The night of June 14, 1864, a man in his room in Hiron’s House, Windsor, Canada, stands before a mirror and in an amateur way arranges himself a disguise. On his unshaven upper lip he smooths a large false mustache, over the close-trimmed beard of his chin and jaws a long flowing set of whiskers. He blackens his reddish eyebrows. Under trousers and vest he buttons a bed pillow.
Nobody bothers him as he rides the ferry to Detroit. A customs officer punches him lightly in the stomach and lets it go at that. A policeman in Detroit is suspicious, takes him to a street gaslight, looks him over and lets him go. On a train out of Detroit a passenger bends down to whisper, “I know your voice but you are safe from me.” Snuggled in the berth of a sleeping car he rides safely overnight to Hamilton, Ohio.
This is the return of the Honorable Clement L. Vallandigham from alien land to native soil. He spoke to a convention that day: “I return of my own act... I was abducted from my home and forced into banishment. The assertion or insinuation of the President, that I was arrested because laboring with some effect to prevent the raising of troops ... is absolutely false ...”
Noah Brooks in Lincoln’s office referred to Vallandigham in Ohio. The President, with a quizzical look: “What! has Vallandigham got back?” Brooks had to say everybody knew it, and heard from the President: “Dear me! I supposed he was in a foreign land. Anyhow, I hope I do not know that he is in the United States; and I shall not, unless he says or does something to draw attention to him.”
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June 27, 1864, Chase sent the President the nomination of Maunsell B. Field for Assistant Treasurer at New York. Lincoln next day wrote Chase: “I cannot, without much embarrassment, make this appointment, principally because of Senator Morgan’s very firm opposition to it,” and naming three men Morgan had mentioned to Chase. “It will really oblige me if you will make choice among these three . . .”
Chase wrote asking an interview and the President the same day replied reciting inexorable political considerations, and, “When I received your note this forenoon suggesting a verbal conversation ... I hesitated, because the difficulty does not, in the main part, lie within the range of a conversation between you and me. As the proverb goes, no man knows so well where the shoe pinches as he who wears it . . .”
The tone of this was a little new to Chase. Once more he resigned. This made four times. And now Lincoln wrote to Chase that his resignation was accepted. “Of all I have said in commendation of your ability and fidelity, I have nothing to unsay; and yet you and I have reached a point of mutual embarrassment in our official relations which it seems cannot be overcome, or longer sustained, consistently with the public service.” In his diary Chase wrote: “So my official life closes. I have laid broad foundations ... I am too earnest, too anti-slavery, and, say, too radical, to make the President willing to have me connected with the Administration, just as my opinion is that he is not earnest enough, not anti-slavery enough, not radical enough.”
The summer had brought stench of scandal. The New York World and other hostile newspapers day on day aired the matter of women from the Printing Bureau of the Treasury Department dressing in men’s attire and attending at the Canterbury Inn in Washington lewd performances to which men only were supposed to have admission. Two newspaper columns of affidavits recited details giving the impression that the Treasury Department offices held a fast and loose set of public servants. This to one as spotless as Chase in relation to women was not to be laughed off. The New York Tribune presented Chase’s view that the affair was a conspiracy and dirty politics.
Hay read mixed motives. The resignation came when gold reached a new high point, when despair over government finance was deepest. The political motive, however, outweighed all others, the yearnings of Chase in his remark to the editor of the Indianapolis Independent, “After all, I believe that I would rather that the people should wonder why I wasn’t President than why I was.”
Lincoln named former Governor David Tod of Ohio, an old Douglas Democrat, to replace Chase. The Senate Finance Committee called in a body on Lincoln to protest that Fod hadn’t the ability. A telegram from Tod to the
President said his health would not permit him to head the Treasury. So Tod was out of the way.
Early next morning the President wrote out a nomination for William Pitt Fessenden, Senator from Maine, to fill the vacancy. The Senate took about one minute to confirm the nomination unanimously.
As chairman of the Senate Finance Committee Fessenden knew the money market was feverish, public confidence wavering; yet his friends were saying a financial crash would follow his refusal. Fie wrote: “Foreseeing nothing but entire prostration of my physical powers, and feeling that to take the Treasury in its exhausted condition would probably result in destroying what little reputation I had, it was still my duty to hazard both life and reputation if by so doing I could avert a crisis so imminent. I consented, therefore, to make the sacrifice.”
Telegrams and letters of approval beyond precedent had poured in on Fessenden. The New York and Boston clearinghouses, bankers and merchants in all quarters, it seemed, urged his acceptance of the President’s nomination when it was reported he would refuse. At the first report that Fessenden was to be Secretary of the Treasury, Government bonds advanced, pork declined $10 a barrel, and all provisions went to lower prices.
