THE APPROACH OF VICTORY
1. _The War to the End of 1863_.
The events of the Eastern theatre of war have been followed into the
early summer of 1863, when Lee was for the second time about to invade
the North. The Western theatre of war has been left unnoticed since the
end of May, 1862. From that time to the end of the year no definite
progress was made here by either side, but here also the perplexities of
the military administration were considerable; and in Lincoln's life it
must be noted that in these months the strain of anxiety about the
Eastern army and about the policy of emancipation was accompanied by
acute doubt in regard to the conduct of war in the West.
When Halleck had been summoned from the West, Lincoln had again a general
by his side in Washington to exercise command under him of all the
armies. Halleck was a man of some intellectual distinction who might be
expected to take a broad view of the war as a whole; this and his freedom
from petty feelings, as to which Lincoln's known opinion of him can be
corroborated, doubtless made him useful as an adviser; nor for a
considerable time was there any man with apparently better qualifications
for his position. But Lincoln soon found, as has been seen, that Halleck
lacked energy of will, and cannot have been long in discovering that his
judgment was not very good. The President had thus to make the best use
he could of expert advice upon which he would not have been justified in
relying very fully.
When Halleck arrived at Corinth at the end of May, 1862, the whole of
Western and Middle Tennessee was for the time clear of the enemy, and he
turned his attention at once to the long delayed project of rescuing the
Unionists in Eastern Tennessee, which was occupied by a Confederate army
under General Kirby Smith. His object was to seize Chattanooga, which
lay about 150 miles to the east of him, and invade Eastern Tennessee by
way of the valley of the Tennessee River, which cuts through the
mountains behind Chattanooga. With this in view he would doubtless have
been wise if he had first continued his advance with his whole force
against the Confederate army under Beauregard, which after evacuating
Corinth had fallen back to rest and recruit in a far healthier situation
50 miles further south. Beauregard would have been obliged either to
fight him with inferior numbers or to shut himself up in the fortress of
Vicksburg. As it was, Halleck spent the month of June merely in
repairing the railway line which runs from Corinth in the direction of
Chattanooga. When he was called to Washington he left Grant, who for
several months past had been kept idle as his second in command, in
independent command of a force which was to remain near the Mississippi
confronting Beauregard, but he restricted him to a merely defensive part
by ordering him to keep a part of his army ready to send to Buell
whenever that general needed it, as he soon did. Buell, who again took
over his former independent command, was ordered by Halleck to advance on
Chattanooga, using Corinth as his base of supply. Buell had wished that
the base for the advance upon Chattanooga should be transferred to
Nashville, in the centre of Tennessee, in which case the line of railway
communication would have been shorter and also less exposed to raids by
the Southern cavalry. After Halleck had gone, Buell obtained permission
to effect this change of base. The whole month of June had been wasted
in repairing the railway with a view to Halleck's faulty plan. When
Buell himself was allowed to proceed on his own lines and was approaching
Chattanooga, his communications with Nashville were twice, in the middle
of July and in the middle of August, cut by Confederate cavalry raids,
which did such serious damage as to impose great delay upon him. In the
end of August and beginning of September Kirby Smith, whose army had been
strengthened by troops transferred from Beauregard, crossed the mountains
from East Tennessee by passes some distance northeast of Chattanooga, and
invaded Kentucky, sending detachments to threaten Louisville on the
Indiana border of Kentucky and Cincinnati in Ohio. It was necessary for
Buell to retreat, when, after a week or more of uncertainty, it became
clear that Kirby Smith's main force was committed to this invasion.
Meanwhile General Bragg, who, owing to the illness of Beauregard, had
succeeded to his command, left part of his force to hold Grant in check,
marched with the remainder to support Kirby Smith, and succeeded in
placing himself between Buell's army and Louisville, to protect which
from Kirby Smith had become Buell's first object. It seems that Bragg,
who could easily have been reinforced by Kirby Smith, had now an
opportunity of fighting Buell with great advantage. But the Confederate
generals, who mistakenly believed that Kentucky was at heart with them,
saw an imaginary political gain in occupying Frankfort, the State
capital, and formally setting up a new State Government there. Bragg
therefore marched on to join Kirby Smith at Frankfort, which was well to
the east of Buell's line of retreat, and Buell was able to reach
Louisville unopposed by September 25.
These events were watched in the North with all the more anxiety because
the Confederate invasion of Kentucky began just about the time of the
second battle of Bull Run, and Buell arrived at Louisville within a week
after the battle of Antietam while people were wondering how that victory
would be followed up. Men of intelligence and influence, especially in
the Western States, were loud in their complaints of Buell's want of
vigour. It is remarkable that the Unionists of Kentucky, who suffered
the most through his supposed faults, expressed their confidence in him;
but his own soldiers did not like him, for he was a strict disciplinarian
without either tact or any quality which much impressed them. Their
reports to their homes in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, from which they
mostly came, increased the feeling against him which was arising in those
States, and his relations with the Governors of Ohio and Indiana, who
were busy in sending him recruits and whose States were threatened with
invasion, seem, wherever the fault may have lain, to have been
unfortunate. Buell's most powerful friend had been McClellan, and by an
irrational but unavoidable process of thought the real dilatoriness of
McClellan became an argument for blaming Buell as well. Halleck defended
him loyally, but this by now probably seemed to Lincoln the apology of
one irresolute man for another. Stanton, whose efficiency in the
business of the War Department gave him great weight, had become eager
for the removal of Buell. Lincoln expected that as soon as Buell could
cover Louisville he would take the offensive promptly. His army appears
to have exceeded in numbers, though not very much, the combined forces of
Bragg and Kirby Smith, and except as to cavalry it was probably as good
in quality. If energetically used by Halleck some months before, the
Western armies should have been strong enough to accomplish great
results; and if the attempt had been made at first to raise much larger
armies, it seems likely that the difficulties of training and
organisation and command would have increased out of proportion to any
gain. Buell remained some days at Louisville itself, receiving
reinforcements which were considerable, but consisted mainly of raw
recruits. While he was there orders arrived from Lincoln removing him
and appointing his second in command, the Virginian Thomas, in his place.
This was a wise choice; Thomas was one of the four Northern generals who
won abiding distinction in the Civil War. But Thomas felt the injustice
which was done to Buell, and he refused the command in a letter
magnanimously defending him. The fact was that Lincoln had rescinded his
orders before they were received, for he had issued them under the belief
that Buell was remaining on the defensive, but learnt immediately that an
offensive movement was in progress, and had no intention of changing
commanders under those circumstances.
On October 8 a battle, which began in an accidental minor conflict, took
place between Buell with 58,000 men and Bragg with considerably less than
half that number of tried veterans. Buell made little use of his
superior numbers, for which the fault may have lain with the corps
commander who first became engaged and who did not report at once to him;
the part of Buell's army which bore the brunt of the fighting suffered
heavy losses, which made a painful impression in the North, and the
public outcry against him, which had begun as soon as Kentucky was
invaded by the Confederates, now increased. After the battle Bragg fell
back and effected a junction with Kirby Smith. Their joint forces were
not very far inferior to Buell's in numbers, but after a few more days
Bragg determined to evacuate Kentucky, in which his hope of raising many
recruits had been disappointed. Buell, on perceiving his intention,
pursued him some distance, but, finding the roads bad for the movement of
large bodies of troops, finally took up a position at Bowling Green, on
the railway to the north of Nashville, intending later in the autumn to
move a little south of Nashville and there to wait for the spring before
again moving on Chattanooga. He was urged from Washington to press
forward towards Chattanooga at once, but replied decidedly that he was
unable to do so, and added that if a change of command was desired the
present was a suitable time for it. At the end of October he was removed
from command. In the meantime the Confederate forces that had been left
to oppose Grant had attacked him and been signally defeated in two
engagements, in each of which General Rosecrans, who was serving under
Grant, was in immediate command on the Northern side. Rosecrans, who
therefore began to be looked upon as a promising general, and indeed was
one of those who, in the chatter of the time, were occasionally spoken of
as suitable for a "military dictatorship," was now put in Buell's place,
which Thomas had once refused. He advanced to Nashville, but was as firm
as Buell in refusing to go further till he had accumulated rations enough
to make him for a time independent of the railway. Ultimately he moved
on Murfreesborough, some thirty miles further in the direction of
Chattanooga. Here on December 31, 1862, Bragg, with somewhat inferior
numbers, attacked him and gained an initial success, which Rosecrans and
his subordinates, Thomas and Sheridan, were able to prevent him from
making good. Bragg's losses were heavy, and, after waiting a few days in
the hope that Rosecrans might retreat first, he fell back to a point near
the Cumberland mountains a little in advance of Chattanooga. Thus the
battle of Murfreesborough counted as a victory to the North, a slight
set-off to the disaster at Fredericksburg a little while before. But it
had no very striking consequences. For over six months Rosecrans
proceeded no further. The Northern armies remained in more secure
possession of all Tennessee west of the mountains than they had obtained
in the first half of 1862; but the length of their communications and the
great superiority of the South in cavalry, which could threaten those
communications, suspended their further advance. Lincoln urged that
their army could subsist on the country which it invaded, but Buell and
Rosecrans treated the idea as impracticable; in fact, till a little later
all Northern generals so regarded it.
