The Cincinnati Gazette correspondent with the Army of the Potomac chanced to hear Lincoln say, “I tell you I think a great deal of that fine fellow Meade.” Meade’s father was a merchant, shipowner, U.S. naval agent in Cadiz, Spain. Born in Cadiz in 1815, graduated from West Point, the son took a hand in fighting Seminole Indians, resigned from the Army, worked on War Department surveys, was brevetted first lieutenant for gallantry in the Mexican War, and for five years was a lighthouse-builder among Florida reefs. He married Margaretta, daughter of John Sergeant, noted Philadelphia lawyer, in 1840, and often when away on duty wrote her a letter every day; in these were many references to “Our Saviour,” to “the will of God and the uncertainty of human plans and projects,” and his own “innumerable sins,” which he prayed would be forgiven.
After Meade’s appointment as brigadier general of volunteers August 31, 1861, he had seen active and often front-line service in every battle of the Army of the Potomac—except for a short interval of recovery from a gunshot wound at New Market Road on the Peninsula. In camp at Fredericksburg he had told Lincoln he believed the army was gratified with the President’s revocation of General Hunter’s emancipation proclamation, writing to his wife that the President said, “I am trying to do my duty, but no one can imagine what influences are brought to bear upon me.” From camp at Falmouth he wrote her of “a very handsome and pleasant dinner” with the President and Mrs. Lincoln.
Meade quietly confessed to his wife, by letter: “I have been making myself (or at least trying to do so) very agreeable to Mrs. Lincoln, who seems an
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amiable sort of personage. In view also of the vacant brigadier-ship in the regular army, I have ventured to tell the President one or two stories, and I think I have made decided progress in his affections.” Ten weeks later, however, there crashed on Meade, against his wish, an order he could not disobey, the President’s appointment of him to the command of the Army of the Potomac.
Where McClellan most often wrote to his wife that any lack of success on his part must be laid on others, Meade more often was moderate and apologetic, writing to his wife, “Sometimes I have a little sinking at the heart, when reflecting that perhaps I may fail at the grand scratch; but I try to console myself with the belief that I shall probably do as well as most of my neighbors, and that your firm faith must be founded on some reasonable groundwork.”
The President on June 15, 1863, issued a call for 100,000 troops—from Pennsylvania 50,000, Maryland 10,000, West Virginia 10,000, Ohio 30,000—to serve for six months unless sooner discharged. The Secretary of War called for help from the governors of 13 states. Thirty regiments of Pennsylvania militia, besides artillery and cavalry, and 19 regiments from New York were mobilized at Harrisburg under General Couch from the Army of the Potomac.
From day to day through latter June the news overshadowing all else in the public prints was that of Lee’s army. Far behind Lee now was Richmond and its small defensive force. When he had requisitioned for rations, it was said the Confederate Commissary General replied, “If General Lee wishes rations let him seek them in Pennsylvania.” When Lee had been asked about a Union army taking Richmond while he was away, he smiled, it was said. “In that case we shall swap queens.” He and his chief, Davis, had decided that “valuable results” might follow the taking of Harrisburg, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington; besides immense amounts of supplies, provisions, munitions, there would be European recognition. Men well informed believed that Lee had nearly 100,000 men and 250 cannon, so Simon Cameron at Harrisburg sent word to Lincoln.
Lee’s men were in a high and handsome stride. Twice within seven months, though far outnumbered, they had routed, sent reeling, the Army of the Potomac. “There were never such men in an army before,” said Lee. “They will go anywhere and do anything if properly led.” The English Lieutenant Colonel Fremantle, traveling with the invading army, noted that the universal feeling in the army was “one of profound contempt for an enemy whom they have beaten so constantly.”
Fremantle wrote of Hood’s ragged Jacks from Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, marching through Chambersburg with cheers and laughter at the taunts of
scowling, well-dressed women: “One female had seen fit to adorn her ample bosom with a huge Yankee flag, and she stood at the door of her house, her countenance expressing the greatest contempt for the barefooted Rebs; several companies passed her without taking any notice; but at length a Texan gravely remarked, ‘Take care, madam, for Hood’s boys are great at storming breastworks when the Yankee colors is on them.’ . . . The patriotic lady beat a precipitate retreat.” No repartee was flung at a gaunt woman with a face of doom who cried from a window at the passing troops: “Look at Pharaoh’s army going to the Red Sea.” To a woman who sang “The Star-spangled Banner” at him, General Lee lifted his hat and rode on. From another window a woman gazed at the cool and impressive Lee riding by and murmured, “Oh, I wish he was ours!”
Like a foretokening a girl in Greencastle, “sweet sixteen and never yet kissed,” came running out of a house at Pickett’s Virginians, her face flushed and her eyes blazing. For an apron she wore the Union flag. And she hurled a defi : “Come and take it, the man that dares!” Pickett bowed, sweeping his hat. His soldiers gave the girl a long cheer and a gale of bright laughter.
