Lincoln grew harder after Antietam. He could be pressed past the limits of his considerable patience, and those who importuned him with unreasonable or frivolous requests, or added to the endless barrage of grousing, sometimes found themselves subject to the president’s ire. “I sincerely wish war was an easier and pleasanter business than it is,” he snapped after receiving a complaint from one man, “but it does not admit of holy-days.”1
From the first days of the war, he had pressed for vigorous offensive action from his generals, but by the end of 1862, that aggressiveness acquired an edge. He grew increasingly angry with what he saw as his generals’ maddening unwillingness to pursue the enemy and incessant excuses for delay. On receiving a typical detailed explanation from one general as to why it was impossible for him to move his army from Missouri into Kentucky, Lincoln’s despair was palpable. “It is exceedingly discouraging,” he scribbled at the bottom of the general’s letter. “As everywhere else, nothing can be done.”2
McClellan was a particularly vexing problem. After Antietam his army sat idle in Maryland, licking its wounds, while the Confederate army he had beaten returned to Virginia unmolested, to regroup and fight another day. Days turned into weeks, and still the Army of the Potomac did not move. Lincoln grew ever more exasperated, and McClellan felt the sharp end of the president’s tongue. When in one message McClellan pleaded tired horses as a reason not to deploy his cavalry more aggressively, Lincoln snapped. “I have just read your despatch about sore tongued and fatigued horses,” he wrote. “Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have done since the battle of Antietam that fatigue anything?”3
He fired McClellan in November, but it proved of no immediate benefit. McClellan’s replacement was Ambrose Burnside, an affable Ohioan with good intentions and limited ability. “I have my fears that [Burnside] has not sufficient grasp and power for the position given him or for so large a force,” Gideon Welles confided in his diary, “but he is patriotic, and his aims are right.”4
Taking Lincoln’s injunctions to aggressively assault the enemy a bit too simplistically, Burnside marched the Army of the Potomac more or less straight at Lee’s Confederate army, which was well emplaced behind strong fortifications at the Virginia town of Fredericksburg on the Rappahannock River. Burnside’s assault against Lee’s army produced the most lopsided battlefield defeat for the Union in the entire war. Over twelve thousand men were killed or wounded between December 11 and 14, creating yet another corpse-littered, battered piece of earth.
The slapdash disposal of unidentified bodies, now a new American normal, was made more urgent by the bitterly cold December weather. Even Southerners were moved by the scene. “I witnessed with pain the burial of many thousands of Federal dead,” wrote a Confederate officer. “The night before, the thermometer must have fallen to zero, and the bodies of the slain had frozen to the ground. The ground was frozen nearly a foot deep, and it was necessary to use pick-axes. . . . It was a sad sight to see these brave soldiers thrown into trenches, without even a blanket or a word of prayer, and the heavy clods thrown upon them.” In their haste, one burial party stuffed a local farmer’s icehouse with bodies, where they were not discovered until after the war, a “hecatomb of skeletons.”5
No other military setback produced quite so much utter disbelief in the North. “The repulse of our gallant army at Fredericksburg has caused a feeling of despondency throughout the North unequalled by any other event of the war,” claimed a Vermont newspaper. The shock quickly (and predictably) turned to furor. The Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War opened a fresh investigation and grilled Burnside’s subordinate commanders such as General Joseph Hooker, who told the committee that “all the troops in the world could not have taken the rebel position.” The lopsided ratio of casualties—approximately three Union soldiers died for every Confederate—gave the criticisms added bite. Union officers called to testify before the committee tried to sound a dispassionate, technical note, citing equipment issues, particularly the failure of pontoon bridges to arrive in a timely enough fashion to allow the army to cross the Rappahannock before Lee could firm up his defenses; miscommunication between parts of the army and the Washington high command; and various difficulties caused by the frigid weather.6
The Northern press was not nearly so detached. “A stunning and fatal blow to public confidence,” declared the New York World, asking, “Of what advantage are our unparalleled resources if they are to be thus squandered by administrative and military incapables, who, as often as they send our brave soldiers to battle, send them to a fruitless butchery?” Another newspaper referred to the tremendous waste of soldiers’ lives as “criminal” and casting a “dark pall [that] seems to have enshrouded all ranks, and conditions of the people—the high, the low, the rich, the poor, the dwellers in the palace as well as those of the humbled roof, whether numbered with the long list of widowed wives, orphaned children and bereaved relatives and friends or not.” “Disheartened, humiliated, crushed by the terrible blow which has fallen on them, the loyal men of America can with difficulty possess their souls in calmness sufficient to review the horrible history which has been enacted within the past week,” read one editorial. The Army of the Potomac was now “almost an army of martyrs,” bravely marching to their deaths without protest, for “of what avail has it been found to protest against the madness which rules at Washington? . . . Such was the soldierly spirit that animated that magnificent army every man of whom felt that the crossing [of the Rappahannock] was marching into the jaws of death. All honor to them, and some day a monument to the thousands who lie on the bloody fields around Fredericksburg, fallen in hopeless obedience to the Government of the United States.”7