Fessenden was sworn in. The press held forth in compliments such as never before, except in the case of Grant, over a major Lincoln appointment. Flay quoted the President: “It is very singular, considering that this appointment of F. s is so popular when made, that no one ever mentioned his name to me for that place . .
Fessenden had attacked the administration on the $300 clause of the draft law. Fie would credit the Government with the best intentions and would sustain it thoroughly, but he was opposed to “the system of high bounties which made people forget that their first duty was to the country."
Three of Fessenden’s four sons had gone into the Army. Sam had been killed in battle at Centerville in ’62; the others had won advancement by valor and ability to brigadier general and colonel. In ’64 Frank was on the Red River in Arkansas, Jim with one leg gone was on Fiooker’s staff with Sherman trying to take Atlanta.
Starting as a young lawyer in Portland, Maine, Fessenden had become a Whig Congressman, later a Senator, helped found the Republican party, watched the tariff, fisheries and shipping interests of his state, clashed with Welles over Maine’s share of favors and patronage, and was now to undergo the trials of an executive. The national debt was $1,700,000,000, the Treasury almost empty, the war costing $2,000,000 a day.
For several weeks it would seem Fessenden held off from making arrangements with Cooke, saying in effect that newspapers and politicians
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had made out too strong a case against Cooke’s garnering a large comfortable fortune for himself in the selling of Government bonds. Out of interviews with Fessenden and Lincoln it followed that Jay Cooke & Company were once more harnessed into Government service.
Seventeen days before Chase resigned Congress had passed the Gold Bill and the President signed it. To buy or sell gold for delivery later than the day of signing the contract was made a crime. To contract to buy or sell gold not in the hands of the seller when selling was made a crime. The purpose was to stop speculation and gambling in gold. In the past six months gold had steadily climbed from 150 to 250. The Gold Bill made the course of gold crazier than before. It cavorted and somersaulted so fast in such a price range that it was the gambler’s perfect delight. And actual gold was sent into deeper hiding and became scarcer for its functions of paying interest on Government bonds and foreign exchange.
After the 17 days of gold-price acrobatics Congress repealed the Gold Bill and the President signed the repeal. From then on the gold gamblers were accepted by the Government as an evil beyond control. Nothing came of a Union League meeting in June ’64 urging that “Congress at once order the erection of scaffolds for hanging” the gold speculators.
In the deep gloom months of July and August ’64, the barometric indicator, gold, was to say that Lincoln and the Union Government were failing. Thirty- nine dollars of gold would buy $100 of greenbacks. This was the bottom gold price of the Union Government’s paper promises to pay. One interpretation was that the holders of gold in those months had less hope than ever of the Union Government winning its war.
On July 4 of this gloomy summer Congress adjourned. Among the bills piled on the President’s desk for signature was one that would slash the slender supports on which the “Lincoln ten-per-cent plan” rested. Since December ’63, when the President had launched his plan, much had happened to it. Then Hay wrote in his diary that all factions in Congress seemed to agree, and on the reading of the President’s message, “Men acted as if the millennium had come. Chandler was delighted, Sumner was beaming.” Border State men said they were satisfied.
I hen slowly had come deepening suspicions of the President’s motives, more open claims that the states in secession had committed suicide and that the President was impossible in his plan for a loyal 10 per cent to be authorized to reorganize the governments of those states. Henry Winter Davis led this opposition in the House, and Ben Wade in the Senate. Davis was tall, slender, with wavy hair and a curly mustache, a musical voice, mental
caliber, oratorical and theatrical style. Born in a Maryland slaveholding family he had come to hate slavery as fiercely as any New Englander. In politics first a Whig, then an American or Know-Nothing, he became a Republican. That Monty Blair of Maryland should be named Postmaster General was a stench in his nostrils. He led in Maryland a faction that hated Blair.
Davis brought in a bill intended to block the restoration efforts already started by the President in Louisiana and Tennessee; the measure aimed to stop the spread of the President’s policy in other Southern States. In the House Davis was the one radical most often reminded by Thaddeus Stevens that he was going too far and ought to take what he could get now. The one speaker who could draw in more members from the cloakrooms than any other was Davis. He spoke his guess and vision for the Negro with cadence: “The folly of our ancestors and the wisdom of the Almighty, in its inscrutable purpose, having allowed them to come here and planted them here, they have a right to remain here to the latest syllable of recorded time.”
