Johanna Connor’s death began with a flash and a bang, followed by searing flames and blinding smoke, all of which engulfed her in a few seconds. The smoke and fire were accompanied by a withering hail of bullets, creating a crescendo of lethality so terrible that afterward no one was entirely certain what killed her—the smoke, the fire, or the hot chunks of lead. She was twenty years old.
Johanna was one of thousands of Northern women employed by the Union war effort to field its million-man army and navy. On the morning of June 17, 1864, Johanna and thirty other young women were seated on benches in a long, low brick building at the Washington Arsenal, a mammoth military complex located in the nation’s capital. Their job was to assemble, or “choke,” musket cartridges. Sweltering in the hot midsummer heat, they opened the windows for fresh air. Shortly after noon, a shower of sparks puffed through one of the windows—probably from pans of chemicals used to make “star shells” that had been placed nearby and were cooked by the sun’s rays—and detonated one of a number of gunpowder containers sitting near the girls.
The containers of black powder exploded, one after the other, creating an enormous concussive force that was contained and magnified by the building’s thick walls. Johanna must not have been killed initially, for her corpse was largely intact, if charred and burned beyond nearly all recognition by the fires that raged through the building. Her head was so badly mangled that her brains were partially exposed, suggesting she may have been maimed by flying bullets and debris. She was placed in a straw-lined box; her brother-in-law managed to identify her by a swatch of her dress he recognized, clinging to what was left of her body. “This is Johanna Connor,” read a placard on her corpse, along with the shattered remains of twenty of her coworkers.1
Lincoln attended the massive funeral, held two days after the explosion. He was a silent participant, giving no speech during the ceremony at the arsenal nor at the cemetery where the women were laid to rest. He rode in a carriage with Secretary Stanton—along with nearly 150 other carriages—down Pennsylvania Avenue, one among a city of mourners. “The streets were literally crowded with people along the lines of the procession,” noted a reporter, “and housetops along the avenue were also thronged. . . . No such demonstration of popular sympathy has ever been expressed in Washington before as by this immense outpouring of people.”2
It was Lincoln’s first funeral in a long time. He had not attended a funeral since the death of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton’s young son in the summer of 1862. This no doubt reflected his extremely hectic schedule; he was a busy man and becoming ever busier.3 But that aside, his understated presence at the Washington Arsenal funeral was entirely in character with how he approached the war dead by 1864. He was now well settled into a relentless, determined mindset. He would see the thing through to the end, come what may—even his own demise. Hyperbolic expressions of his mortality crept into his writing and speeches. “I expect to maintain this contest until successful, or till I die, or am conquered, or my term expires, or Congress or the country forsakes me,” he wrote to Seward. When he met with a group of border state Unionists, many of whom were ambivalent regarding black freedom, Lincoln was pointedly determined not to yield, telling them “he would rather die than take back a word of the Proclamation of Freedom.”4
His generals were now equally grim and serious: Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, Philip Sheridan, men who withstood the war’s casualties with a steely eyed, no-nonsense calm. Grant told Sheridan to execute his campaign in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley in such a manner as to transform the valley into “a barren waste.” He later wrote to another Union general that Sheridan had performed the job so well that “crows flying over it for the balance of this season will have to carry their provender with them.” Grant also approved the campaign waged by Sherman in Georgia and the Carolinas, which achieved a lasting legacy as the embodiment of Sherman’s famous dictum to “make Georgia howl.”5
This was not “total war” in the modern sense. While Union commanders like Grant, Sheridan, and Sherman talked a menacing talk, in practice they did not truly want to kill large numbers of people. Nor did their commander in chief. But Lincoln and his generals knew that their central effort must be the killing of Confederate soldiers. Men on the battlefield must die for the war to end.