Many Northerners placed the responsibility for the dead directly on the president’s shoulders. “Again have you, Abraham Lincoln . . . sent death to thousands of our brothers and friends, again desolation into the homes and hearts of the people; death that gives no life to the perishing nation, and sorrow which no patriotism can console,” declared a New York newspaper. An article headlined “The Fredericksburg Butchery” blamed “the fearful and fruitless slaughter of our gallant soldiers” directly on the president. McClellan was still popular in many quarters, particularly among anti-Lincoln people and Democratic Party stalwarts, and they wasted little time in castigating Lincoln for his decision to remove Little Mac from command. “All this has resulted directly from Abraham Lincoln’s wicked interference with Gen[eral] McClellan’s plans,” thought one observer, “and his treacherous determination to prevent that noble patriot and accomplished commander from achieving a success that would have rendered his name and fame immortal and saved the country from impending anarchy.” Whatever his faults, Little Mac had not gotten so many men killed so quickly, and in such higher numbers than the Confederates on the same battlefield.8
Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation a little over two weeks after Fredericksburg. More conservative elements in white Northern society conflated black freedom, the aggressiveness of Radical Republicans who called for a more vigorous pursuit of the war, and piles of dead bodies. “‘Spades to the rear,’ was the cry of the abolitionists when McClellan was removed,” observed a Maine newspaper. “But spades, it seems, went to the front after the battle of Fredericksburg and dug the graves of some thousands of our soldiers.”9
Dead white Union soldiers and freed black Americans—here was a potent brew for any critic of Lincoln to stir fresh rounds of racially tinged anger and resentment. Rumors abounded among Democrats that Lincoln was interested in prolonging the war—and the dying—because he wanted a complete and revolutionary subversion of American race relations. There were those who thought Lincoln had deliberately withheld reinforcements from McClellan during the Peninsula Campaign for just this reason. “Had not the president, by his own personal orders deprived McClellan of the supporting columns promised him, Richmond would have been ours last spring, and the rebellion crushed,” thought a hostile editor from the president’s own hometown in Springfield, Illinois. “But no. The solution of the slavery conflict was involved, and it would not do to permit McClellan to close the war until the negro was free.”10
Worst of all, Fredericksburg’s death toll seemed an exercise in futility. The public tolerated high casualty rates, at least to a point. But Fredericksburg seemed meaningless, death in the service of nothing. “Soldiers who fall in a noble cause under worthy and skillful leaders count it a joy to die on the field of battle,” opined the New York World, “but [not] when a whole nation is put in mourning because blundering incompetence and charlatanism direct the movements of armies and deluge the land with blood shed to no purpose beyond which further forbearance would be a crime.”11
Reeling from the casualty lists and the hostile press, Lincoln tried to put the Fredericksburg debacle in a positive light. He issued a public decree to the Army of the Potomac, congratulating the men for their bravery at Fredericksburg and arguing that while the assault was certainly “not successful, the attempt was not an error, nor the failure other than an accident.” What the president meant by this was unclear. Perhaps he was referring to the “accident” of the tardy pontoon equipment. In any event, he praised the soldiers’ courage and assured them and the country that he was “condoling with the mourners for the dead, and sympathizing with the severely wounded,” and further observed that “the number of both is comparatively so small.”12
His attempt to paper over the Fredericksburg disaster was unconvincing; if anything, he only added fuel to the fire. “The address of the President to the Army of the Potomac is a remarkable document,” noted a newspaper in Philadelphia. “But, without quarrelling with Mr. Lincoln’s adverb [‘comparatively’] was the loss at Fredericksburg small? . . . We submit that the outrages and criminal blunders of this administration have been enough to put upon the American people, without such wretched attempts to deceive them. This is adding ‘insult to injury.’”13 It sounded a bit too much like a lawyer’s attempt to make the best of a bad case, what modern Americans term political “spin.” Even sympathetic Northerners were nonplussed by Lincoln’s language. “It may have been no ‘error’ to make such an attack,” laconically observed Union general Edwin Sumner, “but it certainly was a very costly method of learning that the enemy’s position was impregnable.”14