The quixotic political artist, Davis, with his ally Ben Wade, saw a wide chasm between them and the President. They nursed suspicions into what they believed were facts. The President was too slow, too hesitant, too loose with expedient, they believed, and Congress would be more firm. New state governments could be referred “to no authority except the judgment and will of the majority of Congress,” said Davis in behalf of his bill of February 15, 1864. Under the bill the President with Senate consent would appoint for each state in rebellion a provisional governor to serve until Congress recognized a regular civil government as existing therein, the loyal people of the state entitled to elect delegates to re-establish a state government. “Until therefore,” said Davis, “Congress recognize a State government, organized under its auspices, there is no government in the rebel States except the authority of Congress.” Davis rejected the President’s Amnesty Proclamation and its “ten-per-cent plan” as lacking guarantees.
The debate ran long, a festival of constitutional lawyers. How and when does a state become a state, and under what conditions can it lose its face as a state and again later have its face put back? This question was argued up, down and across. The unconstitutional and despotic acts of the President would be legalized and perpetuated by the proposed bill, declared Representative Charles Denison of Pennsylvania. Perry of New Jersey was positive the Machiavellian hand of the President was behind the bill. Nor was Thaddeus Stevens satisfied with the Davis bill. “It does not, in my judgment, meet the evil.” Its acknowledgment that the “rebel States have rights under the Constitution” he would deny. His chief objection was that the bill removed the opportunity of confiscating the property of the disloyal.
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By 73 to 59 the Davis bill passed the House May 4, 1864. In the Senate its course had been guided by Wade, who said: “The Executive ought not to be permitted to handle this great question to his own liking. 1 hat a state should have self-government originated by one-tenth of the population seemed to Wade absurd, anti-republican, anomalous and entirely subversive.
In what the President had thus far done he was “equally a usurper with Caesar, Cromwell and Bonaparte,” said Garrett Davis of Kentucky. In exploiting the Peace Democrat viewpoint Garrett Davis spread over the pages of the Congressional Globe a diatribe of several thousand words on Lincoln’s ambition, desire for re-election, love of power and money. “He is no statesman, but a mere political charlatan. He has inordinate vanity and conceit. He is a consummate dissembler, and an adroit and sagacious demagogue.” The tentative and hazardous state governments set up by the President in Louisiana, Tennessee and Arkansas were denounced by Garrett Davis as “lawless and daring political enterprises” intended to garner electoral votes in the coming November.
The main bill of Wade, which had been on the Senators’ desks for five months, passed July 2, 1864, by 26 Yeas to 3 Nays, with no less than 20 Senators absent. The bill went into conference. Wade moved that the Senate agree to the House [Davis] bill. The Senate agreed by 18 Yeas and 14 Nays, no less than 17 Senators being absent.
In the months the bill had been before Congress, “The President declined to exercise any influence on the debate,” said his secretaries, meaning that no Senators or Representatives were privately called in by the President to hear a request that they should do the best they could against it.
Into this confusion and perplexity four days after Congress adjourned the President stepped with an amazing document. He issued a proclamation reciting that Congress had passed a bill to guarantee republican form of government to certain states, and “the said bill was presented to the President of the United States for his approval less than one hour before the sine die adjournment of said session, and was not signed by him.” Never before had an Executive assumed to reject those provisions in a legislative measure he disliked and to adopt those acceptable to him. And he went straight to the people proclaiming what he did. He had neither signed the bill nor vetoed it. “He put it in his pocket.” Madison and others had used this pocket veto. He was “fully satisfied with part ol the bill but as to other parts he was “unprepared.” The key of the matter was in his saying he could not be “inflexibly committed to any single plan ol restoration. Over the heads of Congress and its embittered and warring factions, he put his case to the country and the people.
Ben Wade and Henry Winter Davis raged privately and stormed publicly. In the New York Tribune of August 5 they published their joint answer
to Lincoln, picked up and reprinted over the country, “The Wade-Davis Manifesto.” The language was fierce and polite at once. They hoped to blast the pinions from under the President and blister his name and give him a lesson. Addressing themselves “To the Supporters of the Government,” they said they had “read without surprise, but not without indignation” the President’s proclamation of July 8. They would maintain it was a right and a duty “to check the encroachments of the Executive on the authority of Congress, and to require it to confine itself to its proper sphere.” The President did not sign the bill in question. “The bill did not therefore become a law; and it is therefore nothing. The proclamation is neither an approval nor a veto of the bill; it is therefore a document unknown to the laws and Constitution of the United States . . . The committee sent to ascertain if the President had any further communication for the House of Representatives reported that he had none; and the friends of the bill, who had anxiously waited on him to ascertain its fate, had already been informed that the President had resolved not to sign it. The time of presentation, therefore, had nothing to do with his failure to approve it.