Lincoln had long since arrived at that conclusion, and now he had in place generals who agreed. “I have seen your despatch in which you say ‘I want Sheridan put in command of all the troops in the field, with instructions to put himself South of the enemy, and follow him to the death,’” Lincoln wrote to Grant. “This, I think, is exactly right, as to how our forces should move.”6
He wanted a grinding, unremitting campaign against Confederate soldiers in the field, and during the spring and summer of 1864, Grant gave it to him. His major push into the area of Virginia known as the Wilderness turned into yet another parade of casualty lists and graves, as the Army of the Potomac grappled with Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia in a series of murderous battles in and around Richmond. And yet the Confederacy’s capital city was not the primary target, as it had been for George McClellan and other early Union generals. The primary target was Lee’s army—“wherever Lee goes, there you will also go,” Grant ordered his subordinate commanders—and what this meant, in practical terms, was killing and wounding enough soldiers in the Army of Northern Virginia to effectively end its usefulness as a military force and thus substantially end the war.7
Grant was as good as his word, as he hammered ceaselessly away at Lee. The horrors of the Wilderness met or exceeded anything the president or the nation had previously experienced: close to thirty thousand dead and wounded men on both sides during three hard days of fighting. Burial details overwhelmed by the task of disposing of all the bodies were by now a familiar sight. But the gloomy setting of the Wilderness and some of its more peculiar horrors—men burned to death by forest fires raging out of control in the deep underbrush; soldiers grappling hand to hand in hastily dug, mud-filled pits; an area known as the “Bloody Angle,” in which men threw bayoneted muskets at one another like spears—created particularly awful images. “Hundreds of Confederates, dead or dying, lay piled over one another in those pits,” wrote a journalist who helped bury the bodies near the Bloody Angle. “The fallen lay three or four feet deep in some places, and, with but few exceptions, they were shot in or about the head. . . . The trenches were nearly full of muddy water. It was the most horrible sight I had ever witnessed.”8
Grant remained unperturbed. “Our losses have been heavy,” he admitted to Stanton in May, but “I think the loss of the enemy must be greater. . . . I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.” Lincoln heartily approved. “I have seen your despatch expressing your unwillingness to break your hold where you are,” he telegraphed Grant. “Neither am I willing. Hold on with a bull-dog gripe, and chew and choke, as much as possible.”9
He visited Grant in mid-June, traveling with Tad by steamer to the army’s sprawling central supply depot at a previously obscure little cotton port village, incongruously named City Point. With the Union army’s arrival, it was now indeed a city, the wharves crowded with equipment, warehouses, and hastily constructed wooden buildings, along with a veritable sea of white tents. City Point also grew hospital beds like mushrooms: first six thousand, then ten thousand, and eventually fifteen thousand beds were housed in the hospital facility.
There were also graves. Each hospital created its own makeshift cemetery, burying the dead as quickly and with as much decency as circumstances allowed. After the war, many of the bodies would be reinterred in a massive single area, City Point National Cemetery, wherein lay the remains of nearly seven thousand soldiers. In the summer of 1864, however, these bodies lay scattered in clusters of graves here and there, peppering the place with wooden headboards or whatever could be found to mark a man’s final resting place.10
Lincoln must have seen at least some of these gravesites as he toured the City Point facilities, including the hospitals—no doubt a somber sight. But unlike his visits to McClellan earlier, on this occasion there was little tension, Lincoln evincing a trust in Grant and his staff that he never felt with Little Mac. “The President was in very good spirits at the Cabinet [meeting],” Welles wrote. “His journey has done him good, physically, and strengthened him mentally in confidence in the Genl. and army.”11
Still, the president was occasionally nervous, particularly when he knew the army was directly engaged in battle. He slept little during the three days of the Wilderness Campaign. One congressman found him pacing nervously up and down in his office in the White House. Welles recorded in his diary that the president visited him and discussed what little he had heard regarding the campaign. “I have been very anxious for some days in regard to our armies in the field,” Lincoln admitted. Overriding Stanton’s objections, Lincoln allowed a New York reporter to use the military telegraph system to wire his editor a story on the campaign, on the condition that the reporter would immediately tell the president all he knew of the battle’s progress. Lincoln even sent a special train to fetch the reporter to the White House, where the president queried him at some length regarding what he had seen.12
But for all his anxiety, Lincoln spent relatively little time in the telegraph office reading dispatches, largely because Grant deliberately cut himself off from communications with the capital as he engaged Lee in battle. It was a decision Lincoln approved. “Not expecting to see you again before the Spring campaign opens,” he wrote to Grant right before the Wilderness battles commenced. “The particulars of your plans I neither know, or seek to know.” This was a measure of the president’s trust in Grant. “You are vigilant and self-reliant,” he assured his commanding general, “and, pleased with this, I wish not to obtrude any constraints or restraints upon you.”13
There was no despair over the long casualty lists, no exclamations of “my God, what will the country say?” and no talk of being in a “worse place than hell.” As the Wilderness Campaign settled itself into a siege affair before the town of Petersburg, Virginia, Lincoln responded with a low-key note of optimism, releasing a brief statement on May 9 asking the nation to offer a prayer of gratitude to God. That same evening, in response to a serenade from well-wishers at the White House, he declared, “I am, indeed, very grateful to the brave men who have been struggling with the enemy in the field,” but he said nothing directly regarding the many dead soldiers lying in the Wilderness fields.14