The Springfield Republican urged Lincoln himself to take the field; he was as good a strategist as the Northern generals had proved, and his personal presence would arouse enthusiasm. Lincoln’s instructions to Meade ran that not Richmond but Lee’s army must be the objective. Meade followed Lee with orders from Lincoln “to find and fight” the enemy. From day to day neither Meade nor Lee had been certain where the other was. Lee would rather have taken Harrisburg, its stores and supplies, and then battled Meade on the way to Philadelphia.
Lee rode his horse along roads winding through bright summer landscapes to find himself suddenly looking at the smoke of a battle he had not ordered or planned. Some of his own marching divisions had become entangled with enemy columns, traded shots, and a battle had begun that was to swirl around the little town of Gettysburg. Lee could draw away or carry on; he decided to carry on.
The stakes were immense, the chances fair. The new Union commander had never planned a battle nor handled a big army in the wild upsets of frontal combat on a wide line. Also 58 regiments of Northern veterans who had fought at Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, had gone home, their time up, their places filled by militia and raw recruits.
One factor was against Lee: he would have to tell his cannoneers to go slow and count their shells, while Meade’s artillery could fire on and on from an endless supply. Also Lee was away from his Virginia, where he knew the ground and the people, while Meade’s men were fighting for their homes,
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women, barns, cattle and fields against invaders and strangers, as Meade saw and felt it.
Lee hammered at the Union left wing the first day, the right wing the second day, Meade on that day sending word to Lincoln that the enemy was “repulsed at all points.’ On the third day, July 3, 1863, Lee smashed at Meade’s center. Under Longstreet’s command, General George Edward Pickett, a tall arrow of a man, with mustache and goatee, with long ringlets of auburn hair flying as he galloped his horse, headed 15,000 men who had nearly a mile to go up a slow slope of land to reach the Union center. Before starting his men on their charge to the Union center, Pickett handed Longstreet a letter to a girl in Richmond he was to marry if he lived. Longstreet had ordered Pickett to go forward and Pickett had penciled on the back of the envelope, “If Old Peter’s [Longstreet’s] nod means death, good-bye, and God bless you, little one!” An officer held out a flask of whisky: “Take a drink with me; in an hour you’ll be in hell or glory.” And Pickett said No; he had promised “the little girl” he wouldn’t.
Across the long rise of open ground, with the blue flag of Virginia floating ahead, over field and meadow Pickett’s 15,000 marched steadily and smoothly, almost as if on a drill ground. Solid shot, grape and canister, from the Union artillery plowed through them, and later a wild rain of rifle bullets. Seven- eighths of a mile they marched in the open sunlight, every man a target for the Union marksmen behind stone fences and breastworks. They obeyed orders; Uncle Robert had said they would go anywhere and do anything. As men fell their places were filled, the ranks closed up. As officers tumbled off horses it was taken as expected in battle. Perhaps hall who started reached the Union lines surmounting Cemetery Ridge. Then came cold steel, the bayonet, the clubbed musket. The strongest and last line of the enemy was reached. “The Confederate battle flag waved over his defences,” said a Confederate major, “and the fighting over the wall became hand to hand, but more than half having already fallen, our line was too weak to rout the enemy.”
Meade rode up white-faced to hear it was a repulse and cried, “Thank God!” Lee commented: “They deserved success as far as it can be deserved by human valor and fortitude. More may have been required of them than they were able to perform." To one of his colonels Lee said, “This has been a sad day for us, a sad day, but we cannot expect always to gain victories.” As a heavy rainfall came on the night of July 4 Lee ordered a retreat toward the Potomac.
Meade was seen that day sitting in the open on a stone, his head in his hand, willing it should rain, thankful that his army had, as he phrased it, driven “the invaders from our soil.” For three days and nights Meade wasn’t out of his clothes, took only snatches of sleep, while he had spoken the
controlling decisions to his corps commanders in the bloodiest battle of modern warfare up till that time. Tabulations ran that the Union army lost 23,000 killed, wounded and missing, the Confederate army 28,000. Pickett came out of it alive to write his Virginia girl, “Your soldier lives and mourns and but for you, he would rather, a million times rather, be back there with his dead to sleep for all time in an unknown grave.”
One tree in line of fire had 250 bullets in it, another tree 110. Farmer Rummel’s cow lane was piled with 30 dead horses. Farmer Rummel found two cavalrymen who had fought afoot, killed each other and fallen with their feet touching, each with a bloody saber in his hand. A Virginian and a 3d Pennsylvania man had fought on horseback, hacking each other’s head and shoulders with sabers; they clinched and their horses ran out from under them; they were found with stiff and bloody fingers fastened in each other. The peg-leg Confederate General Ewell, struck by a bullet, had chirped merrily to General John B. Gordon, “It don’t hurt a bit to be shot in a wooden leg.”
The brave and able General John F. Reynolds, who had once peremptorily refused Lincoln’s offer of command of the Army of the Potomac, felt a bullet sink into his neck, called to his men, “Forward! for God’s sake, forward!” and fell into the arms of a captain with the words, “Good God, Wilcox, I am killed.”
