers of hospitals for the wounded.44 Rigorously honest, tireless, and a brilliant organizer, Meigs had supervised the construction of the Capitol before the war. Then, his boss was Jefferson Davis. Now, it was Abraham Lincoln. Because of Meigs’s unstinting efforts, the Union Army was better supplied, better clothed, and better sheltered than any army in history. Everything except food and arms was Meigs’s responsibility; among his other achievements, Meigs began the sizing of boots and clothing—thus giving a powerful boost to the U.S. civilian economy as soon as the fighting ended.45
Because he had to send out the ambulances to tend the hundreds of thousands of Union and Confederate wounded, General Meigs understandably became bitter toward his fellow West Pointers who, he believed, had betrayed their oaths as officers. He had once served under Robert E. Lee. Now, when called upon to select a site for a huge new Union cemetery, General Meigs unhesitatingly chose the front lawn of the Custis-Lee Mansion, across the Potomac River from Washington. By putting the Union dead in Lee’s front yard, Meigs knew, the Confederate commander’s family could never return to their historic home.46 But in October 1864, General Meigs would face his own family tragedy. Union Major John Rodgers Meigs was killed, and General Meigs saw his own son’s body buried in Mrs. Lee’s rose garden.47 Robert E. Lee’s magnificent home thus became the site of Arlington National Cemetery. It is hallowed ground.*
Captivity was cruel for the tens of thousands of prisoners taken by both sides in the Civil War. The Confederate prison at Andersonville, Georgia, was the most notorious. Thousands of Union prisoners starved to death there, and the commandant of Andersonville, Henry Wirz, was the only Confederate soldier convicted and executed for war crimes at the conclusion of the war. But Northern prisons shamed the nation too.
Confederate infantry Captain Jonas Lipps of the Stonewall Brigade was taken prisoner near Chancellorsville, Virginia, in 1864. Taken to Camp Delaware, outside of Philadelphia, Jonas was attacked by a Union guard with a bayonet. The unarmed rebel prisoner jumped back, with the guard’s bayonet going through his arm instead of his belly. Jonas pulled out the bayonet and ran the guard through, killing him. A Union captain ordered that Jonas should not be punished. He said the rebel captain acted only in self-defense. At least justice had not died.
Later, Jonas Lipps was tied up outside the Union batteries at Morris Island, South Carolina. Jonas and hundreds of other Southern prisoners were exposed to friendly artillery fire for thirty-one days outside the besieged city of Charleston. This horrible punishment was in reprisal for the Confederates inside the city tying Union prisoners to lampposts to deter the Federal artillery from shelling the beautiful old city. Jonas’s diary records that while artillery shells were coming in on him, he saw the gates of heaven open up and he saw himself seated at his father’s table. This was war at its worst. Jonas Lipps survived Fort Morris, along with “the Immortal Six Hundred” of his fellow Southerners, only to die of dysentery back at Fort Delaware just five days before the war ended. The Virginian was only twenty-four.
Lincoln approached the inaugural stands for the second time on 4 March 1865. The day was wet and windy. As he arose amid waves of applause, the sun broke through the clouds. Sunbeams shone down on the newly completed dome of the U.S. Capitol. Lincoln had pressed Congress to finish the work of decades, making the Capitol itself a symbol of the completed Union. The Statue of Freedom that topped the dome had originally been brought by wagon to the city of Washington. Many of the teamsters and laborers who hauled the great female figure were, ironically, slaves. By the time she was put in place atop the building where she stands today, they were free.
Lincoln then delivered the greatest inaugural address in American history. Describing the war, he noted that slavery had been the cause of it. Lincoln urged his listeners not to claim all righteousness for themselves. He then offered perhaps the most terrible, most thought-provoking idea ever uttered in American public life:48
Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”*
Lincoln ended with these immortal words:
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
Lincoln’s words were carried in a fine tenor voice—not the baritone so often portrayed by Hollywood. Everyone in the vast crowd could hear him distinctly, including Frederick Douglass.
And John Wilkes Booth.
Later, at the Executive Mansion, Lincoln would greet the celebratory crowd. Frederick Douglass, denied entrance by an usher, climbed through a window and joined the receiving line. Seeing him, Lincoln cried out, “Ah, Douglass!” He told the great abolitionist he wanted to know his opinion of the address. “Mr. President, it was a sacred effort,” Douglass answered. Later, he would say of his relationship with Lincoln that he was the only white man he ever knew who did not instantly make him aware he was a black man.