Thus Chattanooga, which it was hoped would be occupied soon after Halleck
had occupied Corinth, remained in Southern hands for more than a year
after that, notwithstanding the removal of Buell, to whom this
disappointment and the mortifying invasion of Kentucky were at first
attributed. This was rightly felt to be unsatisfactory, but the chief
blame that can now be imputed falls upon the mistakes of Halleck while he
was still commanding in the West. There is no reason to suppose that
Buell had any exceptional amount of intuition or of energy and it was
right to demand that a general with both these qualities should be
appointed if he could be found. But he was at least a prudent officer,
of fair capacity, doing his best. The criticisms upon him, of which the
well informed were lavish, were uttered without appreciation of practical
difficulties or of the standard by which he was really to be judged. So,
with far more justice than McClellan, he has been numbered among the
misused generals. Lincoln, there is no doubt, had watched his
proceedings, as he watched those of Rosecrans after him, with a feeling
of impatience, and set him down as unenterprising and obstinate. In one
point his Administration was much to blame in its treatment of the
Western commanders. It became common political talk that the way to get
victories was to treat unsuccessful generals almost as harshly as the
French in the Revolution were understood to have treated them. Lincoln
did not go thus far, but it was probably with his authority that before
Buell was removed Halleck, with reluctance on his own part, wrote a
letter referring to this prevalent idea and calculated to put about among
the Western commanders an expectation that whichever of them first did
something notable would be put over his less successful colleagues.
Later on, and, as we can hardly doubt, with Lincoln's consent, Grant and
Rosecrans were each informed that the first of them to win a victory
would get the vacant major-generalship in the United States Army in place
of his present volunteer rank. This was not the way to handle men with
proper professional pride, and it is one of those cases, which are
strangely few, where Lincoln made the sort of mistake that might have
been expected from his want of training and not from his native
generosity. But in the main his treatment of this difficult question was
sound. Sharing as he did the prevailing impatience with Buell, he had no
intention of yielding to it till there was a real prospect that a change
of generals would be a change for the better. When the appointment of
Thomas was proposed there really was such a prospect. When Rosecrans was
eventually put in Buell's place the result was disappointing to Lincoln,
but it was evidently not a bad appointment, and a situation had then
arisen in which it would have been folly to retain Buell if any capable
successor to him could be found; for the Governors of Indiana, Ohio and
Illinois, of whom the first named was reputed the ablest of the "war
Governors" in the West, and on whom his army depended for recruits, now
combined in representations against him which could not be ignored.
Lincoln, who could not have personal acquaintance with the generals of
the Western armies as he had with those in the East, was, it should be
observed, throughout unceasing in his efforts to get the fullest and
clearest impression of them that he could; he was always, as it has been
put, "taking measurements" of men, and a good deal of what seemed idle
and gossipy talk with chance visitors, who could tell him little
incidents or give him new impressions, seems to have had this serious
purpose. For the first half of the war the choice of men for high
commands was the most harassing of all the difficulties of his
administration. There is no doubt of his constant watchfulness to
discern and promote merit. He was certainly beset by the feeling that
generals were apt to be wanting in the vigour and boldness which the
conduct of the war demanded, but, though this in some cases probably
misled him, upon the whole there was good reason for it. On the other
hand, it must be considered that all this while he knew himself to be
losing influence through his supposed want of energy in the war, and that
he was under strong and unceasing pressure from every influential quarter
to dismiss every general who caused disappointment. Newspapers and
private letters of the time demonstrate that there was intense impatience
against him for not producing victorious generals. This being so, his
own patience in this matter and his resolution to give those under him a
fair chance appear very remarkable and were certainly very wise.
We have come, however, to the end, not of all the clamour against
Lincoln, but of his own worst perplexities. In passing to the operations
further west we are passing to an instance in which Lincoln felt it right
to stand to the end by a decried commander, and that decried commander
proved to possess the very qualities for which he had vainly looked in
others. The reverse side of General Grant's fame is well enough known to
the world. Before the war he had been living under a cloud. In the
autumn of 1862, while his army lay between Corinth and Memphis, the cloud
still rested on his reputation. In spite of the glory he had won for a
moment at Fort Donelson, large circles were ready to speak of him simply
as an "incompetent and disagreeable man." The crowning work of his life
was accomplished with terrible bloodshed which was often attributed to
callousness and incapacity on his part. The eight years of his
Presidency afterwards, which cannot properly be discussed here, added at
the best no lustre to his memory. Later still, when he visited Europe as
a celebrity the general impression which he created seems to be contained
in the words "a rude man." Thus the Grant that we discover in the
recollections of a few loyal and loving friends, and in the memoirs which
he himself began when late in life he lost his money and which he
finished with the pains of death upon him, is a surprising, in some ways
pathetic, figure. He had been a shy country boy, ready enough at all the
work of a farm and good with horses, but with none of the business
aptitude that make a successful farmer, when his father made him go to
West Point. Here he showed no great promise and made few friends; his
health became delicate, and he wanted to leave the army and become a
teacher of mathematics. But the Mexican War, one of the most unjust in
all history, as he afterwards said, broke out, and--so he later
thought--saved his life from consumption by keeping him in the open air.
After that he did retire, failed at farming and other ventures, and at
thirty-nine, when the Civil War began, was as has been seen, a
shabby-looking, shiftless fellow, pretty far gone in the habit of drink,
and more or less occupied about a leather business of his father's.
Rough in appearance and in manner he remained--the very opposite of
smart, the very opposite of versatile, the very opposite of expansive in
speech or social intercourse. Unlike many rough people, he had a really
simple character--truthful, modest, and kind; without varied interests,
or complicated emotions, or much sense of fun, but thinking intensely on
the problems that he did see before him, and in his silent way keenly
sensitive on most of the points on which it is well to be sensitive. His
friends reckoned up the very few occasions on which he was ever seen to
be angry; only one could be recalled on which he was angry on his own
account; the cruelty of a driver to animals in his supply train,
heartless neglect in carrying out the arrangements he had made for the
comfort of the sick and wounded, these were the sort of occasions which
broke down Grant's habitual self-possession and good temper. "He was
never too anxious," wrote Chaplain Eaton, who, having been set by him in
charge of the negro refugees with his army, had excellent means of
judging, "never too preoccupied with the great problems that beset him,
to take a sincere and humane interest in the welfare of the most
subordinate labourer dependent upon him." And he had delicacy of feeling
in other ways. Once in the crowd at some hotel, in which he mingled an
undistinguished figure, an old officer under him tried on a lecherous
story for the entertainment of the General, who did not look the sort of
man to resent it; Grant, who did not wish to set down an older man
roughly, and had no ready phrases, but had, as it happens, a sensitive
skin, was observed to blush to the roots of his hair in exquisite
discomfort. It would be easy to multiply little recorded traits of this
somewhat unexpected kind, which give grace to the memory of his
determination in a duty which became very grim.
The simplicity of character as well as manner which endeared him to a few
close associates was probably a very poor equipment for the Presidency,
which, from that very simplicity, he afterwards treated as his due; and
Grant presented in some ways as great a contrast as can be imagined to
the large and complex mind of Lincoln. But he was the man that Lincoln
had yearned for. Whatever degree of military skill may be ascribed to
him, he had in the fullest measure the moral attributes of a commander.
The sense that the war could be put through and must be put through
possessed his soul. He was insusceptible to personal danger--at least,
so observers said, though he himself told a different story--and he
taught himself to keep a quiet mind in the presence of losses, rout in
battle, or failure in a campaign. It was said that he never troubled
himself with fancies as to what the enemy might be doing, and he
confessed to having constantly told himself that the enemy was as much
afraid of him as he of the enemy. His military talent was doubled in
efficacy by his indomitable constancy. In one sense, moreover, and that
a wholly good sense, he was a political general; for he had constantly
before his mind the aims of the Government which employed him, perceiving
early that there were only two possible ends to the war, the complete
subjugation of the South or the complete failure of the Union; perceiving
also that there was no danger of exhausting the resources of the North
and great danger of discouraging its spirit, while the position of the
South was in this respect the precise contrary. He was therefore the
better able to serve the State as a soldier, because throughout he
measured by a just standard the ulterior good or harm of success or
failure in his enterprises.
The affectionate confidence which existed between Lee and "Stonewall"
Jackson till the latter was killed at Chancellorsville had a parallel in
the endearing friendship which sprung up between Grant and his principal
subordinate, William T. Sherman, who was to bear a hardly less momentous
part than his own in the conclusion of the war. Sherman was a man of
quick wits and fancy, bright and mercurial disposition, capable of being
a delightful companion to children, and capable of being sharp and
inconsiderate to duller subordinates. It is a high tribute both to this
brilliant soldier and to Grant himself that he always regarded Grant as
having made him, not only by his confidence but by his example.