Confederate bayonets had taken Union cannon and Union bayonets had retaken the cannon. Round Top, Little Round Top, Culp’s Hill, rang with the yells of men shooting and men shot. Meadows of white daisies were pockmarked by horse hoofs. Dead and wounded lay scattered in rows, in little sudden piles. The first battle of the war fought outside a Slave State was over. Lee could have managed it better. So could Meade. The arguments began.
Meade issued an order thanking the Army of the Potomac for glorious results: “An enemy superior in numbers and flushed with the pride of a successful invasion, attempted to overcome and destroy this Army. Utterly baffled and defeated, he has now withdrawn from the contest. . . The Commanding General looks to the Army for greater efforts to drive from our soil every vestige of the presence of the invader.”
On the wall map in his office, Lincoln had watched the colored pins as they changed to indicate military positions. Zach Chandler came in, spoke of painful anxiety because the fate of the nation seemed to hang in the balance, noted “the restless solicitude of Mr. Lincoln, as he paced up and down the room, reading despatches, soliloquizing, and often stopping to trace positions on the map.”
The President announced to the country July 4 that news had arrived up to 10 P.M. July 3 such as to cover with honor the Army of the Potomac, to promise great success to the cause of the Union, and to claim condolence for
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the many gallant fallen. “For this he especially desires that on this day He whose will, not ours, should ever be done be everywhere remembered and reverenced with profoundest gratitude.”
Fry of the Adjutant General’s office had noticed Lincoln clinging to the War Office and devouring every scrap of news as it came over the wires. “I saw him read General Meade’s congratulatory order to the Army of the Potomac. When he came to the sentence about ‘driving the invaders from our soil,’ an expression of disappointment settled upon his face, his hands dropped upon his knees, and in tones of anguish he exclaimed, “‘Drive the invaders from our soil.” My God! Is that all?’ ”
Lincoln sent from Soldiers’ Home a telegram to Halleck saying he had left the telegraph office “a good deal dissatisfied.” He quoted from Meade’s address about driving “the invaders from our soil,” saying, “You know I did not like the phrase.” Since then had come word that the enemy was crossing its wounded over the Potomac.
While the Battle of Gettysburg was being fought the President had wondered what was happening to Grant. For months he had been haunted by the colossal Vicksburg affair. Grant was trying to starve out one Confederate army in Vicksburg while he held off other Confederate armies from reaching Vicksburg. Against many representations and pleadings Lincoln had kept Grant in command and was hoping lor great results. But the months passed.
When Lee’s van was a day’s march from Harrisburg, Lincoln had issued a long letter to an Ohio Democratic committee regarding habeas corpus and the Constitution; sent General R. H. Milroy a sharp letter for losing a division of troops and blaming it on the West Pointers who were his superiors; written a note of comfort to General David Hunter that he must not grumble so much, for he was still held in respect and esteem. On the third day’s fighting he took time to pardon a deserter sentenced to be shot.
Welles July 7 was just saying good afternoon to a distinguished delegation when a dispatch was handed to him with news from Admiral Porter at Vicksburg; that city, its defenses and Pemberton’s army of some 30,000 troops had surrendered to Grant and the Union army. Welles excused himself and headed for the Executive Mansion; he found the President with Chase and others, pointing on a map to details ol Grant’s movements.
Welles gave the news of the Porter telegram. The President rose at once, said they would not discuss Vicksburg and the map any more, and, “I myself will telegraph this news to General Meade.” He took his hat as if to go, suddenly stopped and looked down with a shining face at Welles, took him by the hand, put an arm around him and broke forth: “What can we do for the
Secretary of the Navy for this glorious intelligence? He is always giving us good news. I cannot, in words, tell you my joy over this result. It is great, Mr. Welles, it is great!”
The two of them walked out across the White House lawn. “This,” said the President, “will relieve Banks. It will inspire me.” Welles thought the opportunity good to request the President to insist upon his own views, to enforce them, not only on Meade but on Halleck. Lincoln directed Halleck to send word at once to Meade that Vicksburg had surrendered to Grant July 4, and furthermore: “Now, if General Meade can complete his work, so gloriously prosecuted thus far, by the literal or substantial destruction of Lee’s army, the rebellion will be over.”
Over the North as the news spread were mass meetings and speeches, rejoicing, firing of guns, ringing of bells. In hundreds of cities large and small were celebrations with torchlight processions, songs, jubilation, refreshments. “The price of gold . . . fell ten or fifteen cents and the whole country is joyous,” wrote Welles. A brass band and a big crowd serenaded the President at the White House. He spoke to the crowd: “. . . in a succession of battles in Pennsylvania, near to us, through three days, so rapidly fought that they might be called one great battle on the 1st, 2d and 3d of the month of July; and on the 4th the cohorts of those who opposed the declaration that all men are created equal, ‘turned tail’ and run. Gentlemen, this is a glorious theme, and the occasion for a speech, but I am not prepared to make one worthy of the occasion.” He would praise those who had fought so bravely. “I dislike to mention the name of one single officer, lest I might do wrong to those I might forget.”