Aside from the damage Fredericksburg wrought on the Union’s strategic plans and his administration’s political prospects, the battle’s death toll devastated Lincoln personally. Pennsylvania governor Andrew Curtin met with him soon after having visited the battlefield. The governor arrived at the White House late at night and was ushered into Lincoln’s bedroom—such was the president’s anxiety to hear the news—and when Lincoln sat on the edge of the bed and asked what Curtin had seen, the governor informed him that it was not so much a battlefield as a “slaughter pen.” “I was sorry in a moment that I had said that,” Curtin recalled, “for he groaned, wrung his hands, and uttered exclamations of grief.” It was only with considerable difficulty, Curtin later remembered, that he was able to get Lincoln calmed enough to return to his bed. He told Curtin, “If there is a worse place than hell I am in it.” In a similar vein, he soon thereafter remarked to a young officer in the War Department’s telegraph office, “If there is a man out of perdition who suffers more than I do, I pity him.”15
Such was the grim calculus of the war by the end of 1862. Everything depended on the army. As fortunes on the battlefield turned, so too did the national mood, and that mood waxed and waned in more or less direct proportion to the number of dead bodies on the field and whether that number had exceeded some arbitrary and vaguely unidentifiable threshold past which the casualty levels were unacceptable. “There is discontent in the public mind,” Gideon Welles confessed in his diary. “Our army operations have been a succession of disappointments.” “Things look badly around here politically,” Hay wrote to his secretarial counterpart John Nicolay during a visit to Illinois in late October. “The inaction of the Army and the ill success of our arms have a bad effect.” Hay was entirely correct; Republican candidates everywhere took a shellacking in the November elections.16
Lincoln faced a delicate task. He had to move the lines on the map in such a way as to demonstrate to the Northern populace that progress was being made toward victory, but the movement of those lines necessarily caused more battlefield deaths. If he hesitated—or allowed the generals to hesitate—this might slow the casualty rates, but the war’s end would recede further into the distance. But if the casualties rose too high while the lines moved too slowly—or, as at Fredericksburg, not at all—then Lincoln faced a serious public backlash. The army and the public will that sustained it were after all assets that could be squandered away. The army could refuse en masse to fight; the Northern public could vote him and his party out of office, replacing them with political leaders who would sue for peace on the basis of separation.
Put bluntly, victory meant dying. This was an obvious fact of the war, and yet its stark reality was no less difficult for being so self-evident. Lincoln pressed, cajoled, sometimes begged his generals to hound the enemy without letup. Yet he knew—he had to have known—that his relentlessness, his unceasing urging of his generals forward to pursue the enemy without pause meant that more men would die.
His detractors understood this very well. “When the commander on the Peninsula [McClellan] protested, he was sacrificed,” argued an anti-Lincoln writer, and “when the people of the United States protested with tremendous voice, they heard but derisive laughter from Washington, and they now hear repeated the insane orders—‘Fight the enemy wherever you can find him!’; ‘Move on the enemy’s works!’”17 Lincoln knew that the more he pressed his generals to fight, not only would more men die but also the criticism of his leadership, and often of him personally, would grow worse.
It could be argued that an energetic prosecution of the war would shorten its duration and save lives—the longer the war dragged on, the more men would die. This was a valid point, but it was not one that Lincoln made. Sending his second annual address to Congress on December 1, 1862, ten days before the Fredericksburg debacle and on the cusp of his issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, he made a strong case for emancipation as a means of shortening the war “and thus lessen[ing] its expenditure of money and of blood,” but this was as close as he would get to suggesting that short-term high casualty rates might reduce the war’s human toll in the longer run.18
He knew that his pivot toward emancipation as a central war aim would tear open the scab that covered the ugly American wound of white bigotry and racism and that he would now, as the Great Emancipator, be responsible for enraging white Southerners still further and motivate them to inflict still more deaths on the battlefield. “But for your race among us there could not be war,” he bluntly told that deputation of African American leaders in August 1862.19 This statement could be (and was) read by some indignant observers such as Frederick Douglass as Lincoln laying the blame for the war on African Americans. But perhaps Lincoln meant something more elemental here: that there was a direct connection between American racism and killing. Emancipation would surely only motivate Confederates to greater fury and violence. It might well speak to a higher cause and purpose, eventually proving to be, as he described the Thirteenth Amendment, which permanently abolished slavery, the “King’s cure for all the evils” of the war. But until that time, it must add to the ever-lengthening butcher’s bill.20
Emancipation, race, victory on the battlefield, party politics . . . everything swirled together into that tight apex of the war dead, and it was death of a sort that was different from the deaths Lincoln had previously encountered throughout his life. Now it was he who was responsible for the dying, not the caprice of disease that had carried away his mother, Ann Rutledge, and his two boys or the vagaries of childbirth that had killed his sister. Nor was Lincoln, as in his lawyer days, a dispassionate observer to deaths caused by circumstances in which he played no part. As president, he was now the circumstance.