As has been said, Grant was required to remain on the defensive between
Memphis and Corinth, which mark the line of the Northern frontier at this
period, while Buell was advancing on Chattanooga. Later, while the
Confederates were invading Kentucky further east, attacks were also
directed against Grant to keep him quiet. These were defeated, though
Grant was unable to follow up his success at the time. When the invasion
of Kentucky had collapsed and the Confederates under Bragg were
retreating before Buell and his successor out of Middle Tennessee, it
became possible for Grant and for Halleck and the Government at
Washington to look to completing the conquest of the Mississippi River.
The importance to the Confederates of a hold upon the Mississippi has
been pointed out; if it were lost the whole of far South-West would
manifestly be lost with it; in the North, on the other hand, public
sentiment was strongly set upon freeing the navigation of the great
river. The Confederacy now held the river from the fortress of
Vicksburg, which after taking New Orleans Admiral Farragut had attacked
in vain, down to Port Hudson, 120 miles further south, where the
Confederate forces had since then seized and fortified another point of
vantage. Vicksburg, it will be observed, lies 175 to 180 miles south of
Memphis, or from Grand Junction, between Memphis and Corinth, the points
in the occupation of the North which must serve Grant as a base. At
Vicksburg itself, and for some distance south of it, a line of bluffs or
steep-sided hills lying east of the Mississippi comes right up to the
edge of the river. The river as it approaches these bluffs makes a
sudden bend to the north-east and then again to the south-west, so that
two successive reaches of the stream, each from three to four miles long,
were commanded by the Vicksburg guns, 200 feet above the valley; the
eastward or landward side of the fortress was also well situated for
defence. To the north of Vicksburg the country on the east side of the
Mississippi is cut up by innumerable streams and "bayous" or marshy
creeks, winding and intersecting amid a dense growth of cedars. The
North, with a flotilla under Admiral Porter, commanded the Mississippi
itself, and the Northern forces could freely move along its western shore
to the impregnable river face of Vicksburg beyond. But the question of
how to get safely to the assailable side of Vicksburg presented
formidable difficulty to Grant and to the Government.
Grant's operations began in November, 1862. Advancing directly southward
along the railway from Memphis with the bulk of his forces, he after a
while detached Sherman with a force which proceeded down the Mississippi
to the mouth of the Yazoo, a little north-west of Vicksburg. Here
Sherman was to land, and, it was hoped, surprise the enemy at Vicksburg
itself while the bulk of the enemy's forces were fully occupied by
Grant's advance from the north. But Grant's lengthening communications
were cut up by a cavalry raid, and he had to retreat, while Sherman came
upon an enemy fully prepared and sustained a defeat a fortnight after
Burnside's defeat at Fredericksburg. This was the first of a long series
of failures during which Grant, who for his part was conspicuously frank
and loyal in his relations with the Government, received upon the whole
the fullest confidence and support from them. There occurred, however,
about this time an incident which was trying to Grant, and of which the
very simple facts must be stated, since it was the last of the occasions
upon which severe criticism of Lincoln's military administration has been
founded. General McClernand was an ambitious Illinois lawyer-politician
of energy and courage; he was an old acquaintance of Lincoln's, and an
old opponent; since the death of Douglas he and another
lawyer-politician, Logan, had been the most powerful of the Democrats in
Illinois; both were zealous in the war and had joined the Army upon its
outbreak. Logan served as a general under Grant with confessed ability.
It must be repeated that, North and South, former civilians had to be
placed in command for lack of enough soldiers of known capacity to go
round, and that many of them, like Logan and like the Southern general,
Polk, who was a bishop in the American Episcopal Church, did very good
service. McClernand had early obtained high rank and had shown no sign
as yet of having less aptitude for his new career than other men of
similar antecedents. Grant, however, distrusted him, and proved to be
right. In October, 1862, McClernand came to Lincoln with an offer of his
personal services in raising troops from Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa,
with a special view to clearing the Mississippi. He of course expected
to be himself employed in this operation. Recruiting was at a low ebb,
and it would have been folly to slight this offer. McClernand did in
fact raise volunteers to the number of a whole army corps. He was placed
under Grant in command of the expedition down the Mississippi which had
already started under Sherman. Sherman's great promise had not yet been
proved to any one but Grant; he appears at this time to have come under
the disapproval of the Joint Committee of Congress on the War, and the
newspaper Press had not long before announced, with affected regret, the
news that he had become insane. McClernand, arriving just after
Sherman's defeat near Vicksburg, fell in at once with a suggestion of his
to attack the Post of Arkansas, a Confederate stronghold in the State of
Arkansas and upon the river of that name, from the shelter of which
Confederate gunboats had some chance of raiding the Mississippi above
Vicksburg. The expedition succeeded in this early in January, 1863, and
was then recalled to join Grant. This was a mortification to McClernand,
who had hoped for a command independent of Grant. In his subsequent
conduct he seems to have shown incapacity; he was certainly insubordinate
to Grant, and he busied himself in intrigues against him, with such
result as will soon be seen. As soon as Grant told the Administration
that he was dissatisfied with McClernand, he was assured that he was at
liberty to remove him from command. This he eventually did after some
months of trial.
In the first three months of 1863, while the army of the Potomac,
shattered at Fredericksburg, was being prepared for the fresh attack upon
Lee which ended at Chancellorsville, and while Bragg and Rosecrans lay
confronting each other in Middle Tennessee, each content that the other
was afraid to weaken himself by sending troops to the Mississippi, Grant
was occupied in a series of enterprises apparently more cautious than
that in which he eventually succeeded, but each in its turn futile. An
attempt was made to render Vicksburg useless by a canal cutting across
the bend of the Mississippi to the west of that fortress. Then Grant
endeavoured with the able co-operation of Admiral Porter and his flotilla
to secure a safe landing on the Yazoo, which enters the Mississippi a
little above Vicksburg, so that he could move his army to the rear of
Vicksburg by this route. Next Grant and Porter tried to establish a sure
line of water communication from a point far up the Mississippi through
an old canal, then somehow obstructed, into the upper waters of the Yazoo
and so to a point on that river 30 or 40 miles to the north-east of
Vicksburg, by which they would have turned the right of the main
Confederate force; but this was frustrated by the Confederates, who
succeeded in establishing a strong fort further up the Yazoo. Yet a
further effort was made to establish a waterway by a canal quitting the
Mississippi about 40 miles north of Vicksburg and communicating, through
lakes, bayous, and smaller rivers, with its great tributary the Red River
far to the south. This, like the first canal attempted, would have
rendered Vicksburg useless.
Each of these projects failed in turn. The tedious engineering work
which two of them involved was rendered more depressing by adverse
conditions of weather and by ill-health among Grant's men. Natural
grumbling among the troops was repeated and exaggerated in the North.
McClernand employed the gift for intrigue, which perhaps had helped him
to secure his command, in an effort to get Grant removed. It is
melancholy to add that a good many newspapers at this time began to print
statements that Grant had again taken to drink. It is certain that he
was at this time a total abstainer. It is said that he had offended the
authors of this villainy by the restrictions which he had long before
found necessary to put upon information to the Press. Some of the men
freely confessed afterwards that they had been convinced of his sobriety,
and added the marvellous apology that their business was to give the
public "the news." Able and more honest journalists urged that Grant had
proved his incompetence. Secretary Chase took up their complaints and
pressed that Grant should be removed. Lincoln, before the outcry against
Grant had risen to its height, had felt the need of closer information
than he possessed about the situation on the Mississippi; and had hit
upon the happy expedient of sending an able official of the War
Department, who deserved and obtained the confidence of Grant and his
officers, to accompany the Western army and report to him. Apart,
however, from the reports he thus received, he had always treated the
attacks on Grant with contempt. "I cannot spare this general; he
fights," he said. In reply to complaints that Grant drank, he enquired
(adapting, as he knew, George II.'s famous saying about Wolfe) what
whisky he drank, explaining that he wished to send barrels of it to some
of his other generals. His attitude is remarkable, because in his own
mind he had not thought well of any of Grant's plans after his first
failure in December; he had himself wished from an early day that Grant
would take the very course by which he ultimately succeeded. He let him
go his own way, as he afterwards told him, from "a general hope that you
know better than I."