The colloquial phrase “turned tail” was as old to him as his boyhood and had the graphic edge he wished to convey. But it wasn’t correct English, and he would hear about such language. He closed with a breezy and careless sentence that would do him no good among the purists of diction. “Having said this much, I will now take the music.”
An odd number was Grant, a long way from home, bagging an entire army, winning the greatest Union victory of the war thus far, clearing the Mississippi River of its last Confederate hold, yet failing to send word to Washington—unless he let it go at telling Admiral Porter the Navy should be first to wire the big news to Washington. This was more of Grant’s careless ways. Welles wrote, “The Secretary of War and General Halleck are much dissatisfied that Admiral Porter should have sent me information of the capture of Vicksburg in advance of any word from General Grant, and also with me for spreading it at once over the country without verification from the War Office.”
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The detailed facts arrived at Washington of Grant receiving 31,600 prisoners, 172 cannon, 60,000 muskets. Port Hudson, a little farther south on the Mississippi, had fallen to General Banks with 6,000 prisoners, 31 cannon, 5,000 muskets. The starved Confederates filed out of Vicksburg in silence, the Union soldiers obeying Grant’s instructions “to be orderly and quiet as these prisoners pass, and to make no offensive remarks.” They were paroled, Grant explaining they were largely from the Southwest. “I knew many of them were tired of the war and would get home just as soon as they could. The prisoners included Lieutenant General John C. Pemberton, a favorite of President Davis, 4 major generals, 15 brigadiers, 80 staff officers.
Lincoln’s eager anxiety about a military drama enacted along river bends where he had navigated flatboats, was told in a tender handshake letter of July 13, 1863, to Grant: “. . . I write this now as a grateful acknowledgment for the almost inestimable service you have done the country ... I never had any faith, except a general hope that you knew better than I, that the Yazoo Pass expedition, and the like, could succeed. When you got below, and took Port-Gibson, Grand Gulf, and vicinity, I thought you should go down the river and join Gen. Banks; and when you turned Northward East of the Big Black, I feared it was a mistake. I now wish to make the personal acknowledgment that you were right, and I was wrong.”
Meade was writing to Halleck July 8, “I think the decisive battle of the war will be fought in a few days,” receiving from Halleck two days later the advice, “I think it will be best for you to postpone a general battle till you can concentrate all your forces and get up your reserves and reinforcements.” On July 12 Meade reported to Halleck that he would attack next day “unless something intervenes to prevent it,” recognizing that delay would strengthen the enemy and would not increase his own force. The war telegraph office operator Albert B. Chandler said that when this dispatch arrived from Meade, Lincoln paced the room wringing his hands and saying, “They will be ready to fight a magnificent battle when there is no enemy there to fight.”
Next day Halleck wired Meade in words surely Lincoln rather than Halleck: “You are strong enough to attack and defeat the enemy before he can effect a crossing. Act upon your own judgment and make your generals execute your orders. Call no council of war. It is proverbial that councils of war never fight. Reinforcements are being pushed on as rapidly as possible. Do not let the enemy escape.”
The night before, however, Meade had already called a council of war, finding that only two of his corps commanders wanted to fight. Meade himself was for immediate combat, but when the discussion was over decided to wait. The Monday following Meade’s council of war, July 13, Hay’s diary
noted “the President begins to grow anxious and impatient about Meade’s silence.’ The morning of the 14th “the President seemed depressed by Meade’s despatches of last night. They were so cautiously & almost timidly worded— talking about reconnoitering to find the enemy’s weak place, and other such.” The President said he feared Meade would do nothing. About noon came a dispatch. The enemy had got away unhurt. The President was deeply grieved. “We had them within our grasp,” he said to Hay. “We had only to stretch forth our hands & they were ours. And nothing I could say or do could make the Army move.” It seemed to Hay that one of the President’s dispatches to Meade of a few days before “must have cut like a scourge,” but Meade returned so reasonable and earnest a reply that the President concluded Meade knew best what he was doing.
Welles recorded of July 14 that as Cabinet members were gathering, “Stanton said abruptly and curtly he knew nothing of Lee’s crossing. ‘I do,’ said the President emphatically, with a look of painful rebuke to Stanton. ‘If he has not got all of his men across, he soon will.’ “Lincoln said he did not believe they could take up anything in the Cabinet for that day. Welles walked out slowly. The President hurried and overtook Welles. They walked across the White House lawn to the departments and stopped to talk a few moments at the gate. Welles believed he could never forget the voice and face of the President as he spoke. “And that, my God, is the last of this Army of the Potomac! There is bad faith somewhere. Meade has been pressed and urged, but only one of his generals was for an immediate attack, was ready to pounce on Lee; the rest held back. What does it mean, Mr. Welles? Great God! what does it mean?”