He never intimated that there was a line beyond which he would not go, beyond which there would be too much dying for him to bear. He never even in private expressed a McClellanesque view holding that victory would not be worth it—would “have no charms”—if purchased at too high a cost in human treasure. But in making this choice to endure whatever the war threw at him, he was, as president and commander in chief, assuming a singular degree of personal responsibility for the war’s dead.
His opponents rarely let him forget it. “The war is of Lincoln’s making,” went a typical editorial in a Democratic newspaper from Maine. “He and his party are responsible for its success. . . . The dominant [Republican] party at the North think of peace only as they think of political disgrace and ruin. Peace would be to that party death and annihilation. Lincoln himself has announced his resignation would precede any measure of pacification.”21
To his more unkind critics, Lincoln reveled in this fact, reveled in the killing. Along with the spurious accusations that he dishonored the dead with ribald songs or that he consulted with ghosts before making important decisions, Democrats and other anti-war Northerners charged the president with being a callous, unfeeling butcher who deliberately sacrificed brave soldiers on the altar of his own incompetence and political ambitions. “Mr. LINCOLN, give me back my 500,000 sons!!!” begged a mournful Columbia, the female symbol of the United States, in one cartoon, only to be met with a rejoinder by a smirking Lincoln, “Well the fact is—by the way that reminds me of a STORY!” Others depicted the president dressed as a Roman soldier with a bloody sword or—following the lead of the Antietam song incident—making light of a field of dead and wounded men.22 “He has exactly the demeanor of a man whose rest is broken by remorse, and to whose pillow tranquil sleep is a stranger,” noted a hostile Washington correspondent. “God knows he has done enough to cause him a lifetime of remorse.”23
Lincoln’s legions of critics in the Confederate South were even more scathing. Anti-Lincoln propaganda in the Confederacy routinely portrayed the Union’s president as a man with a great deal of blood on his hands. “Schemes of hellish cruelty and outrage, such as were never before conceived by the most bloody tyrants and or relentless savages, are freely and shamelessly discussed and advocated by the satanic press of the North,” railed a typical editorial from a Memphis newspaper, “and an administration, whose folly is only surpassed by its intense and boundless wickedness, hastens to adopt and carry into action these diabolical counsels.”24
It was small wonder that Lincoln turned increasingly to religion. By 1863, he was attending church on a more regular basis than at any other point in his life, primarily at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, where presided Phineas Gurley, the minister who had conducted Willie’s funeral. Gurley had since become something of a spiritual advisor to the president, frequently visiting the White House, even as the president frequently attended his church. Noah Brooks saw the First Couple as they exited a Gurley service at the end of November 1862, both dressed in deep mourning for Willie, the president towering over the crowd of churchgoers, “his gait more stooping, his countenance sallow.” On other occasions, Lincoln sneaked into a side room unobserved to listen to Gurley’s sermon, trying to remain incognito and escape the favor seekers and others who hounded him even inside the church doors.25
When Lincoln spoke of God publicly, he adopted a reserved air. He never presumed to speak with any degree of certainty regarding God’s will. “Unless I am more deceived in myself than I often am, it is my earnest desire to know the will of Providence,” he told a delegation of Christian leaders. “These are not, however, the days of miracles, and I suppose it will be granted that I am not to expect a direct revelation.” He also tried to put as brave a face as possible on the Union’s military reverses and God’s will. “While it has not pleased the Almighty to bless us with a return of peace, we can but press on,” he declared in his December 1862 message to Congress.26
But in private, he had begun to seriously ponder the connections among the war’s many deaths, God’s will, and his own part in whatever grand plan the Almighty was following. “What has God put me in this place for?” he asked when learning of the news that so many men had died at Fredericksburg. He was too careful a politician to let the public hear him utter such thoughts aloud, but behind closed doors, he agonized over the war’s cost and ultimate meaning—an unfamiliar place for a man who, before this point, had not been much given to theological or metaphysical musings.27
Sometime during that awful fall, he wrote down a few thoughts on the subject of God’s will and the war—a scrap of paper that he meant no one to see. He had a lifelong habit of working out his private musings this way, and though we cannot know for sure the precise circumstances, it is easy to imagine him scribbling away in the wee hours of yet another sleepless night at the White House, perhaps having just read the casualty lists from Second Bull Run, or Antietam, or some other gruesome carnage.