On 2 April 1865, Richmond fell. General Lee sent a message to President Davis telling him he must abandon the lines. The messenger reached Davis while he was in church. The congregation noted the Southern president’s ashen face as he left his pew. The Confederate government frantically packed up and left the city. An attempt to fire key military installations to deny them to the Yankees got out of hand, and the city was soon in flames. Two days later, President Lincoln visited the city. He had his young son, Tad, in tow as he walked to the Confederate White House. Outside, crowds of soldiers and free Negroes cheered as he sat at Jefferson Davis’s desk. White Virginians generally looked out glumly from behind shuttered windows. U.S. Army authorities established a quick, firm, but mild control of the old city. And when the invalid Mrs. Robert E. Lee complained of having a black soldier posted as a guard outside her house, he was quickly replaced with a white one. The Stars and Stripes once again flew over the Capitol that Thomas Jefferson had designed.
A week after Richmond’s fall, General Lee agreed to meet General Grant at Appomattox Courthouse. Because of a bureaucratic snarl, his hungry soldiers had been sent several boxcars of ammunition, not rations. The Southside Virginia countryside could barely feed itself. Lee rejected calls by some of his junior officers to take the army into the mountains and fight a guerilla war. Lee had seen how guerilla war degenerated in Missouri. He wanted no part of a merciless, decades-long bloodletting.
Grant had been suffering from a debilitating headache before he received Lee’s surrender note. But as soon as he read the welcome news, his headache was gone.49 General Lee rode Traveler to the Wilbur McLean home in Appomattox Court House, Virginia, where the meeting would take place on 9 April 1865. Attired in his finest uniform, his engraved sword at his side, Lee cut a magnificent figure. When he rode up, General Grant apologized for being late. He was dressed in a private’s rumpled jacket, the stars of a lieutenant general incongruously attached to his shoulders. His boots were muddy.
Grant did everything he could to ease Lee’s agony. He spoke pleasantly of their Mexican War days. He remembered Lee. Lee could not recall him. When it came to writing out terms for the surrender, Grant asked Colonel Ely Parker, a full-blooded Seneca Indian, to copy out the terms in his beautiful handwriting. Lee froze. He initially thought Colonel Parker was a black man, that his presence might be a way of humbling him. Catching himself, Lee maintained his dignity and military bearing. He asked Grant to amend the terms to allow his men to keep their horses, which most of them owned. Grant declined to change the terms but said it would be understood that any man claiming a horse as his own could keep it. They would be needed for spring planting for “their little farms.”
Grant treated Lee with complete tenderness and respect. And when Union troops began to cheer the news of the surrender, Grant immediately ordered it to stop. Nothing should be done to humiliate the rebels who were once again “our countrymen.” Grant also ordered tens of thousands of Union rations to feed the “famished rebel horde.”* General Lee and all of his twenty-eight thousand soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia were paroled by Grant—allowed simply to go home to live under the laws of their once again United States.
Grant would record his thoughts about that day at Appomattox in his memoirs:
What General Lee’s feelings were I do not know. As he was a man of much dignity, with an impassible face, it was impossible to tell whether he felt inwardly glad that the end had finally come, or felt sad over the result, and was too manly to show it. Whatever his feelings, they were entirely concealed from my observation; but my own feelings, which had been jubilant on the receipt of his letter, were sad and depressed. I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse. I do not question, however, the sincerity of the great mass of those who were opposed to us.50
Grant then selected the twice-wounded Union hero General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain to receive the formal surrender of Southern arms. Chamberlain matched in every way the gallantry and chivalry so long associated with fallen Southerners like J. E. B. Stuart and Stonewall Jackson. As the barefoot, ragged Confederates marched in two days later to lay down their arms and their beloved flags, Chamberlain ordered a smart salute. All along the Union lines, battle-hardened veterans snapped to the call: “Carry Arms!” Confederate General John Brown Gordon wheeled his horse around and executed an elegant response, his horse almost bowing as Gordon touched his saber to his toe: “Honor answering Honor.”51
Chamberlain would later describe the scene:
On they came with the old swinging route step and swaying battle flags . . . crowded so thick, by thinning out of men, that the whole column seemed crowned with red. . . . In the van, the proud Confederate ensign. . . . Before us in proud humiliation stood the embodiment of manhood; men whom neither toils and sufferings, nor the fact of death nor disaster nor hopelessness . . . could bend from their resolve; standing before us now, thin, worn, and famished, but erect, and with eyes looking level into ours, waking memories that bound us together as no other bond. . . . On our part not a sound of trumpet more, nor roll of drum; not a cheer, nor word, nor whisper or vainglorying, nor motion of man . . . but an awed stillness rather, and breath-holding, as if it were the passing of the dead. . . . How could we help falling on our knees, all of us together, and praying God to pity and forgive us all!52
Too little credit goes to U. S. Grant for this sublime moment in the history of our wounded world. We need only compare how rebellions in Mexico and Canada had ended just thirty years before. Santa Anna put all the Alamo rebels—both “Anglos” from the North and local Hispanic Tejanos—to the sword in 1836. The British in Canada in 1837 had hanged dozens of rebel leaders who demanded nothing more than the same representative government enjoyed by millions of their neighbors in the United States.53
In treating his defeated foe with such high regard and compassion, Grant was faithfully reflecting the policies of his commander in chief. Lincoln had vowed to “let ’em up easy.” He would have “no bloody work.” When asked what he planned to do with Confederate leaders, Lincoln made a “shooing” motion with his hands, as if he were driving geese from the kitchen garden.