“The President persists in recognizing those shadows of governments in Arkansas and Louisiana, which Congress formally declared should not be recognized—whose representatives and senators were repelled by formal votes of both Houses of Congress . . . They are the mere creatures of his will.” The President held “the electoral votes of the rebel states at the dictation of his personal ambition.” He had “greatly presumed” and they would give warning. “He must understand . . . that the whole body of the Union men of Congress will not submit to be impeached by him of rash and unconstitutional legislation; and if he wishes our support he must confine himself to his executive duties—to obey and to execute, not make the law.”
On hearing the rasp and snarl of this family quarrel in the Republican party the opposition rejoiced. One who was hot under the collar came to Lincoln about it. And according to Carpenter, the President philosophized: “It is not worth fretting about; it reminds me of an old acquaintance, who, having a son of a scientific turn, bought him a microscope. The boy went around experimenting with his glass on everything that came in his way. One day, at the dinner-table, his father took up a piece of cheese. ‘Don’t eat that, father,’ said the boy; ‘it is full of ‘wrigglers.’‘My son,’ replied the old gentleman, taking, at the same time, a huge bite, ‘let; ’em wriggle-, I can stand it if they can.’”
Welles wrote: “The President, in a conversation with Blair and myself on the Wade and Davis protest, remarked that he had not, and probably should not read it.” And Welles strayed into dejection over the President’s having
advised only with Seward on his pocket-veto proclamation, having called no Cabinet meeting on it.
The main landscape of the country was too somber for people to care that Wade and Davis had lost their heads or that Davis by his false stride was to fail of nomination and lose his seat in Congress to a Unionist colonel who had come near death from wounds in the Wilderness. One viewpoint was given by Harper’s Weekly. “We have read with pain the manifesto of Messrs. Wade and Winter Davis, not because of its envenomed hostility to the President, but because of its ill-tempered spirit, which proves conclusively the unfitness of either of the gentlemen for grave counselors in a time of national peril . . . It was the President’s constitutional right to let the bill drop and say nothing more about it.”
In the three days immediately preceding his proclamation concerning the Wade-Davis bill the President issued, with detailed reasons, a proclamation suspending the writ of habeas corpus in Kentucky, and another proclamation, by direction of Congress, appointing the first Thursday of August as a day of national humiliation and prayer.
Once more General Robert E. Lee played a bold defensive game and struck fear into the heart of the Union cause. He gave Jubal A. Early and John C. Breckinridge an army of 20,000 men. Sheltered by the Blue Ridge Mountains, they marched up the Shenandoah Valley, slipped through a pass, headed for Washington.
Early’s men collected $20,000 cash at Hagerstown, tore up 24 miles of Baltimore & Ohio Railroad tracks, wrecked and burned milk, workshops, factories, at Baltimore burned the home of Governor Bradford, reached Silver Spring and in sight of the Capitol dome seized private papers, valuables, whisky, in the home of Postmaster General Blair, and then set the house afire. “Baltimore is in great peril,” telegraphed a mayor’s committee to Lincoln, asking for troops. Lincoln wired: “I have not a single soldier but whom is being disposed by the Military for the best protection of all. By latest accounts the enemy is moving on Washington. They can not fly to either place. Let us be vigilant but keep cool. I hope neither Baltimore or Washington will be sacked.”
Lew Wallace, department commander at Baltimore, had marched troops out to Monocacy, [ought a battle and, heavily outnumbered, was routed. His defeat delayed Earlys army one day. 1 hat one day, it was generally admitted, saved Washington from the shame of capture. Gustavus Vasa Fox, without the Presidents knowing it, had a steamer ready for him in case the city was taken. In the Gold Room in New York June 11 the wild-eyed gamblers saw gold go to its peak price of 285.
Raw troops and soldiers just out of hospital made up the 20,000 men scraped together for manning the forts around Washington against Early, who had cut all wires north and July 11 marched his men on the Seventh Street Road that would lead him straight to the offices, arsenals, gold and silver, of the U.S. Government. Early halted his men just a little over two miles from Soldiers’ Home, where Lincoln the night before had gone to bed when a squad from the War Department arrived with word from Stanton that he must get back to the city in a hurry. The President dressed and rode to the Executive Mansion.
Next day Lincoln saw through a spyglass transport steamers at Alexandria coming to unload two magnificent divisions of veteran troops fresh from Grant at City Point. The President met them at the wharf, touched his hat to them; they cheered and he waved his hand and smiled and they sent up more and more cheers. No mail, no telegrams, arrived from the outer world that day of July 12 in Washington.