“In great contests,” he wrote, “each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong. God can not be for, and against the same thing at the same time.” Here was the familiar Lincoln of trigonometry-like logic. But then he ventured further:
In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party—and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose. I am almost ready to say this is probably true—that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By his mere quiet power, on the minds of the now contestants, He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And having begun He could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds.28
Emancipation was a strong subtext—it was surely among the things God could not be both for and against at the same time. The survival of the American nation was uppermost in Lincoln’s mind when he wrote the words about saving or destroying the Union, and his thoughts also reflect his lifelong curiosity regarding the nature of God’s will, given a sharp, almost desperate edge by the circumstances of the times.
But another theme is lurking beneath the surface, contained in that seemingly bloodless word contest, repeated several times on his little scrap of paper. Contest meant in this context fighting, bleeding, and dying on a large scale. Yet God willed the contest. God had a purpose—of that Lincoln was certain. God wanted something from the war. But apparently the only means at His disposal, given the frailties and sinfulness of humanity, involved the killing fields, the imperfect “instrumentalities” of an imperfect human race that could find no other, nonlethal alternatives in realizing God’s plan. Lincoln here had begun to articulate a sense that the war’s deaths transcended his personal preferences. “I shall do nothing in malice,” he wrote. “What I deal with is too vast for malicious dealing.”29
This was a revealing turn of phrase, perhaps even more revealing than his rejection of malicious intent in prosecuting the war. The war had become too big for Lincoln to claim any sort of direction or controlling influence. It had assumed a life of its own or, perhaps, to be more precise, a level of death all its own. Already by the end of 1862, the war had claimed a tremendous number of lives, with many more deaths yet to come. The war was fast becoming that very thing George McClellan so feared: a remorseless revolutionary struggle.
That Lincoln embraced the revolution—especially via emancipation—is not to imply that he did so with relish or with the hubris of a man imagining himself exercising any significant degree of control. Nor was he abrogating a sense of responsibility for the dead by placing the ultimate responsibility in the hands of the Almighty. He always knew he was the one giving the orders and directing the campaigns that killed people. But Lincoln was suggesting that the great, grinding engine of the war and the death that it produced was operating at a level far above his (and everyone else’s) comprehension—that there must be a divine will at work here, something moving events that answered little (if at all) to his relatively minuscule sensibilities.
These sensibilities, developed at first in privacy on his little scrap of paper, began making their way into his public pronouncements. His first proclamation of a national “day of prayer and thanksgiving,” issued in August 1861, was an anodyne statement that said little about the war’s deadliness.30 But nearly two years—and many thousands of dead soldiers—later, in March 1863, he responded to a Senate resolution asking him to set aside a day for national “prayer and humiliation” by dwelling at some length on the idea that the casualty lists were a counterbalance for America’s collective sinfulness—slavery, perhaps, but more generally the sin of pride:
Insomuch as we know that, by His divine law, nations like individuals are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world, may we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war, which now desolates the land, may be but a punishment, inflicted upon us, for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole People?. . . . We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. . . . We have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us!31
Pride was, at bottom, the substitution of one’s individual will for the will of God, and in so making the war’s cost a form of atonement for national pride, Lincoln was here again—echoing his private musings—suggesting that the public function of death during the war transcended any individual motive or intent, even his own. “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me,” he wrote.32 It was a statement about emancipation and the fact that the very logic of the war dictated black freedom, but it also expressed his more general belief that the war had become a thing that, for all his power as president, was now functioning beyond him and his wishes.