Back in Washington, hundreds of Union cannon boomed a joyous salute to the news from Appomattox. President Lincoln appeared at a window of his official residence to acknowledge the cheers of an enthusiastic crowd. His little boy, Tad, excitedly waved a captured Confederate flag to the delight of the spectators. Lincoln requested the band play “Dixie.” He said it was always a favorite tune of his, and now, according to the attorney general, it was federal property. When he made some serious remarks about returning Louisiana to the Union on moderate terms, actor John Wilkes Booth bitterly told a fellow conspirator, “That means n——citizenship!” He vowed it would be Lincoln’s last speech. And it was.
On Friday night, April 14, President and Mrs. Lincoln went to Ford’s Theatre to attend a comedy, Our American Cousin. The Lincolns were late, but the play was stopped as they arrived and entered the presidential box. The orchestra played “Hail to the Chief,” and Lincoln acknowledged the applause of the audience. Then, shortly after 10:00 p.m., a shot rang out and smoke wafted out of the box. A man brandishing a large dagger jumped down to the stage, catching his spur on the bunting that decorated the box. “Sic semper tyrannis!”* he cried as he limped toward the stage door exit. Many in the audience immediately recognized him as John Wilkes Booth, one of the most famous actors in America.
The unconscious president was carried through the cold, foggy night to the Peterson house, across from the theater on Tenth Street. There, the six-foot-four-inch giant of a man was placed diagonally on a bed in the rear of the house. And the long deathwatch began. Mrs. Lincoln, haunted by the death of their son Willy, in 1862, gave way to hysteria. She could not be consoled by son Robert Todd Lincoln, or even by her good friend, Senator Charles Sumner. Finally, the brusque, autocratic secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton, ordered soldiers to “get that woman out of here and keep her out.”
All through the night, terrible reports came in to the front parlor where Stanton had set up a command post. Vice President Johnson had also been targeted, but George Atzerodt, a German immigrant, got drunk and failed to go through with the attack. Secretary of State William H. Seward was not as lucky. Lewis Powell, one of the Booth conspirators, attacked him in his bed, where he was recovering from a carriage accident. Powell stabbed him repeatedly, lunging for his jugular and nearly cutting off his cheek. Miraculously, Seward survived.
At 7:22 on the morning of April 15, doctors confirmed that the president had breathed his last. Stanton, in tears, arose and said, “Now he belongs to the Ages.”54
Booth escaped from Washington, riding through Prince George’s County into Southern Maryland. There, he hid out at the home of Dr. Samuel Mudd. Dr. Mudd knew Booth well. He set the assassin’s broken leg. But Booth and fellow plotter Davey Herold set off at dawn for Virginia. Booth had expected a hero’s welcome. Instead, he was shunned.
The North was plunged into deepest mourning. No president had ever been assassinated before. Many people believed that Jefferson Davis—now a refugee in full flight—was behind the foul deed. (There would never be any link found between Davis’s government and Booth’s conspirators.*) Vice President Johnson was sworn in, but he was an unsteady, inadequate replacement for the slain Emancipator.
Grief was nearly universal. “I never before or since have been with such a large body of men overwhelmed by a single emotion; the whole division was sobbing together,” wrote a Union officer in North Carolina.55 Fearing that the freedmen might take vengeance on fellow Southerners they might hold responsible, Colonel John Eaton was amazed to find not one word of revenge in the black churches he visited in Memphis. “They were in despair . . . but there was no whisper against those who sympathized with all that he opposed,” wrote Eaton.56 General Lee was widely and approvingly quoted when he said the assassination was a calamity for the South and “a crime previously unknown in this country, and one that must be deprecated by every American.”57 One Southern woman told General Sherman she was glad Lincoln had been shot. Sherman replied, “Madam, the South has lost the best friend it had.”58
Lincoln’s funeral train retraced much of the same route that had brought him to Washington just four years earlier. Now, many of the same plain people returned who had gathered trackside in 1861 to cheer the elected leader along his route to power. They bore witness in 1865 to the passing of the funeral train as it carried him to glory.
Lincoln’s legacy is liberty and union. That which Webster had immortalized in words, Lincoln achieved in word and deed. America’s poet of the heart, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, offered his tribute to the Union that Lincoln labored so long to save in “The Building of the Ship”:
Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O Union, strong and great
Humanity with all its fears
With all its hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!59