At the end of March Grant took a memorable determination to transfer his
whole force to the south of Vicksburg and approach it from that
direction. He was urged by Sherman to give up any further attempt to use
the river, and, instead, to bring his whole army back to Memphis and
begin a necessarily slow approach on Vicksburg by the railway. He
declared himself that on ordinary grounds of military prudence this would
have been the proper course, but he decided for himself that the
depressing effect of the retreat to Memphis would be politically
disastrous. At Grand Gulf, 30 miles south of Vicksburg, the South
possessed another fortified post on the river; to reach this Grant
required the help of the Navy, not only in crossing from the western bank
of the river, but in transporting the supplies for which the roads west
of the river were inadequate. Admiral Porter, with his gunboats and
laden barges, successfully ran the gauntlet of the Vicksburg batteries by
night without serious damage. Grand Gulf was taken on May 3, and Grant's
army established at this new base. A further doubt now arose. General
Banks in Louisiana was at this time preparing to besiege Port Hudson. It
might be well for Grant to go south and join him, and, after reducing
Port Hudson, return with Banks' forces against Vicksburg. This was what
now commended itself to Lincoln. In the letter of congratulation which
some time later he was able to send to Grant, after referring to his
former opinion which had been right, he confessed that he had now been
wrong. Banks was not yet ready to move, and Vicksburg, now seriously
threatened, might soon be reinforced. Orders to join Banks, though they
were probably meant to be discretionary, were actually sent to Grant, but
too late. He had cut himself loose from his base at Grand Gulf and
marched his troops north, to live with great hardship to themselves on
the country and the supplies they could take with them. He had with him
35,000 men. General Pemberton, to whom he had so far been opposed, lay
covering Vicksburg with 20,000 and a further force in the city; Joseph
Johnston, whom he afterwards described as the Southern general who in all
the war gave him most trouble, had been sent by Jefferson Davis to take
supreme command in the West, and had collected 11,000 men at Jackson, the
capital of Mississippi, 45 miles east of Vicksburg. Grant was able to
take his enemy in detail. Having broken up Johnston's force he defeated
Pemberton in a series of battles. His victory at Champion's Hill on May
16, not a fortnight after Chancellorsville, conveyed to his mind the
assurance that the North would win the war. An assault on Vicksburg
failed with heavy loss. Pemberton was at last closely invested in
Vicksburg and Grant could establish safe communications with the North by
way of the lower Yazoo and up the Mississippi above its mouth. There had
been dissension between Pemberton and Johnston, who, seeing that gunboats
proved able to pass Vicksburg in any case, thought that Pemberton, whom
he could not at the moment hope to relieve, should abandon Vicksburg and
try to save his army. Long before Johnston could be sufficiently
reinforced to attack Grant, Grant's force had been raised to 71,000. On
July 4, 1863, the day of the annual commemoration of national
Independence, Vicksburg was surrendered. Its garrison, who had suffered
severely, were well victualled by Grant and allowed to go free on parole.
Pemberton in his vexation treated Grant with peculiar insolence, which
provoked a singular exhibition of the conqueror's good temper to him; and
in his despatches to the President, Grant mentioned nothing with greater
pride than the absence of a word or a sign on the part of his men which
could hurt the feelings of the fallen. Johnston was forced to abandon
the town of Jackson with its large stores to Sherman, but could not be
pursued in his retreat. On July 9, five days later, the defender of Port
Hudson, invested shortly before by Banks, who had not force enough for an
assault, heard the news of Vicksburg and surrendered. Lincoln could now
boast to the North that "the Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the
sea."
At the very hour when Vicksburg was surrendered Lincoln had been issuing
the news of another victory won in the preceding three days, which, along
with the capture of Vicksburg, marked the turning point of the war. For
more than a month after the battle of Chancellorsville the two opposing
armies in the East had lain inactive. The Conscription Law, with which
we must deal later, had recently been passed, and various elements of
discontent and disloyalty in the North showed a great deal of activity.
It seems that Jefferson Davis at first saw no political advantage in the
military risk of invading the North. Lee thought otherwise, and was
eager to follow up his success. At last, early in June, 1863, he started
northward. This time he aimed at the great industrial regions of
Pennsylvania, hoping also while assailing them to draw Hooker further
from Washington. Hooker, on first learning that Lee had crossed the
Rappahannock, entertained the thought of himself going south of it and
attacking Richmond. Lincoln dissuaded him, since he might be "entangled
upon the river, like an ox jumped half over a fence"; he could not take
Richmond for weeks, and his communications might be cut; besides, Lincoln
added, his true objective point throughout was Lee's army and not
Richmond. Hooker's later movements, in conformity with what he could
gather of Lee's movements, were prudent and skilful. He rejected a later
suggestion of Lincoln's that he should strike quickly at the most
assailable point in Lee's lengthening line of communications, and he was
wise, for Lee could live on the country he was traversing, and Hooker now
aimed at covering Philadelphia or Baltimore and Washington, according to
the direction which Lee might take, watching all the while for the moment
to strike. He found himself hampered in some details by probably
injudicious orders of his superior, Halleck, and became irritable and
querulous; Lincoln had to exercise his simple arts to keep him to his
duty and to soothe him, and was for the moment successful. Suddenly on
June 27, with a battle in near prospect, Hooker sent in his resignation;
probably he meant it, but there was no time to debate the matter.
Probably he had lost confidence in himself, as he did before at
Chancellorsville. Lincoln evidently judged that his state of mind made
it wise to accept this resignation. He promptly appointed in Hooker's
place one of his subordinates, General George Meade, a lean, tall,
studious, somewhat sharp-tongued man, not brilliant or popular or the
choice that the army would have expected, but with a record in previous
campaigns which made him seem to Lincoln trustworthy, as he was. A
subordinate command in which he could really distinguish himself was
later found for Hooker, who now took leave of his army in words of marked
generosity towards Meade. All this while there was great excitement in
the North. Urgent demands had been raised for the recall of McClellan, a
course of which, Lincoln justly observed, no one could measure the
inconvenience so well as he.
Lee was now feeling his way, somewhat in the dark as to his enemy's
movements, because he had despatched most of his cavalry upon raiding
expeditions towards the important industrial centre of Harrisburg. Meade
continued on a parallel course to him, with his army spread out to guard
against any movements of Lee's to the eastward. Each commander would
have preferred to fight the other upon the defensive. Suddenly on July
1, three days after Meade had taken command, a chance collision took
place north of the town of Gettysburg between the advance guards of the
two armies. It developed into a general engagement, of which the result
must partly depend on the speed with which each commander could bring up
the remainder of his army. On the first day Lee achieved a decided
success. The Northern troops were driven back upon steep heights just
south of Gettysburg, of which the contour made it difficult for the enemy
to co-ordinate his movements in any attack on them. Here Meade, who when
the battle began was ten miles away and did not expect it, was able by
the morning of the 2nd or during that day to bring up his full force; and
here, contrary to his original choice of a position for bringing on a
battle, he made his stand. The attack planned by Lee on the following
day must, in his opinion, afterwards have been successful if "Stonewall"
Jackson had been alive and with him. As it was, his most brilliant
remaining subordinate, Longstreet, disapproved of any assault, and on
this and the following day obeyed his orders reluctantly and too slowly.
On July 3, 1863, Lee renewed his attack. In previous battles the
Northern troops had been contending with invisible enemies in woods; now,
after a heavy cannonade, the whole Southern line could be seen advancing
in the open to a desperate assault. This attack was crushed by the
Northern fire. First and last in the fighting round Gettysburg the North
lost 23,000 out of about 93,000 men, and the South about an equal number
out of 78,000. The net result was that, after a day's delay, Lee felt
compelled to retreat. Nothing but an actual victory would have made it
wise for him to persist in his adventurous invasion.
The importance of this, which has been remembered as the chief battle of
the war, must be estimated rather by the peril from which the North was
delivered than by the results it immediately reaped. Neither on July 3
nor during Lee's subsequent retreat did Meade follow up his advantage
with the boldness to which Lincoln, in the midst of his congratulations,
exhorted him. On July 12 Lee recrossed the Potomac. Meade on the day
before had thought of attacking him, but desisted on the advice of the
majority in a council of war. That council of war, as Lincoln said,
should never have been held. Its decision was demonstrably wrong, since
it rested on the hope that Lee would himself attack. Lincoln writhed at
a phrase in Meade's general orders about "driving the invader from our
soil." "Will our generals," he exclaimed in private, "never get that
idea out of their heads? The whole country is our soil." Meade,
however, unlike McClellan, was only cautious, not lukewarm, nor without a
mind of his own. The army opposed to him was much larger than that which
McClellan failed to overwhelm after Antietam. He had offered to resign
when he inferred Lincoln's dissatisfaction from a telegram. Lincoln
refused this, and made it clear through another officer that his strong
opinion as to what might have been done did not imply ingratitude or want
of confidence towards "a brave and skilful officer, and a true man."
Characteristically he relieved his sense of Meade's omissions in a letter
of most lucid criticism, and characteristically he never sent it. Step
by step Meade moved on Lee's track into the enemy's country. Indecisive
manoeuvres on both sides continued over four months. Lee was forced over
the Rappahannock, then over the Rapidan; Meade followed him, found his
army in peril, and prudently and promptly withdrew. In December the two
armies went into winter quarters on the two sides of the Rappahannock to
await the opening of a very different campaign when the next spring was
far advanced.
The autumn months of 1863 witnessed in the Middle West a varying conflict
ending in a Northern victory hardly less memorable than those of
Gettysburg and Vicksburg. At last, after the fall of Vicksburg,
Rosecrans in Middle Tennessee found himself ready to advance. By skilful
manoeuvres, in the difficult country where the Tennessee River cuts the
Cumberland mountains and the parallel ranges which run from north-east to
south-west behind, he turned the flank of Bragg's position at Chattanooga
and compelled him to evacuate that town in the beginning of September.