From where Lincoln stood on a Fort Stevens rampart that afternoon he could see the swaying skirmish lines and later the marching brigade of General Daniel D. Bidwell, a police justice from Buffalo, New York, who had enlisted in ’61 as a private, advanced in rank, and with his men had heard the bullets sing from Antietam through Gettysburg and the Wilderness. Out across parched fields, dust and a haze of summer heat marched Bidwell’s men in perfect order, to drive the enemy from a house and orchard near the Silver Spring Road. Up a rise of ground in the face of a withering fire they moved, took their point and pushed the enemy pickets back for a mile—the cost 280 men killed and wounded.
While Lincoln stood watching this bloody drama a bullet whizzed five feet from him and struck Surgeon Crawford of the 102d Pennsylvania in the ankle. Within three feet of the President an officer fell with a death wound. Those who were there said he was cool and thoughtful, seemed unconscious of danger, and looked like a Commander in Chief. “Amid the whizzing bullets,” wrote Nicolay and Hay, the President held to his place “with . . . grave and passive countenance,” till finally “General Wright peremptorily represented to him the needless risk he was running.” Official records gave the Union losses at 380 killed and 319 wounded.
Next morning Early’s army was gone. Again on July 14 Washington had mail and telegrams. Somewhere toward the Shenandoah Valley marched Early’s army with its plunder-laden wagons, audacity on its banners, money in its strongboxes, shoes on feet that had started north barefoot. Early got away for the same reason, it was said, that he arrived. “Nobody stopped him.”
And why? The answer would require a diagram of the overlapping authorities and departments; of many physical and psychic factors, of slackness, fears, jealousies, rivalries. Nicolay and Hay recorded: “Everybody was eager for the pursuit [of Early] to begin; but Grant was too far away to give the necessary orders; the President, true to the position he had taken when Grant was made general-in-chief, would not interfere, though he observed with anguish the undisturbed retreat of Early.” Halleck assumed that he was in fact, as he ranked, a chief of staff and not a commander from whom strategy was required. “Put Halleck in command of 20,000 men,” said Ben Wade, “and he would not scare three sitting geese from their nests.” “Today,” wrote Bates in his diary, “I spoke my mind very plainly, to the Prest. (in presence of Seward, Welles and Usher) about the ignorant imbecility of the late military operations, and my contempt for Genl. Halleck.”
On July 25 Grant sent a dynamic constructive proposal to Lincoln on “the necessity of having the four departments of the Susquehanna, the Middle, West Virginia, and Washington, under one head.” He had made this proposal before and the War Department had rejected it. Now he was urging it again. And again he was naming General William B. Franklin, one of the abler major generals of distinguished field service, “as a suitable person to command the whole.” Two days later the Secretary of War notified not General Franklin, but Halleck, that “the President directs me to instruct you that all the military operations” of the four departments and all the forces in those departments, “are placed under your general command.”
It seemed that Grant wanted Franklin, or some other proven field general, at the head of the defense of Washington, while Stanton wanted the desk strategist, Halleck, elevated from staff chief to commander. And as between Stanton and Grant the President was saying Yes to Stanton and No to Grant. On the face of the matter Lincoln was going back on Grant and taking a stand with the established political bureaucrats who muddled instead of performing. Stantons order accommodating Grant by joining four departments into one, and then giving Grant the last man Grant would have picked to head the new four-in-one department, was dated July 27.
And on that day Grant took to drink. Had Rawlins been there, Rawlins would have cursed him and put up arguments and returned to cursing and Grant would have stayed sober. As it was, Rawlins on July 28 got back from Washington to write his wife: I find the General in my absence digressed from his true path. The God of Heaven only knows how long I am to serve my country as the guardian of the habits of him whom it has honored.”
Whethei the death of Major General James B. McPherson could have had anything to do with Grants drinking on July 27, Rawlins did not write his wife.
Five days before, McPherson, bronzed, tall, tireless, in boots and gauntlets on a beautiful black horse, had ridden away from a talk with Sherman to examine the cause of a new roaring note in the bring on the left of their army near Atlanta. McPherson was only 35, with a future of hope ahead of him and a sweetheart dated to marry him when Atlanta should be taken. And McPhersons black horse had come racing back with saddle empty. Later they found him with a bullet near his heart—a soldier so rare that Grant had him in mind to take Sherman’s place if anything happened to Sherman, a friend and comrade so rare that Sherman at the news paced back and forth in a headquarters room barking orders, barking his grief, tears running down his cheeks into the red beard. Grant too at the news had wet eyes, and his voice broke in saying, “The country has lost one of its best soldiers, and I have lost my best friend.”