In the wake of the savagery of the Wilderness Campaign and the grueling siege operations that had Lee pinned down in Petersburg, the Confederate high command in July launched a diversionary assault on Washington, a relatively small force of approximately ten thousand to fifteen thousand men under the dyspeptic Confederate general Jubal Early, whom Lee affectionately dubbed his “bad old man.” Early personified what the war had become, in its callousness and almost casual acceptance of mayhem. On the way to Washington, cavalry under Early burned the town of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, when its citizens refused to pay a ransom of $100,000 in gold, targeting in particular the homes of known Republicans, African Americans (one of whom was shot when he tried to save his house from the fire), and those who were known to have assisted them. Early later claimed that he had ordered the burning by way of retaliation for Union atrocities in the South, his ransom demand being “compensation for the destruction” and an attempt to “open the eyes of the people of the other towns at the North, to the necessity of urging upon their government the adoption of a different policy.”15
The assault was more of a large-scale raid; Early had no hope of capturing the capital city, ringed as it was with a series of forts well stocked with heavy artillery and soldiers. But he did better than anyone had a right to expect, making his way to within sight of the Capitol dome and bringing the city’s outer works under fire. “I can see a couple of columns of smoke just north of the White House,” Hay recorded in his diary. Early cut telegraph wires leading into the city, adding to a general uneasy feeling of being besieged, particularly since, as Orville Browning noted, “the sound of the guns [was] occasionally heard.” One reporter characterized the city’s mood as “gloomy,” with “much apprehension among the people.”16
Lincoln betrayed no outward emotion, even as Washington was threatened by an enemy force for the first time in nearly two years. “The loss of the capital he regarded as a disaster that would probably be fatal,” remembered one observer who saw him at this time, yet he did not “exhibit any evidence of excitement or apprehension.” He also came—for the first and last time in the war—under direct enemy fire. On July 11, he rode out to Fort Stevens on the city’s outskirts, as Early’s men were engaged in bringing the fort under their guns. “He was in the Fort when it was first attacked, standing on the parapet,” Hay wrote. “A soldier roughly ordered him to get down or he would have his head knocked off.”17
Early later exulted that although his raid ended in a retreat back to Virginia, at least he “scared Abe Lincoln like hell.” In fact, he had done nothing of the kind. People who saw Lincoln at this time remarked on his unruffled disposition. “The President is in very good feather this evening,” Hay remarked on July 11. “He seems not in the least concerned about the safety of Washington.” He returned to Fort Stevens the next day and again observed the enemy’s fire as Early began his retreat south; according to legend, he was again told by a soldier standing nearby to get down, the soldier supposedly being none other than future Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. An army surgeon standing nearby caught a bullet in his leg; Lincoln remained unperturbed, “pleasant and in confident humor.” When Welles visited Fort Stevens later that day, he found Lincoln calmly “sitting in the shade—his back against the parapet toward the enemy.”18
During the summer and into the fall, he maintained that same steady, grim determination. He sometimes grew despondent about his prospects for reelection—needlessly, as it turned out—and he had his share of political headaches. But he did not waver in his confidence in Grant or in his belief that his “chew and choke” approach would ultimately bring victory. Always he urged his commanders to run the enemy to the ground, with no outward expressions of doubt regarding casualties, and he was invariably disappointed if he felt they had not done their utmost. “Met the President between the War Department and White House,” Browning recorded in his diary on July 15. “Said he was in the dumps—that the rebels who had besieged us were all escaped.”19
Not everyone approved or shared this grinding, killing vision of the war. Mary Lincoln felt that her husband had misplaced confidence in Grant. She told him that Grant had “no regard for life. . . . [He] is an obstinate fool and a butcher.” The epithet stuck, especially among antiwar Northerners and McClellan’s supporters during the 1864 campaign, when the general was nominated by the Democratic Party for the presidency. At one New York campaign rally for McClellan, the crowd audibly groaned when Grant’s name was mentioned, followed by chants of “the butcher!” and “Grant the butcher!” Lincoln ignored them all.20
By now a death needed to be truly extraordinary to grab his attention. The Washington Arsenal fire certainly did so, as the national headlines and immense crowds attested. Ever attuned to the nuances of politics and public opinion, Lincoln would have understood the value of appearing at the victims’ funeral, by way of openly demonstrating his compassion and counteracting the charges leveled by his enemies that he was a callous man—“the great violator of the Constitution, and still greater butcher of men . . . who remains unmoved in the face of the greatest misery,” according to one critic. And perhaps it was no coincidence that he chose to attend the funeral just as the old Antietam song episode was receiving renewed attention from the opposition press.21
He had become reserved in death’s presence, choosing his words carefully and sparingly—or saying nothing at all, communicating with his simple presence at the funeral a quiet commiseration with the deceased and their families. Death was now so commonplace, so normal for both himself and the country that he was not given to many public pronouncements or open displays of grief.