Bragg, as he retreated, succeeded in getting false reports as to his
movements and the condition of his army conveyed to Rosecrans, who
accordingly followed him up in an incautious manner. By this time the
bulk of the forces that had been used against Vicksburg should have been
brought to support Rosecrans. Halleck, however, at first scattered them
for purposes which he thought important in the West. After a while,
however, one part of the army at Vicksburg was brought back to General
Burnside in Ohio, from whom it had been borrowed. Burnside accomplished
the very advance by Lexington, in Kentucky, over the mountains into
Eastern Tennessee, which Lincoln had so long desired for the relief of
the Unionists there, and he was able to hold his ground, defeating at
Knoxville a little later an expedition under Longstreet which was sent to
dislodge him. Other portions of the Western army were at last ordered to
join Rosecrans, but did not reach him before he had met with disaster.
For the Confederate authorities, eager to retrieve their losses, sent
every available reinforcement to Bragg, and he was shortly able to turn
back towards Chattanooga with over 71,000 men against the 57,000 with
which Rosecrans, scattering his troops in false security, was pursuing
him. The two armies came upon one another, without clear expectation,
upon the Chicamauga Creek beyond the ridge which lies south-east of
Chattanooga. The battle fought among the woods and hills by Chicamauga
on September 19 and 20 surpassed any other in the war in the heaviness of
the loss on each side. On the second day Bragg's manoeuvres broke
Rosecrans' line, and only an extraordinarily gallant stand by Thomas with
a part of the line, in successive positions of retreat, prevented Bragg
from turning the hasty retirement of the remainder into a disastrous
rout. As it was, Rosecrans made good his retreat to Chattanooga, but
there he was in danger of being completely cut off. A corps was promptly
detached from Meade in Virginia, placed under Hooker, and sent to relieve
him. Rosecrans, who in a situation of real difficulty seems to have had
no resourcefulness, was replaced in his command by Thomas. Grant was
appointed to supreme command of all the forces in the West and ordered to
Chattanooga. There, after many intricate operations on either side, a
great battle was eventually fought on November 24 and 25, 1863. Grant
had about 60,000 men; Bragg, who had detached Longstreet for his vain
attack on Burnside, had only 33,000, but he had one steep and entrenched
ridge behind another on which to stand. The fight was marked by notable
incidents--Hooker's "battle above the clouds"; and the impulse by which
apparently with no word of command, Thomas' corps, tired of waiting while
Sherman advanced upon the one flank and Hooker upon the other, arose and
carried a ridge which the enemy and Grant himself had regarded as
impregnable. It ended in a rout of the Confederates, which was
energetically followed up. Bragg's army was broken and driven right back
into Georgia. To sum up the events of the year, the one serious invasion
of the North by the South had failed, and the dominion on which the
Confederacy had any real hold was now restricted to the Atlantic States,
Alabama, and a part of the State of Mississippi.
At this point, at which the issue of the war, if it were only pursued,
could not be doubted, and at which, as it happens, the need of Lincoln's
personal intervention in military matters became greatly diminished, we
may try to obtain a general impression of his wisdom, or want of it, in
such affairs. The closeness and keen intelligence with which he followed
the war is undoubted, but could only be demonstrated by a lengthy
accumulation of evidence. The larger strategy of the North, sound in the
main, was of course the product of more than one co-operating mind, but
as his was undoubtedly the dominant will of his Administration, so too it
seems likely that, with his early and sustained grasp of the general
problem, he contributed not a little to the clearness and consistency of
the strategical plans. The amount of the forces raised was for long, as
we shall see later, beyond his control, and, in the distribution of what
he had to the best effect, his own want of knowledge and the poor
judgment of his earlier advisers seem to have caused some errors. He
started with the evident desire to put himself almost unreservedly in the
hands of the competent military counsellors, and he was able in the end
to do so; but for a long intermediate period, as we have seen, he was
compelled as a responsible statesman to forego this wish. It was all
that time his function first to pick out, with very little to go by, the
best officers he could find, replacing them with better when he could;
and secondly to give them just so much direction, and no more, as his
wisdom at a distance and their more expert skill upon the spot made
proper. In each of these respects his occasional mistakes are plain
enough, but the evidence, upon which he has often been thought capable of
setting aside sound military considerations causelessly or in obedience
to interested pressure, breaks down when the facts of any imputed
instance are known. It is manifest that he gained rapidly both in
knowledge of the men he dealt with and in the firm kindness with which he
treated them. It is remarkable that, with his ever-burning desire to see
vigour and ability displayed, he could watch so constantly as he did for
the precise opportunity or the urgent necessity before he made changes in
command. It is equally remarkable that, with his decided and often right
views as to what should be done, his advice was always offered with equal
deference and plainness. "Quite possibly I was wrong both then and now,"
he once wrote to Hooker, "but in the great responsibility resting upon
me, I cannot be entirely silent. Now, all I ask is that you will be in
such mood that we can get into action the best cordial judgment of
yourself and General Halleck, with my poor mite added, if indeed he and
you shall think it entitled to any consideration at all." The man whose
habitual attitude was this, and who yet could upon the instant take his
own decision, may be presumed to have been wise in many cases where we do
not know his reasons. Few statesmen, perhaps, have so often stood
waiting and refrained themselves from a firm will and not from the want
of it, and for the sake of the rare moment of action.
The passing of the crisis in the war was fittingly commemorated by a
number of State Governors who combined to institute a National Cemetery
upon the field of Gettysburg. It was dedicated on November 19, 1863.
The speech of the occasion was delivered by Edward Everett, the
accomplished man once already mentioned as the orator of highest repute
in his day. The President was bidden then to say a few words at the
close. The oration with which for two hours Everett delighted his vast
audience charms no longer, though it is full of graceful sentiment and
contains a very reasonable survey of the rights and wrongs involved in
the war, and of its progress till then. The few words of Abraham Lincoln
were such as perhaps sank deep, but left his audience unaware that a
classic had been spoken which would endure with the English language.
The most literary man present was also Lincoln's greatest admirer, young
John Hay. To him it seemed that Mr. Everett spoke perfectly, and "the
old man" gracefully for him. These were the few words: "Four score and
seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation,
conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are
created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether
that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long
endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to
dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who
here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether
fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we
cannot dedicate--we cannot consecrate--we cannot hallow--this ground.
The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it
far above our poor power to add or to detract. The world will little
note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what
they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to
the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly
advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task
remaining before us--that from these honoured dead we take increased
devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of
devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died
in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom;
and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall
not perish from the earth."
2. _Conscription and the Politics of 1863_.
The events of our day may tempt us to underestimate the magnitude of the
American Civil War, not only in respect of its issues, but in respect of
the efforts that were put forth. Impartial historians declare that "no
previous war had ever in the same time entailed upon the combatants such
enormous sacrifices of life and wealth." Even such battles as Malplaquet
had not rivalled in carnage the battles of this war, and in the space of
these four years there took place a number of engagements--far more than
can be recounted here--in many of which, as at Gettysburg, the casualties
amounted to a quarter of the whole forces engaged. The Southern armies,
especially towards the end of the war, were continually being pitted
against vastly superior numbers; the Northern armies, whether we look at
the whole war as one vast enterprise of conquest or at almost any
important battle save that of Gettysburg, were as continually confronted
with great obstacles in the matter of locality and position. In this
case, of a new and not much organised country unprepared for war, exact
or intelligible figures as to losses or as to the forces raised must not
be expected, but, according to what seems to be a fair estimate, the
total deaths on the Northern and the Southern side directly due to the
war stood to the population of the whole country at its beginning as at
least 1 to 32. Of these deaths about half occurred on the Northern and
half on the Southern side; this, however, implies that in proportion to
its population the South lost twice as heavily as the North.