What was the balancing circumstance that made Lincoln say Yes when Stanton brought him the suggestion that Halleck and not Franklin must head the new four-in-one department? Could Stanton have boldly said to Lincoln that he must have this point or he would resign? Would that have been past Stanton? And could Lincoln at this hour have taken on himself the burden of finding a new Secretary of War to replace Stanton? If so, who would make a better one than Stanton? In telegrams they exchanged July 28 and 29 it was evident that Grant and Lincoln each understood delicate and involved matters of administration and personnel they could neither write nor telegraph. Both men were working at a furious pace in the fevered air of decisive events. On July 19 Grant had telegraphed the President a suggestion to call for another draft of 300,000 men and Lincoln had replied: “I suppose you had not seen the call for 500,000 made the day before, and which I suppose covers the case. Always glad to have your suggestions.”
In grief over losing his library and many valuable papers when Early’s men ransacked, looted and burned his Silver Spring house, Monty Blair said nothing better could be expected while “poltroons and cowards” manned the War Department. Ready tongues carried this to Halleck. At once Halleck had to write about it to Stanton. “I desire to know whether such wholesale denouncement and accusation by a member of the Cabinet receives the sanction and support of the President of the United States.” Stanton chose to pass the letter without comment to the President, who remarked, “Men will speak their minds freely in this country,” and wrote to the Secretary of War:
“. . . Gen. Halleck’s letter ... in substance demands of me that if I approve the remarks, I shall strike the names of those officers from the rolls; and that if I do not approve them, the Post-Master-General shall be dismissed from the Cabinet. Whether the remarks were really made I do not know; nor do I suppose such knowledge is necessary to a correct response. If they were
made, I do not approve them; and yet, under the circumstances, I would not dismiss a member of the Cabinet therefor. I do not consider what may have been hastily said in a moment of vexation at so severe a loss, is sufficient ground for so grave a step. Besides this, truth is generally the best vindication against slander. I propose continuing to be myself the judge as to when a member of the Cabinet shall be dismissed. Thus Lincoln was peremptory, decisive, perfectly understanding and sweetly courteous, in a single letter.
In the cross play of hates, guesses were made as to whether some of the Federal Government servants hated each other any less than they hated the enemy. A peculiar mental attitude or a hoodoo spell pervaded much of Washington. Lincoln and Grant were aware of it. Grant on August 1 acted to evade it; he notified Fialleck that he was sending Sheridan to “expel the enemy from the border.’’ Sheridan’s record and status, his complete aloofness from the desk strategists of Washington, were such that there was nothing they could do about it. Lincoln approved the action and August 3 sent Grant a telegram momentous in its confession of a spirit that held powerful sway: “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. Wherever the enemy goes, let our troops go also.’ This, I think, is exactly right, as to how our forces should move. But please look over the despatches you may have receved from here, even since you made that order, and discover, if you can, that there is any idea in the head of anyone here, of 'putting our army South of the enemy’ or of following him to the death’ in any direction. I repeat to you it will neither be done nor attempted unless you watch it every day, and hour, and force it.”
Grant journeyed from south of Richmond to Monocacy north of Washington, August 6, 1864, for personal communication with Sheridan; his telegrams through the War Department were too often translated into something else. Or as he put it later: “I knew it was impossible for me to get orders through Washington to Sheridan to make a move, because they would be stopped there and such orders as Halleck’s caution (and that of the Secretary of War) would suggest would be given instead, and would, no doubt, be contradictory to mine. I he four times’ use ot “would had to be read more than once—and then there was no mistaking what Grant meant to say.
Weeks were to pass with Sheridan on trial, with Sherman on trial, one in the Shenandoah, the other in Georgia, two commanders not yet proved as Grant had been proved, both of them held by Grant as unbeatable. And the delays and failure of immediate victory were blamed, by those in black moods
for blaming that summer, chiefly on the President, who upheld all three and never let up in his efforts to meet their requirements.
Later in a political matter Sherman refused to correct a policy of Grant when so requested, saying, “Grant stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk, and now we stand by each other.”
Halleck had written to Sherman that the President wished to give him appointment as a major general in the Regular Army. “I wish you to say to the President,” wrote Sherman, “that I would prefer he should not nominate me or anyone.” He had all the rank he needed.