But it could still move him, even in that time of countless graves. Perhaps on some level he needed death not to become too normal, needed himself not to become too accepting and too benumbed. Some deaths still needed to be unusual and required reflection. Death needed a degree of unacceptability; it needed to retain at least some horror, like the horror when young women were “blown to atoms.” For what would it say about a president and a nation that failed to stop and reflect when such a tragedy occurred? This was so even in a time when scores of soldiers had been similarly blown to atoms on countless battlefields, or died in their own filth from dysentery or other diseases in camp hospitals, or were the victims of any of the war’s other obscenities, none of which prompted mourners to line the streets. Johanna’s death, and those of her coworkers, called for at least a brief pause, bowed heads, and quiet mourning, and thus Lincoln attended his first funeral in nearly two years.
This need for death to be both ordinary and extraordinary was also the context of that famous letter Lincoln sent to Lydia Bixby, written six months after the arsenal funeral:
I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts, that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save. I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours, to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom.22
The Bixby letter was not what it seemed. Mrs. Bixby had actually lost two sons, not five, and at least one (possibly two) deserted, though the president did not know any of this. She was believed by those who knew her to be a Southern sympathizer with no very kind opinion of Abraham Lincoln. It is also highly likely that Lincoln did not write the letter and that John Hay composed it for the president’s signature. This being the case, it is not altogether fruitful to do a close textual analysis of the letter’s contents, since the exact words are probably Hay’s and not Lincoln’s. Indeed, given what we know of the president’s hectic routine—with piles and piles of paper daily crossing his desk—it may well be that he did little more than glance at his secretary’s work, affixed his signature, and moved on.23
A transcript made its way into print, first appearing in a Boston newspaper four days after it was written, and then receiving wide coverage in Northern newspapers.24 A few political opponents chose to denigrate it; a Philadelphia anti-Lincoln organ dismissed the Bixby letter as “cheap sympathy” and wondered at the “hypocrisy” of the president, who “is thus ostentatiously shedding his tears over the remains of Mrs. Bixby’s sons, [and who] has two sons who are old enough to be laid upon ‘the altar’ but whom he keeps at home in luxury.” (Tad was in fact only eleven years old, and Robert would soon join General Grant’s staff.) But most seemed to agree with the assessment of an editor in faraway Denver who reprinted the letter and opined, “If Mr. Lincoln is sometimes the author of rough English—as one who saws a board without plaining it—he also occasionally turns out a piece of finished work, showing a master hand.”25
Even if he did not write the letter, and even if Mrs. Bixby did not actually lose five sons, it nonetheless served as an effective public relations tool, and it is in this sense that the letter is revealing of Lincoln’s late-war approach to the war’s high human cost. Like his attendance at the arsenal victims’ funeral, it was quiet and understated but nonetheless powerful, all the more so because it was ostensibly a private letter of condolence, rather than a speech or some other public pronouncement intended for political effect. The president was genuinely “tender and sympathetic,” one Massachusetts paper put it. Many newspapers reprinted the letter’s text with no additional comment, aside from an occasional characterization of the language as “touching” and “noble,” albeit some ventured a bit further in their praise; “as an heir loom in the [Bixby] family, it will be worth more than gold,” suggested a Boston newspaper, “and will serve to comfort thousands of others in their loss of husbands and sons.”26
Lincoln did not contact many bereaved parents and loved ones in this way. After he wrote Elmer Ellsworth’s parents to express his dismay at their son’s death, he wrote only one other such letter, a brief note to a young woman named Fanny McCullough, whose father, Lieutenant Colonel William McCullough, had been killed in battle in December 1862. In that letter, he gives a glimpse of his own personal mechanism for grieving, honed after coping with the deaths of his sons and others close to him. “Perfect relief is not possible, except with time,” he counseled Fanny. “You can not now realize that you will ever feel better. Is not this so? And yet it is a mistake. You are sure to be happy again. To know this, which is certainly true, will make you some less miserable now. I have had experience enough to know what I say; and you need only to believe it, to feel better at once. The memory of your dear Father, instead of an agony, will yet be a sad sweet feeling in your heart, of a purer, and holier sort than you have known before.”27
It was a rare moment, this confluence of Lincoln’s private mourning with that of a mourning nation. As with the arsenal fire victims, a death needed to be of an unusual nature to capture the president’s attention. In Fanny McCullough’s case, both she and her father were from Illinois, and Colonel McCullough had been in command of a cavalry regiment from Lincoln’s home state when he was killed. He had been a court clerk in one of the counties where Lincoln practiced law before the war, so the president knew the man and his family from earlier days.28
Otherwise, Lincoln was not inclined to send a written condolence, even as a form letter or certificate, to the family of a deceased soldier, as would later wartime presidents (Franklin Roosevelt, for example, whose signature appeared on letters of condolence mailed to many of the families of soldiers killed during World War II, along with immediate notification via Western Union telegram and a death certificate). The Lincoln administration produced no such system, for several reasons. The sheer numbers of the dead would have made even a brief pro forma note almost impossible to produce and distribute in adequate quantities. The mistakes regarding Lydia Bixby’s situation illuminate another difficulty: the lack of certainty regarding whether a given soldier had actually been killed. Many families were given no definitive information regarding the fate of their loved ones, learning of their loss only when letters stopped arriving from the front.29
If Lincoln wanted to offer comfort to the bereaved, he was compelled by circumstances to do so only in the most general terms. Possibly the Bixby letter was intended by the president as more than a personal communique to Mrs. Bixby; it may have been one of those private letters for public consumption that he sometimes wrote during the war, knowing the letter would eventually find its way into print. We have no way of knowing whether this was Lincoln’s intent, but he surely did find fortuitous the Bixby letter’s widespread publication and generally favorable reception.