Eight months later, he stood before a crowd gathered at the new cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the site of a battle that, for all its portents and promise of hope for the future, was all too familiar to Lincoln in terms of its human cost. The actual numbers were unprecedented—fifty-one thousand casualties total, with over seven thousand dead and many thousands more wounded or missing—but Lincoln and the rest of the country were by now numbingly acquainted with the scenes created in the battle’s aftermath. Gettysburg was a charnel house of suffering, nearly every building and house having been transformed into a hospital or a makeshift morgue. Horror stories abounded about the dead bodies lying everywhere. “What spectacles awaited us on the slopes of the rolling hills around us!” wrote a Union nurse. “I never could have imagined anything to compare with it. Dead, dying, and wounded, in every condition you can conceive.”33
But it was a decisive Union victory, whatever the cost. Lincoln’s reaction, while celebratory, was even-keeled and rather subdued, more so than probably would have been the case earlier in the war. He understood that even as Northerners basked in their army’s triumph, their mood was tempered by a sobering realization of its high cost. “While the nation’s heart is cheered by the glorious success of our arms, routing if not destroying the rebel hosts who have invaded the North, our joy is chastened by the remembrance of those who have fallen in the contest, and the thousands of homes that are saddened by the loss of those most dear,” observed a Connecticut newspaper.34
Lincoln responded from a White House balcony to a gathering of well-wishers on July 7, following news of the Vicksburg victory, with a paean to the recent Fourth of July celebrations and in the process echoed words he would later use in his Gettysburg Address: “How long ago is it?—eighty odd years—since on the Fourth of July for the first time in the history of the world a nation by its representatives, assembled and declared as a self-evident truth that ‘all men are created equal.’” He thanked the Almighty for the Union’s triumphs but also added the somewhat cryptic observation that “there are trying occasions, not only in success, but for the want of success”—possibly a gentle nod on Lincoln’s part to the fact that many soldiers sacrificed their lives in such battles, regardless of the outcome.35
He was also given reasons not to be too enthused when the army’s commanding general, George Meade, who like so many other Union commanders seemed painfully slow in following up his victory, allowed Lee’s army to escape back to Virginia largely unmolested. On July 12, Lincoln received a message from Meade that he was only then at a point ready for his pursuit, and the president was dismayed. “They will be ready to fight a magnificent battle when there is no enemy there to fight,” he remarked. He constantly goaded Meade to get on with it; “he paced the room, wringing his hands,” recalled one observer who saw him in the War Department’s telegraph office. “On only one or two occasions have I ever seen the President so troubled, so dejected and discouraged,” Welles confided in his diary.36
Lincoln was absolutely convinced that the aftermath of Gettysburg was a golden opportunity not only to defeat Lee but also to end the war. When it became clear that Lee had indeed made his way back to Virginia, Lincoln’s reaction was unusually harsh, perhaps because he was so painfully aware of how many men had died to afford Meade the opportunity he had now squandered. “Our army held the war in the hollow of their hand and they would not close it,” he told John Hay. “We had gone through all the labor of tilling and planting an enormous crop and when it was ripe we did not harvest it.” To Welles, he was more emotional: “It is terrible, terrible, this weakness, this indifference of our Potomac generals, with such armies of good and brave men.”37
He drafted a message to Meade that dripped with anger and despair. “I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee’s escape,” the president wrote. “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. . . . Your golden opportunity is gone, and I am distressed immeasureably because of it.” Lincoln knew his tone was hard, and upon reflection, he never sent the message.38
Piles of corpses, calculations of public reaction to the casualties, yet another commander slow to capitalize on a battlefield victory purchased in human blood—none of this was unusual for Lincoln. By 1863, he had seen it all before. Yet it was different; he was different.
Much has been written about that three-minute speech of only 272 words that he delivered four months after the battle, which historian Garry Wills (among many others) argues transformed America, with its invocation of the highest American ideals of democracy, freedom, and sacrifice. “The power of words has rarely been given a more compelling demonstration,” Wills wrote. Lincoln “casts a spell” here with a “transcendental declaration,” tying together the nation’s past, present, and future as an experiment in self-government, rooted in equality, with “the chaste and graven quality of an Attic frieze.”39
Wills is essentially correct. But if the address was a triumph, it was also more subtly a capitulation. It was a frank public admission of what the rising body count had been communicating to Lincoln since the war’s opening days: that ultimately he exercised no real control over the dying.