On July 14 Lincoln wrote a long bitter letter to Meade: “I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee’s escape. He was within your easy grasp, and to have closed upon him would, in connection with our other late successes, have ended the war . . . Your golden opportunity is gone, and I am distressed immeasurably because of it. I beg you will not consider this a prossecution, or persecution of yourself. As you had learned that I was dissatisfied, I have thought it best to kindly tell you why.” This letter never reached Meade, Lincoln later scribbling on the envelope “never sent or signed.” It lacked the tone of Lincoln’s remark to Simon Cameron in a later reference to Meade: “Why should we censure a man who has done so much for his country because he did not do a little more?”
Robert Lincoln said he went into his father’s room to find him “in tears, with head bowed upon his arms resting on the table at which he sat.” To the question, “Why, what is the matter, father?” the answer came slowly, “My boy, I have just learned that at a council of war, of Meade and his Generals,
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it had been determined not to pursue Lee, and now the opportune chance of ending this bitter struggle is lost.”
A few days having passed, he could see it was well he had not sent Meade the letter he meant to be kindly but which was not kindly. Having met in Meade a rare humility and sincerity throughout their many difficult interchanges, Lincoln sent through Howard the salutation that Meade was more than a brave and skillful officer, was “a true man.”
As the days passed Welles continued to blame chiefly General in Chief Halleck: “In this whole summer’s campaign I have been unable to see, hear, or obtain evidence of power, or will, or talent, or originality on the part of General Halleck. He has suggested nothing, decided nothing, done nothing but scold and smoke and scratch his elbows.”
On the last day of the Battle of Gettysburg Alexander H. Stephens, Vice- President of the Confederate States, had with one companion started down the James River from Richmond in a small steamer, aiming to reach Washington as commissioners of the Confederate Government and hold a conference with the President of the United States. Their dispatch of July 4 requested permission to pass through the blockade. The final decision after much consultation was in a telegram sent by Lincoln to the blockading admiral: “The request of A. H. Stephens is inadmissible. The customary agents and channels are adequate for all needful communication and conference between the United States forces and the insurgents.” Thus did Lincoln dismiss his old-time colleague.
There was issued a “Proclamation of Thanksgiving,” July 15, 1863, by the President. In diapasons of Old Testament prose, in the attitude of piety in which the name of Almighty God was invoked, Lincoln emerged as a man of faith. “It has pleased Almighty God to hearken to the supplications and prayers of an afflicted people,” ran the opening chords, “and to vouchsafe to the army and the navy of the United States victories on land and on the sea so signal and so effective as to furnish reasonable grounds for augmented confidence that the Union of these States will be maintained, their constitution preserved, and their peace and prosperity permanently restored ... It is meet and right to recognize and confess the presence of the Almighty Father and the power of His Hand equally in these triumphs and in these sorrows:
“Now, therefore, be it known that I do set apart Thursday the 6th. day of August next, to be observed as a day for National Thanksgiving, Praise and Prayer, and I invite the People of the United States to assemble on that occasion in their customary places of worship, and in the forms approved by their own consciences, render the homage due to the Divine Majesty, for the wonderful things he has done in the Nation’s behalf. . .”
On the date this proclamation was issued the dignity and majesty of the U.S. Government was being challenged, upset, smeared with insult and threatened with the disorders and violence of revolution, in the largest city in the United States.
During the three days of July 13, 14, 15, mobs or crowds in New York City met by prearrangement, with a specific design as to what points they would attack and carry, drove out the U.S. provost marshal from his office at 43d Street and Third Avenue, wrecked the wheel or revolving drum from which the names of drafted men were drawn, tore to pieces the books and papers, poured turpentine on the floor, set the building on fire, fought off police and firemen, and the draft office and six adjoining buildings burned. They wrecked and burned the U.S. draft office on Broadway two doors from 29th Street, looted stores nearby, and burned 12 buildings; they smashed windows and doors and sacked the home of Republican Mayor Opdyke and burned at midnight the home of U.S. Postmaster Abram Wakeman, first stripping the premises of furniture and clothing; they burned a ferry house, hotels, drugstores, clothing stores, factories, saloons where they were refused free liquor, police stations, a Methodist church, a Protestant mission, the Colored Orphan Asylum at 43d Street and Lexington Avenue. They drove out 40 policemen and 15 armed workmen from the state arsenal at 21st Street and Second Avenue, trampling over five of their dead, seizing muskets and cartridges, setting the building on fire; they hanged a Negro from a tree on Clarkson Street and burned the body with loud howling; they hanged three a day of Negroes; they hanged to a lamppost a captain of the 11th regiment of the state guard; they hanged, shot or beat and trampled to death at least 30 Negroes and so terrorized the colored population that it disappeared upstate and across to New Jersey. They erected for protection and refuge barricades on First Avenue from 11 th to 14th Streets, on Ninth Avenue from 32d to 43d Streets, with smaller barricades across intersecting thoroughfares. They sang “We’ll hang old Greeley to a sour apple tree, and send him straight to hell!”; they yelled “To hell with the draft and the war!” and “Tell Old Abe to come to New York!”