He had begun to speak more of soldiers’ battlefield sacrifices. Gratitude to the dead formed a subtle, unstated subtext in his Gettysburg Address, a sentiment that he expressed more openly during the ensuing months. In his annual message to Congress in December 1863, he closed by noting that he and Congress “do also honorably recognize the gallant men . . . to whom, more than to others, the world must stand indebted for the home of freedom disenthralled, regenerated, enlarged, and perpetuated.” When he accepted renomination for the presidency six months later, he included in his formal letter to Republican Party leaders his approval of their formal statement of thanks to the country’s fallen soldiers. “I am especially gratified that the soldier and the seaman were not forgotten by the convention, as they forever must and will be remembered by the grateful country for whose salvation they devote their lives,” he wrote. He sounded a similar note in his public speeches. “I am, indeed, very grateful to the brave men who have been struggling with the enemy in the field,” he told a group of well-wishers who gathered at the White House in May 1864.30
His sense of gratitude was no doubt genuine. He knew, perhaps better than anyone else, just how much had been sacrificed by the many thousands of dead young men scattered in battlefield graves throughout the nation. It was at this time that he gave his speech to the Sanitary Fair in Philadelphia, speaking of the heavens being “hung in black.”31
But there is also a discordant element in Lincoln’s expressions of gratitude toward the soldiers who fell in the war’s terrible storm, because the idea of gratitude carries with it the corollary of choice. We are grateful for an act because we understand implicitly that the act did not have to occur. The person to whom we are grateful might have chosen otherwise. Yet most of the men who died at Gettysburg and elsewhere did not truly have much of a choice. They were compelled to follow orders into battle, as they followed orders when they first entered the army. Volunteerism had long since ceased to provide an adequate foundation for the armed forces. Both the Union and the Confederacy resorted to conscription, and both sides used harsh means—imprisonment, floggings and other corporal punishment, and sometimes even executions—to put and keep men in the ranks.
Lincoln did what he could to avoid executing men for desertion. He routinely reviewed soldiers’ death sentences—what he sardonically referred to as “butcher-day”—and commented to his friend Leonard Swett, “I must go through these papers and see if I can find some excuse to let these poor fellows off.” It was a matter of importance to Lincoln, this effort to ease the strain of war. When one Union officer tried to persuade Lincoln to reinstate the executions of twenty deserters, the president refused, and with a good deal of emotion. “General, there are too many weeping widows in the United States now,” he retorted. “For God’s sake don’t ask me to add to the number; for, I tell you plainly, I won’t do it!”32
Word soon spread about the president’s largesse, and he developed a reputation in army ranks as a kind man, “Father Abraham,” who avoided meting out harsh punishments to ordinary men when he could. Some errant soldiers even showed up at the White House, begging forgiveness for their transgressions, which they often received. “The bearer, William Henry Craft, a corporal in Co. C. in the 82nd. N.Y. Volunteers, comes to me voluntarily, under apprehension that he may be arrested, convicted, and punished as a deserter,” Lincoln wrote on a scrap of paper in December 1863. Just what the corporal had done to run this risk is unknown, but the president was willing to overlook it, provided Craft return to his post: “I hereby direct him to report forthwith to his regiment for duty, and, upon condition that he does this, and faithfully serves out his term, or until he shall be honorably discharged for any cause, he is fully pardoned for any supposed desertion heretofore committed.”33
There were many similar examples of the president’s compassion. He both annoyed military officials who were attempting to enforce military law and discipline and endeared himself to rank-and-file soldiers who saw the president as a fair-minded man, loath to inflict capital punishment on them for their transgressions. Others simply chuckled over what they perceived as Lincoln’s soft-heartedness. “I was amused at the eagerness with which the President caught any fact which would justify him in saving the life of a condemned soldier,” Hay wrote in his diary. “Cases of cowardice he was especially averse to punishing with death. He said it would frighten the poor devils too terribly to shoot them.”34
Lincoln’s reluctance to have men shot harks back to his days growing up in Indiana and his dislike of hunting or anything that smacked of violence or cruelty. But this reluctance can be exaggerated. He did allow some men to be executed. Not every soldier sentenced to death for cowardice or desertion received presidential clemency, and it often boiled down to the content of a man’s character. “He was only merciless in cases where meanness or cruelty were shown,” Hay wrote.35
Lincoln did not see himself as merely a butcher, sending men to their death without pity or reason. The war was an “experiment” in democracy, as he described it, and part of the experiment was learning whether men would choose to die for their country. There was an implied decision in the citizenship of a free man in a democracy, a decision to repay what was owed for the price of freedom by a willingness to offer up the “last full measure” and take the chance of ending up a corpse on a battlefield.