He accepted relatively few speaking invitations during the war, and he never explained exactly why he went to Gettysburg or what he hoped to accomplish when he arrived. The affair was obviously important to him, given the care he took in both making the preparations for travel and writing the speech. Old myths that he hastily composed the address on the back of an envelope while en route to Gettysburg have long been debunked; Lincoln put extensive thought into what he would say, working his way through multiple drafts in the days prior to the speech.40
When he arrived on the evening of November 18, the new cemetery was far from completed, the project having encountered various delays and scheduling problems. Work crews were still busy disinterring bodies from the hastily dug sites in which they had been placed following the battle. “The dead were buried, friend and foe, on the field where they fell,” noted one government report. “Many were not identified, but slight marks were put up to indicate how many each trench contained and to which side they belonged.”41
Digging out these bodies and then reinterring them in an orderly fashion was a nasty and thankless task. Two Gettysburg men named John Hoke and Franklin Biesecker won the contract; they were paid $1.59 per corpse and were required to “open up the graves and trenches for personal inspection of the remains, for the purpose of ascertaining whether they are bodies of Union soldiers, and close them over again when ordered to do so.” Hoke and Biesecker in turn contracted with two other Gettysburg men to supervise the exhumation of the bodies and surveying of new cemetery plots, and they hired a team of African American laborers to perform the actual task of digging up the bodies and parts of bodies, rifling through jacket pockets or searching shoes—where soldiers sometimes placed slips of paper with their names written on them for this very purpose—for some sign of identification. These bodies were months along in the decomposing process. Those buried on higher or drier ground tended to be skeletal, while bodies in wetter areas still had partially rotted strips of flesh, mingled with decayed uniforms and the other detritus of what amounted to a massive battlefield graveyard.42
When the crowds began to arrive for the dedication ceremony, there were still signs everywhere of only partial completion of this gruesome and time-consuming task. Marshals worked to steer people clear of the areas where graves were still freshly dug or marked for future burial, so it is unlikely that many people actually saw human remains waiting to be reburied. Still, the place had a raw funereal air. “The graves are fresh, for they are newly made,” noted one correspondent. They are “marked as yet, at head and foot, only by bits of board stuck in the ground, numbered, or bearing the hastily written name of the dead soldier, the letter of his company, and his regiment. No flowers or tree are yet planted over them. No marble monument or lofty gateway guards the approach to these hundred[s] of sepulchers. That is the work of art and time, yet to be performed.”43
Accompanied by Secretary of State Seward, the president toured the battlefield that morning. There is no record of what they saw, but it was Lincoln’s closest proximity yet to the actual disposal and burial of dead soldiers. He must have been keenly aware of the presence of the dead, so close to where he stood as he rose to deliver his remarks later that day.44
An air of spiritual solemnity marked the occasion. Several newspapers referred to Lincoln’s task at the ceremony as “perform[ing] the consecrational service,” almost as if the president were pronouncing a benediction.45 So it is not surprising that he sounded a spiritual note in tying the dead soldiers to an abiding idea of the sacred, alluding to the complex relationship among dying on the battlefield, the war’s higher meaning, and God that he had been groping toward when he penned his private meditation a year earlier: “We cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have hallowed it, far above our poor power to add or detract.”46
The divine had always been to Lincoln, broadly speaking, an incomprehensible thing, unknown and largely unknowable. By tying the Gettysburg dead to concepts like consecration and the hallowing of a space, he was elevating their deaths to a level that was too “far above” Lincoln’s “power to add or detract” and even to fully comprehend. Men died at Gettysburg not in the service of Abraham Lincoln, their commander in chief, or their military leaders who designed campaigns and gave orders. They died in the service of an ideal, “a new birth of freedom” that was in turn ultimately tied to a greater, unknowable divine plan.
A close reading of his words at Gettysburg reveals a Lincoln who does not promise an end to the death toll. “It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they have, thus far, so nobly carried on.” “Unfinished” and “thus far” connote at the very least a war that is not yet won, and so might much of the crowd who listened to him have understood his meaning: the president wanted his audience to continue pressing forward to victory so that the Gettysburg deaths were not wasted in a lost cause. “It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us.”47
But there is more here than simply an exhortation to victory in the “great task” of winning the war, a gentle version of the prod he had so often applied to Meade, McClellan, and others to fight on. Lincoln did not here actually call on the American people to be dedicated to an ultimate victory in the Civil War and the defeat of the Confederacy. Historians have long marveled at the absence of any mention of the Union, the Confederacy, or emancipation in the Gettysburg Address. It is surely true that Lincoln omitted these subjects because he aimed for higher, more universal truths, ones that transcended the immediate events and meanings of the war itself. But to have mentioned any of these matters would also have implied a finite ending to the conflict, an ending to the death and dying, and that was something Lincoln could not yet see. Tying the Gettysburg dead to either the Union or the Confederacy carried with it the implicit suggestion that when one side or the other triumphed, the dying would end. Tying the dead to emancipation likewise carried with it the underlying suggestion that the war’s death toll might decline once emancipation was fully achieved.48
Tying the dead to any of this placed them within Lincoln’s purview as the president; it placed death more firmly in his control than he actually felt. By the fall of 1863, there were hopeful signs, but signs only, of an eventual Union victory. This would not translate into a reduction of the casualties anytime soon. Fresh from his deep disappointment with Meade, Lincoln could from Gettysburg see no end to the war or its death toll.