Neither side obtained the levies of men that it needed without resort to
compulsion. The South, in which this necessity either arose more quickly
or was seen more readily, had called up before the end of the war its
whole available manhood. In the North the proportion of effort and
sacrifice required was obviously less, and, at least at one critical
moment, it was disastrously under-estimated. A system of compulsion, to
be used in default of volunteering, was brought into effect half-way
through the war. Under this system there were in arms at the end of the
war 980,000 white Northern soldiers, who probably stood to the population
at that time in as high a proportion as 1 to 25, and everything was in
readiness for calling up a vastly greater number if necessary. After
twenty months of war, when the purely voluntary system still existed but
was proving itself inadequate to make good the wastage of the armies, the
number in arms for the North was 860,717, perhaps as much as 1 in 27 of
the population then. It would be useless to evade the question which at
once suggests itself, whether the results of voluntary enlistment in this
country during the present war have surpassed to the extent to which they
undoubtedly ought to have surpassed the standard set by the North in the
Civil War. For these two cases furnish the only instances in which the
institution of voluntary enlistment has been submitted to a severe test
by Governments reluctant to abandon it. The two cases are of course not
strictly comparable. Our own country in this matter had the advantages
of riper organisation, political and social, and of the preparatory
education given it by the Territorials and by Lord Roberts. The
extremity of the need was in our case immediately apparent; and the cause
at issue appealed with the utmost simplicity and intensity to every brave
and to every gentle nature. In the Northern States, on the other hand,
apart from all other considerations, there were certain to be sections,
local, racial, and political, upon which the national cause could take no
very firm hold. That this was so proves no unusual prevalence of
selfishness or of stupidity; and the apathy of such sections of the
people, like that of smaller sections in our own case, sets in a brighter
light the devotion which made so many eager to give their all. Moreover,
the general patriotism of the Northern people is not to be judged by the
failure of the purely voluntary system, but rather, as will be seen
later, by the success of the system which succeeded it. There is in our
case no official statement of the exact number serving on any particular
day, but the facts which are published make it safe to conclude that, at
the end of fifteen months of war, when no compulsion was in force, the
soldiers then in service and drawn from the United Kingdom alone amounted
to 1 in 17 of the population. The population in this case is one of
which a smaller proportion are of military age than was the case in the
Northern States, with their great number of immigrants. The apparent
effect of these figures would be a good deal heightened if it were
possible to make a correct addition in the case of each country for the
numbers killed or disabled in war up to the dates in question and for the
numbers serving afloat. Moreover, the North, when it was driven to
abandon the purely voluntary system, had not reached the point at which
the withdrawal of men from civil occupations could have been regarded
among the people as itself a national danger, or at which the Government
was compelled to deter some classes from enlisting; new industries
unconnected with the war were all the while springing up, and the
production and export of foodstuffs were increasing rapidly. For the
reasons which have been stated, there is nothing invidious in thus
answering an unavoidable question. Judged by any previous standard of
voluntary national effort, the North answered the test well. Each of our
related peoples must look upon the rally of its fathers and grandfathers
in the one case, its brothers and sons in the other, with mingled
feelings in which pride predominates, the most legitimate source of pride
in our case being the unity of the Empire. To each the question must
present itself whether the nations, democratic and otherwise, which have
followed from the first, or, like the South, have rapidly adopted a
different principle, have not, in this respect, a juster cause of pride.
In some of these countries, by common and almost unquestioning consent,
generation after generation of youths and men in their prime have held
themselves at the instant disposal of their country if need should arise;
and, in the absence of need and the absence of excitement, have
contentedly borne the appreciable sacrifice of training. With this it is
surely necessary to join a further question, whether the compulsion
which, under conscription, the public imposes on individuals is
comparable in its harshness to the sacrifice and the conflict of duties
imposed by the voluntary system upon the best people in all classes as
such.
From the manner in which the war arose it will easily be understood that
the South was quicker than the North in shaping its policy for raising
armies. Before a shot had been fired at Fort Sumter, and when only seven
of the ten Southern States had yet seceded, President Jefferson Davis had
at his command more than double the number of the United States Army as
it then was. He had already lawful authority to raise that number to
nearly three times as many. And, though there was protest in some
States, and some friction between the Confederate War Department and the
State militias, on the whole the seceding States, in theory jealous of
their rights, submitted very readily in questions of defence to the
Confederacy.
It is not clear how far the Southern people displayed their warlike
temper by a sustained flow of voluntary enlistment; but their Congress
showed the utmost promptitude in granting every necessary power to their
President, and on April 16, 1862, a sweeping measure of compulsory
service was passed. The President of the Confederacy could call into the
service any white resident in the South between the ages of eighteen and
thirty-five, with certain statutory exemptions. There was, of course,
trouble about the difficult question of exemptions, and under conflicting
pressure the Confederate Congress made and unmade various laws about
them. After a time all statutory exemptions were done away, and it was
left entirely in the discretion of the Southern President to say what men
were required in various departments of civil life. The liability to
serve was extended in September, 1862, to all between eighteen and
forty-five, and finally in February, 1864, to all between seventeen and
fifty. The rigorous conscription which necessity required could not be
worked without much complaint. There was a party disposed to regard the
law as unconstitutional. The existence of sovereign States within the
Confederacy was very likely an obstacle to the local and largely
voluntary organisation for deciding claims which can exist in a unified
country. A Government so hard driven must, even if liberally minded,
have enforced the law with much actual hardship. A belief in the
ruthlessness of the Southern conscription penetrated to the North. If
was probably exaggerated from the temptation to suppose that secession
was the work of a tyranny and not of the Southern people. Desertion and
failure of the Conscription Law became common in the course of 1864, but
this would seem to have been due not so much to resentment at the system
as to the actual loss of a large part of the South, and the spread of a
perception that the war was now hopelessly lost. In the last extremities
of the Confederate Government the power of compulsion of course
completely broke down. But, upon the surface at least, it seems plain
that what has been called the military despotism of Jefferson Davis
rested upon the determination rather than upon the submissiveness of the
people.
In the North, where there was double the population to draw upon, the
need for compulsion was not likely to be felt as soon. The various
influences which would later depress enlistment had hardly begun to
assert themselves, when the Government, as if to aggravate them in
advance, committed a blunder which has never been surpassed in its own
line. On April 3, 1862, recruiting was stopped dead; the central
recruiting office at Washington was closed and its staff dispersed. Many
writers agree in charging this error against Stanton. He must have been
the prime author of it, but this does not exonerate Lincoln. It was no
departmental matter, but a matter of supreme policy. Lincoln's knowledge
of human nature and his appreciation of the larger bearings of every
question might have been expected to set Stanton right, unless, indeed,
the thing was done suddenly behind his back. In any case, this must be
added to the indications seen in an earlier chapter, that Lincoln's calm
strength and sure judgment had at that time not yet reached their full
development. As for Stanton, a man of much narrower mind, but acute,
devoted, and morally fearless, kept in the War Department as a sort of
tame tiger to prey on abuses, negligences, pretensions, and political
influences, this was one among a hundred smaller erratic doings, which
his critics have never thought of as outweighing his peculiar usefulness.
His departmental point of view can easily be understood. Recruits,
embarrassingly, presented themselves much faster than they could be
organised or equipped, and an overdriven office did not pause to think
out some scheme of enlistment for deferred service. Waste had been
terrific, and Stanton did not dislike a petty economy which might shock
people in Washington. McClellan clamoured for more men--let him do
something with what he had got; Stanton, indeed, very readily became
sanguine that McClellan, once in motion, would crush the Confederacy.
Events conspired to make the mistake disastrous. In these very days the
Confederacy was about to pass its own Conscription Act. McClellan,
instead of pressing on to Richmond, sat down before Yorktown and let the
Confederate conscripts come up. Halleck was crawling southward, when a
rapid advance might have robbed the South of a large recruiting area.
The reopening of enlistment came on the top of the huge disappointment at
McClellan's failure in the peninsula. There was a creditable response to
the call which was then made for volunteers. But the disappointment of
the war continued throughout 1862; the second Bull Run; the inconclusive
sequel to Antietam; Fredericksburg; and, side by side with these events,
the long-drawn failure of Buell's and Rosecrans' operations. The spirit
of voluntary service seems to have revived vigorously enough wherever and
whenever the danger of Southern invasion became pressing, but under this
protracted depressing influence it no longer rose to the task of subduing
the South. It must be added that wages in civil employment were very
high. Lincoln, it is evident, felt this apparent failure of patriotism
sadly, but in calm retrospect it cannot seem surprising.
In the latter part of 1862 attempts were made to use the powers of
compulsion which the several States possessed, under the antiquated laws
as to militia which existed in all of them, in order to supplement
recruiting. The number of men raised for short periods in this way is so
small that the description of the Northern armies at this time as purely
volunteer armies hardly needs qualification. It would probably be worth
no one's while to investigate the makeshift system with which the
Government, very properly, then tried to help itself out; for it speedily
and completely failed. The Conscription Act, which became law on March
3, 1863, set up for the first time an organisation for recruiting which
covered the whole country but was under the complete control of the
Federal Government. It was placed under an officer of great ability,
General J. B. Fry, formerly chief of staff to Buell, and now entitled
Provost-Marshal-General. It was his business, through provost-marshals
in a number of districts, each divisible into sub-districts as
convenience might require, to enroll all male citizens between twenty and
forty-five. He was to assign a quota, in other words a stated proportion
of the number of troops for which the Government might at any time call,
to each district, having regard to the number of previous enlistments
from each district. The management of voluntary enlistment was placed in
his hands, in order that the two methods of recruiting might be worked in
harmony. The system as a whole was quite distinct from any such system
of universal service as might have been set up beforehand in time of
peace. Compulsion only came into force in default of sufficient
volunteers from any district to provide its required number of the troops
wanted. When it came into force the "drafts" of conscripts were chosen
by lot from among those enrolled as liable for service. But there was a
way of escape from actual service. It seems, from what Lincoln wrote, to
have been looked upon as a time-honoured principle, established by
precedent in all countries, that the man on whom the lot fell might
provide a substitute if he could. The market price of a substitute (a
commodity for the provision of which a class of "substitute brokers" came
into being) proved to be about 1,000 dollars. Business or professional
men, who felt they could not be spared from home but wished to act
patriotically, did buy substitutes; but they need not have done so, for
the law contained a provision intended, as Lincoln recorded, to safeguard
poorer men against such a rise in prices. They could escape by paying
300 dollars, or 60 pounds, not, in the then state of wages, an
extravagant penalty upon an able-bodied man. The sums paid under this
provision covered the cost of the recruiting business.