Lincoln tasked Southerners for just this reason. He always thought average white Southerners, especially nonslaveholders, did not really have their hearts in secession or the war. He did not believe the Confederacy was dedicated to any sort of “proposition” other than human bondage—certainly it was not dedicated to the liberty of white Southerners, in his estimation, and therefore the calculus of men fighting and dying in Confederate uniforms was different. He replied to New York governor Horatio Seymour’s request that the administration wait for a judge’s ruling on the conscription laws by writing, “We are contending with an enemy who, as I understand, drives every able bodied man he can reach, into his ranks, very much as a butcher drives bullocks into a slaughter-pen. No time is wasted, no argument is used. . . . It produces an army with a rapidity not to be matched on our side, if we first waste time to re-experiment with the volunteer system, already deemed by congress, and palpably, in fact, so far exhausted, as to be inadequate; and then more time, to obtain a court decision, as to whether a law is constitutional.”36
Well might a white Southerner have said much the same of Lincoln. His letter to Seymour made its way into the opposition press, and the reaction was predictable. “We have little hesitation in saying that we think the letter of Mr. Lincoln callous and brutal,” argued one anti-administration editor in Maine, who lamented that “a great many people will be stupid enough not to see the difference between the drivers of the Southern bullocks and the Northern bullocks. . . . We think this allegorical simile however classic in Illinois it might be considered, exceedingly unfortunate in view of the present exigencies and happenings.”37
Yet Lincoln was not being disingenuous or hypocritical. The Union was, in Lincoln’s estimation, a society of freemen, either to that status born or having acquired it after emigrating from abroad. Other men had died on the battlefields of the Revolution to afford the Americans in Lincoln’s day this privilege. It was a debt owed by all Americans to the Founding Fathers, a debt that might require repayment: the last full measure. And if repayment of that debt in turn required a draft—which Lincoln believed was constitutional under the war powers vested in him and Congress—then this was acceptable, because the men drafted had made a decision to live in a free and democratic society. Having made that decision, they owed a debt, like everyone else. Unlike the Confederacy, his soldiers were free men fighting to make other men free; or, as he put it so eloquently in his 1862 annual message to Congress, “In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve.”38
His clemency was often balanced by an expectation that the reprieved soldier would make good on his debt with a willingness to go back and face death in battle, to balance the scales and compensate for earlier failures. “On the case of a soldier who had once deserted and reenlisted he endorsed, ‘Let him fight instead of shooting him,’” Hay recalled. “Col. Thomas C. Devin represents that Robert Gill, now of Co. D. 6th. N.Y. Cavalry . . . is under sentence of death for desertion,” Lincoln wrote in a typical letter to Stanton, “and that since his desertion, he has fought at Gettysburg and in several other battles, and has otherwise behaved well; and he asks that said Gill may be pardoned and sent to his Regiment. Let it be done.” In another, addressed “to whom it may concern,” he provided a reprieve for Private John Thornton, who was fearful he might be punished as a deserter, saying that the private would be “fully pardoned for any supposed desertion heretofor committed,” provided he return to his regiment and “faithfully serves out his term.” Having been approached with many such cases, he finally in February 1864 issued blanket authority to commanders in the field to “restore to duty deserters under sentence, when in their judgment the service will be thereby benefited.”39
He had not really thought this way before the war, never really connecting a willingness to face death with civic life and the responsibilities of American citizenship. There had been no need then, but now that need was acute. Gratitude must be appropriately counterbalanced with expectation. Choice must be counterbalanced with duty. “I present you sincere thanks for myself and the country,” he told an Ohio regiment in August 1864. “I almost always feel inclined, when I happen to say anything to soldiers, to impress upon them in a few brief remarks the importance of success in this contest.” Their service and, by extension, the sacrifices of their fallen comrades were ultimately worth it; men were dying for a cause that transcended themselves and their times. “It is not merely for to-day, but for all time to come that we should perpetuate for our children’s children this great and free government, which we have enjoyed all our lives. . . . It is for this the struggle should be maintained, that we may not lose our birthright.”40
There was a somber tone to this little speech, an intimation that his men were engaged in suffering for a higher cause—worthy suffering, but suffering nonetheless. He no longer offered “congratulations” to soldiers for results in the field, as he had in his unfortunate pronouncement following Fredericksburg. Nor was he much inclined to speak of a soldier winning “glory” on the field of battle, a word connoting the pursuit of public renown or the trappings of military honor and fame.41