With the Armies of the Cumberland, Tennessee and Ohio joined into a force of 99,000, Sherman began his campaign from Chattanooga aimed at the capture of Atlanta. Between him and Atlanta was a Confederate army of 41,000, soon reinforced to 62,000, commanded by the master strategist General Joseph E. Johnston. Carrying scars of wounds from Florida Indian wars, from Cerro Gordo and Chapultepec in the Mexican War, from Seven Pines in the Peninsular campaign near Richmond, now 57 years old, a West Pointer, a Virginian who had never owned slaves, a clean sportsman of a fighter, a silent, cautious Fabian—little Joe Johnston, familiar with the red hills of Georgia, seemed the one marshal in gray best able to stop or delay Sherman. He led Sherman on. He fought and faded and waited. At Dalton, past Buzzard’s Roost, through Snake Creek Gap, back to Resaca and Cassville, across the Etowah, through Allatoona Pass, and after clashes at New Hope Church, not until Kenesaw Mountain did Johnston in his slowly maneuvered retreat lure Sherman into a frontal attack.
Sherman piled in his men on the fortified lines of Johnston hoping to break through and win victory and Atlanta. Sherman lost 3,000 as against the Confederates 800. “One or two more such assaults would use up this army,” said Old Pap Thomas. Not least of Johnston’s hopes was the one that he could hold off any Sherman victory until the November elections in the North. He would like to make Sherman’s efforts look useless in order to persuade Northern citizens that the Lincoln administration was useless.
Davis and Bragg at Richmond wanted more decisive action. Davis on July 17 replaced Johnston with General John B. Hood, who, they knew, would not wait and fade and hope. In 11 days Hood fought and lost three battles at a cost of 10,841 men to Sherman’s 9,719. Sherman had at last reached the Atlanta area. But would he take Atlanta? The North hoped. And the North despaired. Why did it take so long? Why had the whole war gone on so long? From Lincoln the last week of July Sherman had a long telegram which closed: “My profoundest thanks to you and your whole Army for the present campaign so far.”
Many were tired of the war, its cost, its betrayals and corruptions. Peace movements gained headway from this feeling in the North and the South. Fernando Wood in seeking to have Congress empower the President to appoint commissioners to discuss peace terms with Southern representatives was playing with this sentiment. To Davis in Richmond and to others Governor Zebulon B. Vance of North Carolina wrote of “discontent” in his state. “I have concluded it will be impossible to remove it except by some effort at negotiation with the enemy.” Davis gave Vance three instances wherein he had made “distinct efforts” to communicate with Lincoln, never once connecting, and to send peace proposals was “to invite insult and contumely, and to subject ourselves to indignity without the slightest chance of being listened to.”
The New York World and its country newspaper following would not let their readers forget that Lincoln’s inaugural address carried the portentous words: “Suppose you go to war, you cannot fight always; and when, after much loss on both sides, and no gain on either, you cease fighting, the identical old questions, as to terms of intercourse, are again upon you.”
Horace Greeley in July ’64 received a letter from a fellow signing himself “William Cornell Jewett of Colorado.” Jewett wrote many letters—to Lincoln, to Jeff Davis, to the New York Herald. Jewett needed listeners. Now he picked on Greeley, writing, “I am authorized to state to you, for your use only, not the public, that two ambassadors of Davis & Co. are now in Canada, with full and complete powers for a peace.” If the President would accord protection for these ambassadors they would meet in Niagara Falls whomsoever Lincoln might choose to send for a private interview.
The quavering Greeley again wrote to Lincoln one of his long letters, both pleading and cudgeling. Lincoln discounted Jewett’s story but within two days wrote to Greeley: “If you can find, any person anywhere professing to have any proposition of Jefferson Davis in writing, for peace, embracing the restoration or the Union and abandonment of slavery, what ever else it embraces, say to him he may come to me with you, and that if he really brings such proposition, he shall, at the least, have safe conduct, with the paper (and without publicity, if he choose) to the point where you shall have met him. I he same, if there be two or more persons.”
On July 13 Greeley again wrote Lincoln; now he had confidential information that the two Confederate ambassadors waiting and ready to cross over from Canada and talk peace terms at Niagara Falls were the Honorable Clement C. Clay of Alabama and the Honorable Jacob Thompson of Mississippi, each an ex-U.S. Senator from his state. Lincoln telegraphed two days later: “1 was not expecting you to send me a letter, but to bring me a man, or men. Mr. Hay goes to you with my answer.”
In New York Hay handed Greeley Lincoln’s letter which stated his disappointment over Greeley’s not having produced the commissioners and “if they would consent to come, on being shown my letter to you of the 9th. Inst. . . . bring them. I not only intend a sincere effort for peace, but I intend that you shall be a personal witness that it is made.” Greeley didn’t like the letter, noted Hay, said he was the worst man the President could have picked for such a mission. Lincoln, it was evident to Hay, was pressing the matter. Whatever reality or illusion might be hovering on the Canadian border, he was going to smoke it out.