The mobs were not driven in their work by mere blind wrath. Somebody had done some thinking, somebody had chosen a time when all the state guards the governor could scrape together had gone to Gettysburg. The only organized force ready against the first riots was a police department of 1,500 members. With club and revolver they had fought night and day, and their dead lay in scores, their wounded by the hundreds.
The mobs of the first day’s riots aimed straight at a thing they hated: the Draft. It was a Monday, and on the previous Saturday 1,200 names had been picked by a blindfolded man out of the wheel. These 1,200 names had been
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published, and unless something happened to make the Government change its mind most of the men answering to these 1,200 names would be put into uniforms and sent to fight.
If they believed such newspapers as the World, the Journal of Commerce, the Express, the Daily News, the Day Book, the Mercury, they were to be the willing cannon fodder of a tyrannical and oppressive Government daily violating the Constitution and the fundamental law of the land. Said the Daily News-. “The people are notified that one out of about two and a half of our citizens are to be brought off into Messrs. Lincoln & Company’s charnelhouse. God forbid!”
The newspapers had printed the Fourth of July speech of Franklin Pierce, former President of the United States, at a great Democratic mass meeting at Concord, New Hampshire. Said Pierce, “It is made criminal for that noble martyr of free speech, Mr. Vallandigham, to discuss public affairs in Ohioay, even here, in time of war the mere arbitrary will of the President takes the place of the Constitution.” Governor Seymour of New York told a Fourth of July audience that the country was on “the very verge of destruction" because of Government coercion, “seizing our persons, infringing upon our rights, insulting our homes . . . men deprived of the right of trial by jury, men torn from their homes by midnight intruders.”
By the time the subtle arguments of the newspapers and of Pierce and Seymour had been simplified into plain words for the 400,000 foreign-born citizens of New York, of whom 203,740 were Irish, they had lost their fine philosophic distinctions. And far beyond any discussion was the terribly simple and outstanding fact that any man having $300 could buy his freedom from the draft. It was “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight,” ran the talk in 5,000 saloons and 20 times as many homes.
Drafted men, their relatives and friends, reinforced by thousands of sympathizers who favored some kind of direct action, gathered early the morning of July 13 in vacant lots with clubs, staves, cart rungs, pieces of iron, and moved as if by agreement to a lot near Central Park where they organized, began patrolling the city, and put the first sign of their wrath and vengeance on the draft offices wrecked and burned. The first acts of the three days’ tornado had some semblance of an uprising of the people against a Government discriminating in its conscription between the rich and the poor. The second and third days, however, saw the events come under the sway of the city’s criminal and gang elements, then numbering between 50,000 and 70,000, who swarmed out for loot and the work of getting the police defied and overrun.
Governor Seymour probably set forth a sincere viewpoint in a proclamation calling for enforcement of law and order. He meant to say he might have
favored a few small riots which would show a healthy Democratic opposition to the draft, but when the mobs ran wild and made war against the rich, it was time to place the emphasis on property, safety, strict law enforcement, rather than on personal liberty and the class discrimination of the Conscription Act.
Besides the many mobs carrying banners inscribed “No Draft” and “No $300 Arrangements with Us,” there had been many other mobs with varied and mixed motives. Class war was the cry behind the big placards of one division: “The Poor Man’s Blood for the Rich Man’s Money.” Eagerness for loot lay back of the stripping of houses of jewelry, plate, furniture, rugs, clothes. Primitive race antagonism, set aflame by political malevolence, underlay the hanging and beating of black men by white men. In thousands of boys the savage was unleashed; they robbed houses and set them on fire; they beat to death with fists and clubs the young Negro cripple Abraham Franklin; they tore off the clothes of Jeremiah Robinson, who was trying to escape to a ferryboat wearing his wife’s dress and hood, threw him to the pavement, kicked him in the face and ribs, killed him and threw the body into the river.
Robert Nugent, assistant provost marshal in charge of conscription, received the second day of the riots a telegram from his Washington chief, James B. Fry, directing him to suspend the draft. Governor Seymour and Mayor Opdyke clamored that he should publish this order. Nugent said he had no authority, but he finally consented to sign his name to a notice: “The draft has been suspended in New York City and Brooklyn,” which was published in newspapers. This had a marked quieting effect.
The storm in the streets began to slow down as though winds had changed. There was added quieting effect as infantry, cavalry, artillery, from the Army of the Potomac commenced arriving.
On July 14, the second of the three-day riots, a telegram dated at the War Department, Washington, and signed “A. Fincoln” went addressed to Robert T. Fincoln, Fifth Avenue Hotel, New York, with the query, “Why do I hear no more of you?”
After 150 Regular Army soldiers with ball cartridges had faced a crowd of 2,000, fired in the air, and received a volley of stones in reply, and had then shot into the swarming and defiant mass, killing 12 and wounding more, the hullabaloo began to die down.