Instead, he referenced a soldier’s responsibility. Soldiering was not the seeking of medals, rank, or headlines. It was a job, and a grim one at that; a necessary requirement of patriotic citizenship that entailed sacrifice, sometimes the ultimate sacrifice. In September 1864, he issued an order of thanks to a unit from Ohio, “one hundred day troops” who had lent their services to the army during the previous summer’s campaigns and come to the aid of Washington during the Early raid. Lincoln acknowledged both their value and the fact that they had participated in the important (and dangerous) campaigns in the Shenandoah Valley and the siege trenches around Petersburg. In doing so, he indulged in no gaudy language of victories won or battlefield plaudits; instead, he quietly tendered his and the nation’s gratitude for the Ohio men who “performed with alacrity the duty of patriotic volunteers.”42
“Duty” was, fundamentally, a debt, and black men as well as white now owed that debt. The Emancipation Proclamation brought African Americans into the arc of American duty. They were now, in Lincoln’s eyes, part of that same basic equation. It was their willingness to die that, in Lincoln’s eyes, sealed their status as bona fide American citizens.
Early in the war, he had been unsure, as were many other white Americans, about the black man’s resolve. While on the more enlightened side of the racial spectrum, he was a product of his times. The white supremacy endemic to those times had its effect, and he worried that black men armed as soldiers would, when the moment came, fail in their duty to face death in combat; that they would throw down their guns and run away. “I am not sure we could do much with the blacks,” he told a delegation of antislavery men in September 1862. “If we were to arm them I fear that in a few weeks the arms would be in the hands of the rebels.”43
But like so many other white Americans, Lincoln received a lesson in the mettle of black soldiers during the summer of 1863, when one of the first African American units of the war, the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, mounted a valiant (if ultimately fruitless) assault on Fort Wagner, a Confederate stronghold guarding the mouth of Charleston Harbor. The fort was a formidable redoubt, and the men of the 54th and supporting white units were compelled by geography to assault the place head-on, hurling themselves directly into the teeth of murderous Confederate fire. Nearly three hundred black men and their white officers (including the 54th’s colonel, Robert Gould Shaw) were killed, wounded, or captured, with many of those taken prisoner slain by their Confederate captors. “It is impossible to see how our troops could have shown more devotion and daring,” noted a Massachusetts newspaper.44
While Lincoln did not directly speak to the Fort Wagner assault, overshadowed as it was by the nearly simultaneous Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, thereafter any small doubts he may have entertained about black men as soldiers disappeared entirely. They had proven their worth by risking and in many cases suffering death in combat. They had done their duty. “Peace does not appear so distant as it did. I hope it will come soon, and come to stay,” he wrote nearly two months after the Fort Wagner assault. “It will then have been proved that, among free men, there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and that they who take such appeal are sure to lose their case, and pay the cost. And 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.”45
“Silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye”: it was classic bit of Lincolnian prose, an apt and almost lyrical invocation of what he as president at once admired and was grateful for in his soldiers, and also expected from them. He would tolerate no bigoted criticism of black men in blue uniforms. “You say you will not fight to free negroes,” he wrote to critics of emancipation, with the icy rejoinder that “some of them seem willing to fight for you.” Just as he had seen the willingness to die for democracy and freedom as the sine qua non of the white soldier’s bargain, the choice that distinguished between free men and “bullocks,” so too had the black men lying on the beach before Fort Wagner made their choice and paid their debt. “Negroes, like other people, act upon motives. Why should they do any thing for us, if we will do nothing for them? If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive—even the promise of freedom. And the promise being made, must be kept.”46
By performing their duty, black soldiers had entered into that same circle of protection Lincoln afforded the rest of the men in Union uniform when he commuted their sentences and the like, and he would not tolerate mistreatment of black soldiers. At the end of July 1863, in the wake of rumors that the Confederates defending Fort Wagner had murdered black soldiers trying to surrender, and after the Confederate congress passed a law threatening to sell black prisoners of war into slavery, Lincoln issued his own Order of Retaliation, proclaiming that “for every soldier of the United States killed in violation of the laws of war, a rebel soldier shall be executed; and for every one enslaved by the enemy or sold into slavery, a rebel soldier shall be placed at hard labor on the public works and continued at such labor until the other shall be released and receive the treatment due to a prisoner of war.” He did not mince words. “The law of nations and the usages and customs of war as carried on by civilized powers, permit no distinction as to color in the treatment of prisoners of war as public enemies,” he stated, and “to sell or enslave any captured person, on account of his color, and for no offence against the laws of war, is a relapse into barbarism and a crime against the civilization of the age.”47