Most emphatically the Conscription Law operated mainly as a stimulus to
voluntary enlistment. The volunteer received, as the conscript did not,
a bounty from the Government; States, counties, and smaller localities,
when once a quota was assigned to them, vied with one another in filling
their quota with volunteers, and for that purpose added to the Government
bounty. It goes without saying that in a new country, with its scattered
country population and its disorganised great new towns, there were
plenty of abuses. Substitute brokers provided the wrong article;
ingenious rascals invented the trade of "bounty-jumping," and would
enlist for a bounty, desert, enlist for another bounty, and so on
indefinitely; and the number of men enrolled who were afterwards
unaccounted for was large. There was of course also grumbling of
localities at the quotas assigned to them, though no pains were spared to
assign them fairly. There was some opposition to the working of the law
after it was passed, but it was, not general, but partly the opposition
of rowdies in degraded neighbourhoods, partly factitious political
opposition, and partly seditious and openly friendly to the South. In
general the country accepted the law as a manifest military necessity.
The spirit and manner of its acceptance may be judged from the results of
any of the calls for troops under this law. For example, in December,
1864, towards the end of the war, 211,752 men were brought up to the
colours; of these it seems that 194,715 were ordinary volunteers, 10,192
were substitutes provided by conscripts, and only 6,845 were actually
compelled men. It is perhaps more significant still that among those who
did not serve there were only 460 who paid the 300-dollar penalty, as
against the 10,192 who must have paid at least three times that sum for
substitutes. Behind the men who had been called up by the end of the war
the North had, enrolled and ready to be called, over two million men.
The North had not to suffer as the South suffered, but unquestionably in
this matter it rose to the occasion.
The constitutional validity of the law was much questioned by
politicians, but never finally tried out on appeal to the Supreme Court.
There seems to be no room for doubt that Lincoln's own reasoning on this
matter was sound. The Constitution simply gave to Congress "power to
raise and support armies," without a word as to the particular means to
be used for the purpose; the new and extremely well-considered
Constitution of the Confederacy was in this respect the same. The
Constitution, argued Lincoln, would not have given the power of raising
armies without one word as to the mode in which it was to be exercised,
if it had not meant Congress to be the sole judge as to the mode. "The
principle," he wrote, "of the draft, which simply is involuntary or
enforced service, is not new. It has been practised in all ages of the
world. It was well known to the framers of our Constitution as one of
the modes of raising armies. . . . It had been used just before, in
establishing our independence, and it was also used under the
Constitution in 1812." In fact, as we have seen, a certain power of
compelling military service existed in each of the States and had existed
in them from the first. Their ancestors had brought the principle with
them from the old country, in which the system of the "militia ballot"
had not fallen into desuetude when they became independent. The
traditional English jealousy, which the American Colonies had imbibed,
against the military power of the Crown had never manifested itself in
any objection to the means which might be taken to raise soldiers, but in
establishing a strict control of the number which the Crown could at any
moment maintain; and this control had long been in England and had always
been in America completely effective. We may therefore treat the protest
which was raised against the law as unconstitutional, and the companion
argument that it tended towards military despotism, as having belonged to
the realm of political verbiage, and as neither founded in reason nor
addressed to living popular emotions.
This is the way in which the Northern people, of whom a large part were,
it must be remembered, Democrats, seem to have regarded these
contentions, and a real sense, apart from these contentions, that
conscription was unnecessary or produced avoidable hardship seems
scarcely to have existed. It was probably for this reason that Lincoln
never published the address to the people, or perhaps more particularly
to the Democratic opposition, to which several references have already
been made. In the course of it he said: "At the beginning of the war,
and ever since, a variety of motives, pressing, some in one direction and
some in the other, would be presented to the mind of each man physically
fit to be a soldier, upon the combined effect of which motives he would,
or would not, voluntarily enter the service. Among these motives would
be patriotism, political bias, ambition, personal courage, love of
adventure, want of employment, and convenience, or the opposite of some
of these. We already have and have had in the service, as it appears,
substantially all that can be obtained upon this voluntary weighing of
motives. And yet we must somehow obtain more or relinquish the original
object of the contest, together with all the blood and treasure already
expended in the effort to secure it. To meet this necessity the law for
the draft has been enacted. You who do not wish to be soldiers do not
like this law. This is natural; nor does it imply want of patriotism.
Nothing can be so just and necessary as to make us like it if it is
disagreeable to us. We are prone, too, to find false arguments with
which to excuse ourselves for opposing such disagreeable things." He
proceeded to meet some of these arguments upon the lines which have
already been indicated. After speaking of the precedents for
conscription in America, he continued: "Wherein is the peculiar hardship
now? Shall we shrink from the necessary means to maintain our free
government, which our grandfathers employed to establish it and our
fathers have already once employed to maintain it? Are we degenerate?
Has the manhood of our race run out?" Unfair administration was
apprehended. "This law," he said, "belongs to a class, which class is
composed of those laws whose object is to distribute burthens or benefits
on the principle of equality. No one of these laws can ever be
practically administered with that exactness which can be conceived of in
the mind. A tax law . . . will be a dead letter if no one will be
compelled to pay until it can be shown that every other one will be
compelled to pay in precisely the same proportion according to value;
nay, even it will be a dead letter if no one can be compelled to pay
until it is certain that every other one will pay at all. . . . This
sort of difficulty applies in full force to the practical administration
of the draft law. In fact, the difficulty is greater in the case of the
draft law"; and he proceeded to state the difficulties. "In all these
points," he continued, "errors will occur in spite of the utmost
fidelity. The Government is bound to administer the law with such an
approach to exactness as is usual in analogous cases, and as entire good
faith and fidelity will reach." Errors, capable of correction, should,
he promised, be corrected when pointed out; but he concluded: "With these
views and on these principles, I feel bound to tell you it is my purpose
to see the draft law faithfully executed." It was his way, as has been
seen, sometimes to set his thoughts very plainly on paper and to consider
afterwards the wisdom of publishing them. This paper never saw the light
till after his death. It is said that some scruple as to the custom in
his office restrained him from sending it out, but this scruple probably
weighed with him the more because he saw that the sincere people whom he
had thought of addressing needed no such appeal. It was surely a wise
man who, writing so wisely, could see the greater wisdom of silence.
The opposition to the Conscription Law may be treated simply as one
element in the propaganda of the official Opposition to the
Administration. The opposition to such a measure which we might possibly
have expected to arise from churches, or from schools of thought
independent of the ordinary parties, does not seem, as a matter of fact,
to have arisen. The Democratic party had, as we have seen, revived in
force in the latter part of 1862. Persons, ambitious, from whatever
mixture of motives, of figuring as leaders of opposition during a war
which they did not condemn, found a public to which to appeal, mainly
because the war was not going well. They found a principle of opposition
satisfactory to themselves in condemning the Proclamation of
Emancipation. (It was significant that McClellan shortly after the
Proclamation issued a General Order enjoining obedience to the Government
and adding the hint that "the remedy for political errors, if any are
committed, is to be found only in the action of the people at the
polls.") In the curious creed which respectable men, with whom
allegiance to an ancient party could be a powerful motive at such a time,
were driven to construct for themselves, enforcement of the duty to
defend the country and liberation of the enemy's slaves appeared as twin
offences against the sacred principles of constitutional freedom. It
would have been monstrous to say that most of the Democrats were opposed
to the war. Though a considerable number had always disliked it and now
found courage to speak loudly, the bulk were as loyal to the Union as
those very strong Republicans like Greeley, who later on despaired of
maintaining it. But there were naturally Democrats for whom a chance now
appeared in politics, and who possessed that common type of political
mind that meditates deeply on minor issues and is inflamed by zeal
against minor evils. Such men began to debate with their consciences
whether the wicked Government might not become more odious than the
enemy. There arose, too, as there often arises in war time, a fraternal
feeling between men who hated the war and men who reflected how much
better they could have if waged it themselves.
There was, of course, much in the conduct of the Government which called
for criticism, and on that account it was a grievous pity that
independence should have stultified itself by reviving in any form the
root principle of party government, and recognising as the best critics
of the Administration men who desired to take its place. More useful
censure of the Government at that time might have come from men who, if
they had axes to grind, would have publicly thrown them away. There were
two points which especially called for criticism, apart from military
administration, upon which, as it happened, Lincoln knew more than his
critics knew and more than he could say. One of these points was
extravagance and corruption in the matter of army contracts and the like;
these evils were dangerously prevalent, but members of the Cabinet were
as anxious to prevent them as any outside critic could be, and it was
friendly help, not censure, that was required. The other point was the
exercise of martial law, a difficult question, upon which a word must
here be said, but upon which only those could usefully have spoken out
whose general support of the Government was pronounced and sincere.