Soon afterward James R. Gilmore, who had sent Lincoln reports on the riots from the New York Tribune office, called on Lincoln at the White House and asked why the President could not say Yes or No to the recommendation for a special commissioner to expose the instigators of the riots. Lincoln hesitated and in a peculiar half-bantering manner, according to Gilmore,
replied: “Well, you see if 1 had said no, I should have admitted that I dare not enforce the laws, and consequently have no business to be President of the United States. If I had said yes, and had appointed the judge, I should— as he would have done his duty—have simply touched a match to a barrel of gunpowder. You have heard of sitting on a volcano. We are sitting upon two; one is blazing away already, and the other will blaze away the moment we scrape a little loose dirt from the top of the crater. Better let the dirt alone,— at least for the present. One rebellion at a time is about as much as we can conveniently handle.”
Governor Seymour wrote to the President asking for suspension of the draft, the President replying that he could not consent. "Time is too important.” Due credit in the quota would be made for volunteers, Lincoln stipulated; he also said he would be willing to facilitate a decision from the U.S. Supreme Court on whether the draft law was constitutional. “But I can not consent to lose the time while it is being obtained . . His purpose was to be “just and constitutional; and yet practical.” He was yielding nothing to the astute and persistent Governor who had so often given words of hope to New York City that the draft would be got rid of.
Lincoln did during those hectic summer weeks prepare an address to the country giving the facts and logic which dictated his actions in the draft. Having written this argument, Lincoln filed it away in a pigeonhole of personal papers and it was not heard of till long afterward. One relentlessly logical passage read: “There can be no army without men. Men can be had only voluntarily, or involuntarily. We have ceased to obtain them voluntarily; and to obtain them involuntarily, is the draft—the conscription. If you dispute the fact, and declare that men can still be had voluntarily in sufficient numbers prove the assertion by your selves volunteering in such numbers, and I shall gladly give up the draft. Or if not a sufficient number, but any one of you will volunteer, he for his single self, will escape all the horrors of the draft; and will thereby do only what each one of at least a million of his manly brethren have already done. Their toil and blood have been given as much for you as themselves. Shall it all be lost rather than that you too, will bear your part?”
His mind had dwelt, evidently, on a law to enforce universal selective service, the Government taking all men physically fit, no man escaping by purchase or substitution. Such conscription was operating in several European monarchies and republics, but as Lincoln looked out across the American scene in 1863, he seemed to believe it could not then be put to work in the United States, even if he could find Congressmen to advocate it. Perhaps the opposition had more than a demagogue’s idle phrase in the cry “The rich man’s money against the poor man’s blood.”
His elaborately prepared address, said Nicolay and Hay, was intended more especially for the honest and patriotic Democrats of the North, “but after he had finished it, doubts arose in his mind as to the propriety or the expediency of addressing the public directly in that manner,” and “with reserve and abnegation, after writing it, he resolved to suppress so admirable a paper.” He laid his paper aside as a meditation that had exercised his mind and sharpened his humility and perhaps deepened his patience.
New York City saw on August 19, 1863, no less than 10,000 troops from the Army of the Potomac assisted by the 1st Division New York State Guards. Governor Seymour proclaimed that citizens should obey the law of Congress as to conscription. New draft offices went into operation. Cavalry patrols rode up and down the streets.
The draft proceeded, meeting covert instead of open resistance. Tammany, Tweed, A. Oakey Hall, Fernando Wood and his brother Ben, the World, the Express, the Day Book, the Mercury, many scurrying politicians, examining physicians, and fixers, lawyers, did their work. Upward of $3,000,000 was appropriated by the municipality of New York for draft-evasion purposes. According to the “infallible” record which Lincoln had mentioned to Seymour, of 292,441 men whose names were drawn from the wheels 39,877 failed to report for examination. Of the remaining 252,564, for good or bad reasons 164,394 were exempted. This left 88,170 available for duty, of whom 52,288 bought exemptions at $300 apiece, which yielded the Government $15,686,400. The original 292,441 names were thus cut down to 35,882 men, of whom 26,002 hired substitutes to go to war for them. This left 9,880 who lacked political pull or seemed to want to join the army and fight.
There now arose at Niagara Falls, Canada, Clement L. Vallandigham, crying that on British soil he was a freeman but if he crossed over into the U.S.A. he was a felon and would be clapped into jail. Discussion of habeas corpus and the right of free speech flared higher. The New York World declared that the crime of arresting Vallandigham was a Lincoln blunder and inquired why the President had not arrested Fernando Wood for remarks at New York mass meetings as treasonable as those of Vallandigham in Ohio.
Mrs. Vallandigham left her home in Dayton, Ohio, to join her husband at Windsor, Canada, opposite Detroit, to help him campaign from there. It was reported she told her friends that she never expected to return from Canada until she did so as the wife of the governor of Ohio. This reminded Lincoln of a man out in Illinois running for supervisor on the county board. On leaving home election morning he said, “Wife, tonight you shall sleep with the supervisor from this township.” News came in the evening that her
husband was beaten in the election, and she was all dressed up for going out when she met her defeated man at the door. “Wife, where are you going all dressed up this time of night?” he exclaimed. “Going?” she countered. “Why, you told me this morning that I should sleep tonight with the supervisor of this town and as the other man was elected instead of you, I was going to his house.” Whereupon the husband, as newspapers quoted Lincoln, “acknowledged the corn, she didn’t go out, and he bought a new Brussels carpet for the parlor.”