He was far too astute a politician to admit this openly. But we know—again, from that private rumination on the war and divine will in the fall of 1862—that he had begun to see the war’s death toll as serving a purpose beyond his presidency. And if the Gettysburg Address was in many ways a statement of hope and purpose, it carried within it a subtle bleaker undercurrent of understanding that the dying would not and could not yet end, that there was much “unfinished work” ahead. He could promise the nation at Gettysburg that it was all for a high and noble cause. He could not promise them when or how it would all end. Only God knew that.
When he admitted as much—when by the time of Gettysburg he had begun to admit both privately and publicly that he possessed no real control over the war’s dead—he was finding a means by which to end, or at least ameliorate, his writhing in the agony of his lonely “worse place than hell.” He reacted to the Gettysburg victory in a calmer, more measured way. He sounded a tone of restrained thanks; he maintained an even emotional keel in the public eye, even as he privately felt disappointment over the battle’s aftermath. He chose not to send Meade that angry message.
He needed to find a relatively calm place within himself, a place where he could direct the war and pursue his presidential duty without being tortured by its enormous human cost. Perhaps paradoxically, he did so by letting go, in a sense—by releasing control of the killing and the dying to a higher plane. It was a form of surrender, but surrender that gave him a small degree of private peace. More men would die every time he pushed his commanders to do battle. He had come to accept this.
It had taken him a while to get to this point; it was a process. Through the end of 1862, he had done almost nothing to address death’s meaning in the war’s context, and he directly spoke very little to the suffering caused by the war’s many dead soldiers. He allowed a vacuum to form, and it was filled in ways not at all to his liking or in his best interests, with the stories of his supposed indifference to the battlefield dead and the implausible tales of his preoccupation with ghosts and séances. His enemies were busily defining the meaning of the war’s dead. They were filling that vacuum and in ways damaging to his presidency.
The weaknesses of the presidency itself, an office that had not yet developed sophisticated mechanisms for shaping public perception, were to blame. But perhaps there was also a certain personal preoccupation at work, with the deaths of Willie, Edward Baker, and Colonel Ellsworth occurring so early in Lincoln’s White House tenure. Even as the first battles of the war were ratcheting up the casualties, Lincoln found himself repeatedly immersed in his own suffering and the private turmoil of his wife. Both he and Mary were able to effectively keep their anguish from the public’s prying eyes, but it was never easy, and if either the president or the First Lady occasionally allowed their personal losses to predominate, at the expense of paying more attention to how they might guide the nation as a whole through its ordeal of mourning, no one could blame them.
This is not to suggest that Lincoln was indifferent to public perception—quite the contrary. He was always keenly aware of public opinion and its importance, and he believed in the power of political leaders like himself to accurately perceive, mold, and direct it. “Our government rests in public opinion,” he once observed, and “whoever can change public opinion, can change the government.”49 But the relationship between death and public opinion was different. Throughout his life, Lincoln was quite careful to observe the proprieties of funeral rituals and mourning, knowing how seriously these matters were taken in nineteenth-century America. Before the war, in matters of death, public opinion had always shaped him, not the other way around.
Now, as president, he was a public figure, shaping the way millions of Americans related to the deaths of their loved ones. He set the rules for national mourning; he explained what the war’s deaths were all about and why they mattered. Lincoln was a bit slow to understand this, and in any event, he had never been one to ruminate at length about the meaning of death. Death had always been a great, mysterious thing to Lincoln, since his earlier days when it had swooped in and taken his mother, his sister, Ann Rutledge, and Eddy. In each case when death touched him so personally, he responded not with any assurance that he knew what death was about, but rather with a sense that death was an inexplicable, uncontrollable mystery.
They were all deaths he could not control, from Willie’s inadvertent ingestion of tainted water to the soldiers’ corpses lying on the fields of Gettysburg. No president had ever before been required to lead the nation through this sort of bloodletting, and occasionally he slipped, as at Antietam and in the aftermath of Fredericksburg. But Lincoln was finding his way, groping slowly but steadily toward a place where he could stand and direct the nation with reasonable calm and at least an understanding—if not a controlling influence—regarding the war’s dead.