Lincoln would have black men die for their country; he would not have them murdered. That was not part of their duty, any more than it was Johanna Connor’s duty to die or the duty of widows like Lydia Bixby to give over so many sons to the cause. These things sometimes did happen, but they were not expected; they were not the normal price exacted by duty. When the unexpected occurred, he might still sometimes attend a funeral or write a letter, quietly acknowledging that, in some instances at least, the price had been too high, the debt more than repaid.
As 1864 waned, Lincoln increasingly concentrated his energies on what would come after the war: issues of reconstruction, integrating the freedmen into American public life, and the many difficult legal and political problems involved in bringing the rebellious states and their conquered white population back into the Union. He was looking to a future fraught with what he admitted were “great difficulties.” He would begin his second term of office expecting four more years of serious challenges in trying to put the country together, and his concerns were understandably far more with the living than the dead.
Still, the war’s cost in human lives was an underlying theme when he delivered his second inaugural address in March 1865. He strongly echoed the themes he had first pondered on that scrap of paper more than two years previously. Referencing the North’s and the South’s religiosity, he observed that “each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.”
Then he came to the point regarding the war’s many dead. “Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away,” he declared. “Yet, if God wills that it continue, until the wealth piled by the bond-man’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.’”48
At Gettysburg, he had told the nation that the war’s death toll was beyond his control and that both he and the war functioned in the service of a higher cause, the end of which end he could not foresee. Now he could see more clearly both the cause and the end. The cause was a mighty reckoning, a balancing of justice’s scales and a giving of lives in repayment for the taking of so many slaves’ lives. This was the only way he could truly make sense of it all. If individual soldiers had a duty to repay their debt to their country by risking and sometimes suffering death, then the country as a whole had a similar duty to repay the debt it owed for the terrible national sin of slavery.
Here was a Lincoln with a clearer vision of what the dying truly meant. It was a new theme, this idea of a reckoning, of a national debt repaid. He had never spoken this way before, certainly not in the service of understanding death and its purpose. Throughout his life, he had eschewed the very idea that he could somehow comprehend the meaning of death. His mother, his sister, Ann Rutledge, his two young boys—they had perished in the name of an unknown and unknowable fate, willed by a God whose plans he never pretended to understand.
But now, at the very end of that ruinous war, he began to comprehend the point of the dying, and if his understanding looked backward to the war’s uncountable graves, it also looked forward to the looming project of national reconciliation and reconstruction. What Lincoln wanted, with his use of the dead to balance the scales, was a reconstruction pursued without a national sense of guilt or the endless recriminations he knew were a very real risk in a war that had often brought out the worst in his countrymen. He wanted no eye-for-an-eye approach to reconstruction. He wanted instead a clean slate, a beginning for national reconciliation on a level field.
This was not a pernicious species of moral relativism; Lincoln made it quite clear in his address that one side, the Confederacy, intended to preserve the evil of human bondage. “To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war,” he said, “while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.” But Lincoln’s moral clarity regarding the right and the wrong of the war did not extend to a perpetuation of the hatreds wrought by battle. He very much wanted “malice towards none,” and with the balancing of the scales, the war dead provided that clean beginning.49
Too often the Second Inaugural Address has been read by subsequent generations of Americans as closure, a sublime and grand culmination to Lincoln’s presidency and his life that would soon end. But it may also be read as a start; Lincoln did not know he would soon die, and he believed he was now embarking on the challenging project of restoring the American Union. He was looking for a way to start that process, and his answer was to press the war’s dead into its service. So many Americans, black and white, had fulfilled their duty in war; now, their deaths would be pressed into service to fulfill the needs of peace.