During those six weeks of Vallandigham’s banishment Lee had been repulsed at Gettysburg; Grant had taken Vicksburg and Confederate power on the Mississippi River was gone; a violent three-day uprising in the largest city in the North, and minor revolts at other points, had been brought under control. Lincoln, pleased at the outlook, wrote a letter that James C. Conking read at an immense mass meeting in Springfield, Illinois: “There are those who are dissatisfied with me. To such I would say: You desire peace; and you blame me that we do not have it.” One way to peace was to suppress the rebellion by force of arms. “This, I am trying to do. Are you for it? If you are, so far we are agreed. If you are not for it, a second way is, to give up the Union. I am against this. Are you for it? If you are, you should say so plainly. If you are not for force , nor yet for dissolution, there only remains some imaginable compromise."
He promised that if any peace proposition came from those who controlled the Confederate Army, “It shall not be rejected, and kept a secret from you.” There was another issue. “You are dissatisfied with me about the negro ... I suggested compensated emancipation; to which you replied you wished not to be taxed to buy negroes. But I had not asked you to be taxed to buy negroes, except in such way, as to save you from greater taxation to save the Union exclusively by other means.”
He launched into the finish of what was really a paper aimed at the masses of people in America and Europe: “The signs look better. The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea . . . And while those who have cleared the great river may well be proud, even that is not all. It is hard to say that anything has been more bravely and well done, than at Antietam, Murfreesboro, Gettysburg, and on many fields of lesser note. Nor must Uncle Sams Web-feet be forgotten. At all the watery margins they have been present. Not only on the deep sea, the broad bay, and the rapid river, but also up the narrow muddy bayou, and wherever the ground was a little damp, they have been, and made their tracks. Thanks to all. For the great republic—for the principle it lives by, and keeps alive—for man’s vast future,—thanks to all.
“Peace does not appear so distant as it did. I hope it will come soon, and come to stay; and so come as to be worth the keeping in all future time. 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; while, I fear, there will be some white ones, unable to forget that, with malignant heart, and deceitful speech, they strove to hinder it. Still, let us not be over-sanguine of a speedy final triumph. Let us be quite sober. Let us diligently apply the means, never doubting that a just God, in his own good time, will give us the rightful result.”
No previous letter, address or state paper of Lincoln’s received such warmhearted comment. Many newspapers joined with the New York Times seeing it as having hard sense, a temper defying malice. “Even the Copperhead gnaws upon it as vainly as a viper upon a file. The most consummate rhetorician never used language more pat to the purpose and still there is not a word not familiar to the plainest plowman . . . Abraham Lincoln is today the most popular man in the Republic . . .”
The New York World was saying, “Nature has not endowed Mr. Lincoln with a single great or commanding quality. He has indeed a certain homely untutored shrewdness and vulgar honesty . . . but no . . . higher degree of consideration than belongs to a village lawyer . . The London Times was annoyed at Lincoln’s latest letter: “The persons, if there be any such, to whom such jargon can appear impressive or even intelligible, must have faculties and tastes of which we can form no idea.”
Living in the same house, seeing the chief in many moods, Hay was writing, “The Tycoon is in fine whack. I have rarely seen him more serene & busy. He is managing this war, the draft, foreign relations, and planning a reconstruction of the Union, all at once. I never knew with what tyrannous authority he rules the Cabinet, till now. The most important things he decides & there is no cavil . . . There is no man in the country, so wise, so gentle and so firm. I believe the hand of God placed him where he is.”
In September ’63 the Boston publisher Benjamin B. Russell issued a collection of The Letters of President Lincoln on Questions of National Policy, with a preface, as though the letters were literature and unique reading matter. The sheaf filled 22 pages, and sold at eight cents a copy, two copies 15 cents.
By the carefully wrought appeal in simple words aimed to reach millions of readers and by the face-to-face contact with thousands who came to the White House, Lincoln was holding to the single purpose of adding momentum to what there was of popular will for war. The late summer and early fall of ’63 seemed to mark a deepening of loyalties to Lincoln and his vision of where to go and how.
2 8 4
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
The President needed anchors, needed hope. A million volunteers had answered his call and given toil and blood for the cause of which he was the mouthpiece. Soon he was to order a draft for 300,000 more conscripts. He had told Mary Livermore there was little realization of the agony and cost that yet lay ahead. The reports of Grant and Sherman far down in the intestinal center of the Confederacy told him their belief that the war had only truly begun, as it could only be ended by complete and bloody conquest. So furiously had it raged thus far that both sides had often been left no time to bury their dead.
CHAPTER XX