At the town of Niagara Falls Greeley met Jewett and sent by him a letter to Clay, Thompson and a University of Virginia professor, James P. Holcombe, saying he was informed they were accredited from Richmond as bearing propositions looking toward peace, that they desired to visit Washington in their mission, George N. Sanders accompanying them, and “if my information be thus far substantially correct, I am authorized by the President of the United States to tender you his safe conduct on the journey proposed.” Greeley heard in reply that Jacob Thompson was not one of them, that none of them had authority to act for the Richmond Government, but they were acquainted with the views of their Government and could easily get credentials, or other agents could be accredited in their place, if they could be sent to Richmond armed with “the circumstances disclosed in this correspondence.”
Greeley telegraphed Lincoln the substance of this letter. Lincoln consulted with Seward and gave Hay a paper in his own handwriting to take to Niagara. There on July 20 Hay saw Greeley nettled and perplexed at reading:
Executive Mansion, Washington, July 18, 1864.
To Whom it may concern:
Any proposition which embraces the restoration of peace, the integrity of the whole Union, and the abandonment of slavery, and which comes by and with an authority that can control the armies now at war against the United States will be received and considered by the Executive government of the United States, and will be met by liberal terms on other substantial and collateral points; and the bearer, or bearers thereof shall have safe-conduct both ways.
Abraham Lincoln
Greeley proposed bringing Jewett into conference. Hay declined. Greeley then refused to cross the suspension bridge into Canada unless Hay would go with him and deliver the Lincoln paper into Confederate hands. The two then crossed the bridge, met Holcombe in a hotel room in Clifton, Canada,
and handed him the President’s letter. Greeley took a train for New York, but before doing so had an interview with Jewett, unknown to Hay. Hay stayed on a day and then wrote Holcombe asking when he might be favored with a reply to the communication addressed “To Whom it may concern.” “Mr. Holcombe greatly regrets,” was the reply, “if his [Hay’s] return to Washington has been delayed by any expectation of an answer.” Jewett then wrote the Confederate emissaries that Greeley was gone and he regretted “the sad termination of the initiatory steps taken for peace,” placing the blame on “the change made by the President in his instructions”; they could communicate with Greeley through him, Jewett.
The Confederates replied with compliments and a long letter to Greeley, holding the President responsible for the collapse of peace hopes. Without notifying Hay, Jewett gave this letter to the press, letting Hay know afterward that this was a mild form of revenge. The letter made interesting reading for a gloom-struck nation. Those who saw the President as “indecisive” had a new item to contemplate. Others saw the President as more astute, if not wiser, than they had expected.
There was drama bordering on farce in the Confederate diplomats, at the end of the suspension bridge connecting the United States and Canada, accusing Lincoln of high crimes. They assumed people would believe the President’s duty was to invite unauthorized Confederate agents to Washington to receive peace terms to carry to Richmond. They had hoped to use Bennett of the New York Herald for their game, Sanders remarking to Hay once, “I wanted old Bennett to come up, but he was afraid to come.” They had used Jewett to lure Greeley, Jewett having followed his first letter to Greeley with a telegram: “Will you come here? Parties have full power.” Greeley had believed the parties had foil power; Lincoln hadnt and by a litde memorandum addressed to nobody or anybody had thwarted them. Greeley’s course in the end brought ridicule on him; Lincoln at a climactic point turned the incident into a dramatic presentation of his Government’s viewpoint as to peace proposals.
Another peace mission was undertaken by Colonel James Frazier Jaquess, a Methodist clergyman from Illinois commissioned to raise and lead the 73d Illinois Volunteers, and James R. Gilmore, a newspaperman. Without Government authority from Lincoln, it was permitted by him under pressure. Under flags of truce the two men arrived in Richmond, and in an evening interview with Jefferson Davis, they had from him the declaration: “I worked night and day for twelve years to prevent it [war], but I could not. The North was mad and blind, would not let us govern ourselves, and so the war came; now it must go on until the last man of this generation falls in his tracks and
his children seize his musket and fight our battles, unless you acknowledge our right to self-government. We are not fighting for slavery. We are fighting for independence, and that, or extermination, we will have.”
Gilmore published the interview in the Atlantic Monthly, and the article, widely reprinted, went to millions of readers. At Niagara, through Greeley, Lincoln had given the world his peace terms; at Richmond, Davis had made himself clear.
Intricate in vast detail, droll, fantastic, comic in various phases, the Greeley and Jaquess-Gilmore peace missions had been affairs of risk. Any slight circumstance could have put Lincoln in a false light. Only a certain procedure of guns, men, blood and iron, could bring peace, it seemed. “Peace,” said Leslies Weekly August 6, 1864, “must come through the powerful negotiations of Gens. Grant and Sherman.”
CHAPTER XXXII