In almost every rebellion or civil war statesmen and the military
officers under them are confronted with the need, for the sake of the
public safety or even of ordinary justice, of rules and procedure which
the law in peace time would abhor. In great conflicts, such as our own
wars after the French Revolution and the American Civil War, statesmen
such as Pitt and Lincoln, capable of handling such a problem well, have
had their hands full of yet more urgent matters. The puzzling part of
the problem does not lie in the neighbourhood of the actual fighting,
where for the moment there can be no law but the will of the commander,
but in the districts more distantly affected, or in the period when the
war is smouldering out. Lincoln's Government had at first to guard
itself against dangerous plots which could be scented but not proved in
Washington; later on it had to answer such questions as this: What should
be done when a suspected agent of the enemy is vaguely seen to be working
against enlistment, when an attack by the civil mob upon the recruits is
likely to result, and when the local magistrate and police are not much
to be trusted? There is no doubt that Seward at the beginning, and
Stanton persistently, and zealous local commanders now and then solved
such problems in a very hasty fashion, or that Lincoln throughout was far
more anxious to stand by vigorous agents of the Government than to
correct them.
Lincoln claimed that as Commander-in-Chief he had during the continuance
of civil war a lawful authority over the lives and liberties of all
citizens, whether loyal or otherwise, such as any military commander
exercises in hostile country occupied by his troops. He held that there
was no proper legal remedy for persons injured under this authority
except by impeachment of himself. He held, further, that this authority
extended to every place to which the action of the enemy in any form
extended--that is, to the whole country. This he took to be the doctrine
of English Common Law, and he contended that the Constitution left this
doctrine in full force. Whatever may be said as to his view of the
Common Law doctrine, his construction of the Constitution would now be
held by every one to have been wrong. Plainly read, the Constitution
swept away the whole of that somewhat undefined doctrine of martial law
which may be found in some decisions of our Courts, and it did much more.
Every Legislature in the British Empire can, subject to the veto of the
Crown, enact whatever exceptional measures of public safety it thinks
necessary in an emergency. The Constitution restricted this legislative
power within the very narrowest limits. There is, moreover, a recognised
British practice, initiated by Wellington and Castlereagh, by which all
question as to the authority of martial law is avoided; a governor or
commander during great public peril is encouraged to consider what is
right and necessary, not what is lawful, knowing that if necessary there
will be enquiry into his conduct afterwards, but knowing also that,
unless he acts quite unconscionably, he and his agents will be protected
by an Act of Indemnity from the legal consequences of whatever they have
done in good faith. The American Constitution would seem to render any
such Act of Indemnity impossible. In a strictly legal sense, therefore,
the power which Lincoln exercised must be said to have been usurped. The
arguments by which he defended his own legality read now as good
arguments on what the law should have been, but bad arguments on what the
law was. He did not, perhaps, attach extreme importance to this legal
contention, for he declared plainly that he was ready to break the law in
minor matters rather than let the whole fabric of law go to ruin. This,
however, does not prove that he was insincere when he pleaded legal as
well as moral justification; he probably regarded the Constitution in a
manner which modern lawyers find it difficult to realise; he probably
applied in construing it a principle such as Hamilton laid down for the
construction of statutes, that it was "qualified and controlled" by the
Common Law and by considerations of "convenience" and of "reason" and of
the policy which its framers, as wise and honest men, would have followed
in present circumstances; he probably would have adapted to the occasion
Hamilton's position that "construction may be made against the letter of
the statute to render it agreeable to natural justice."
In the exercise of his supposed prerogative Lincoln sanctioned from
beginning to end of the war the arrest of many suspected dangerous
persons under what may be called "letters de cachet" from Seward and
afterwards from Stanton. He publicly professed in 1863 his regret that
he had not caused this to be done in cases, such as those of Lee and
Joseph Johnston, where it had not been done. When agitation arose on the
matter in the end of 1862 many political prisoners were, no doubt wisely,
released. Congress then proceeded, in 1863, to exercise such powers in
the matter as the Constitution gave it by an Act suspending, where the
President thought fit, the privilege of the writ of _habeas corpus_. A
decision of the Supreme Court, delivered curiously enough by Lincoln's
old friend David Davis, showed that the real effect of this Act, so far
as valid under the Constitution, was ridiculously small (see _Ex parte
Milligan_, 4 Russell, 2). In any case the Act was hedged about with many
precautions. These were entirely disregarded by the Government, which
proceeded avowedly upon Lincoln's theory of martial law. The whole
country was eventually proclaimed to be under martial law, and many
persons were at the orders of the local military commander tried and
punished by court-martial for offences, such as the discouragement of
enlistment or the encouragement of desertion, which might not have been
punishable by the ordinary law, or of which the ordinary Courts might not
have convicted them. This fresh outbreak of martial law must in large
part be ascribed to Lincoln's determination that the Conscription Act
should not be frustrated; but apart from offences relating to enlistment
there was from 1863 onwards no lack of seditious plots fomented by the
agents of the Confederacy in Canada, and there were several secret
societies, "knights" of this, that, or the other. Lincoln, it is true,
scoffed at these, but very often the general on the spot thought
seriously of them, and the extreme Democratic leader, Vallandigham,
boasted that there were half a million men in the North enrolled in such
seditious organisations. Drastic as the Government proceedings were, the
opposition to them died down before the popular conviction that strong
measures were necessary, and the popular appreciation that the
blood-thirsty despot "King Abraham I.," as some Democrats were pleased to
call him, was not of the stuff of which despots were made and was among
the least blood-thirsty men living. The civil Courts made no attempt to
interfere; they said that, whatever the law, they could not in fact
resist generals commanding armies. British Courts would in many cases
have declined to interfere, not on the ground that the general had the
might, but on the ground that he had the right; yet, it seems, they would
not quite have relinquished their hold on the matter, but would have held
themselves free to consider whether the district in which martial law was
exercised was materially affected by the state of war or not. The legal
controversy ended in a manner hardly edifying to the layman; in the
course of 1865 the Supreme Court solemnly tried out the question of the
right of one Milligan to a writ of _habeas corpus_. At that time the
war, the only ground on which the right could have been refused him, had
for some months been ended; and nobody in court knew or cared whether
Milligan was then living to enjoy his right or had been shot long before.
Save in a few cases of special public interest, Lincoln took no personal
part in the actual administration of these coercive measures. So great a
tax was put upon his time, and indeed his strength, by the personal
consideration of cases of discipline in the army, that he could not
possibly have undertaken a further labour of the sort. Moreover, he
thought it more necessary for the public good to give steady support to
his ministers and generals than to check their action in detail. He
contended that no great injustice was likely to arise. Very likely he
was wrong; not only Democrats, but men like Senator John Sherman, a
strong and sensible Republican, thought him wrong. There are evil
stories about the secret police under Stanton, and some records of the
proceedings of the courts-martial, composed sometimes of the officers
least useful at the front, are not creditable. Very likely, as John
Sherman thought, the ordinary law would have met the needs of the case in
many districts. The mere number of the political prisoners, who counted
by thousands, proves nothing, for the least consideration of the
circumstances will show that the active supporters of the Confederacy in
the North must have been very numerous. Nor does it matter much that, to
the horror of some people, there were persons of station, culture, and
respectability among the sufferers; persons of this kind were not likely
to be exposed to charges of disloyal conduct if they were actively loyal.
Obscure and ignorant men are much more likely to have become the innocent
victims of spiteful accusers or vile agents of police. Doubtless this
might happen; but that does not of itself condemn Lincoln for having
maintained an extreme form of martial law. The particular kind of
oppression that is likely to have occurred is one against which the
normal procedure of justice and police in America is said to-day to
provide no sufficient safeguard. It is almost certain that the regular
course of law would have exposed the public weal to formidable dangers;
but it by no means follows that it would have saved individuals from
wrong. The risk that many individuals would be grievously wronged was at
least not very great. The Government was not pursuing men for erroneous
opinions, but for certain very definite kinds of action dangerous to the
State. These were indeed kinds of action with which Lincoln thought
ordinary Courts of justice "utterly incompetent" to deal, and he avowed
that he aimed rather at preventing intended actions than at punishing
them when done. To some minds this will seem to be an attitude dangerous
to liberty, but he was surely justified when he said, "In such cases the
purposes of men are much more easily understood than in cases of ordinary
crime. The man who stands by and says nothing when the peril of his
Government is discussed cannot be misunderstood. If not hindered, he is
sure to help the enemy, much more if he talks ambiguously--talks for his
country with 'buts' and 'ifs' and 'ands.'" In any case, Lincoln stood
clearly and boldly for repressing speech or act, that could help the
enemy, with extreme vigour and total disregard for the legalities of
peace time. A little later on we shall see fully whether this imported
on his part any touch whatever of the ferocity which it may seem to
suggest.