In the summer of 1863 the Confederate armies reached their greatest
strength. It was then that, flushed with military ardor, and made bold
by what seemed to the southern leaders an unbroken series of victories
on the Virginia battlefields, General Lee again crossed the Potomac
River, and led his army into the North. He went as far as Gettysburg
in Pennsylvania; but there, on the third of July, 1863, suffered a
disastrous defeat, which shattered forever the Confederate dream of
taking Philadelphia and dictating peace from Independence Hall. This
battle of Gettysburg should have ended the war, for General Lee, on
retreating southward, found the Potomac River so swollen by heavy rains
that he was obliged to wait several days for the floods to go down. In
that time it would have been quite possible for General Meade, the Union
commander, to follow him and utterly destroy his army. He proved too
slow, however, and Lee and his beaten Confederate soldiers escaped.
President Lincoln was inexpressibly grieved at this, and in the first
bitterness of his disappointment sat down and wrote General Meade a
letter. Lee "was within your easy grasp," he told him, "and to have
closed upon him would, in connection with our other late successes, have
ended the war. As it is, the war will be prolonged indefinitely. ...
Your golden opportunity is gone and I am distressed immeasurably because
of it." But Meade never received this letter. Deeply as the President
felt Meade's fault, his spirit of forgiveness was so quick, and his
thankfulness for the measure of success that had been gained, so great,
that he put it in his desk, and it was never signed or sent.
The battle of Gettysburg was indeed a notable victory, and coupled with
the fall of Vicksburg, which surrendered to General Grant on that
same third of July, proved the real turning-point of the war. It seems
singularly appropriate, then, that Gettysburg should have been the place
where President Lincoln made his most beautiful and famous address.
After the battle the dead and wounded of both the Union and Confederate
armies had received tender attention there. Later it was decided to
set aside a portion of the battlefield for a great national military
cemetery in which the dead found orderly burial. It was dedicated to its
sacred use on November 19, 1863. At the end of the stately ceremonies
President Lincoln rose and said:
"Fourscore 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
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
honored 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."
With these words, so brief, so simple, so full of reverent feeling, he
set aside the place of strife to be the resting place of heroes, and
then went back to his own great task--for which he, too, was to give
"the last full measure of devotion."
Up to within a very short time little had been heard about Ulysses S.
Grant, the man destined to become the most successful general of the
war. Like General McClellan, he was a graduate of West Point; and also
like McClellan, he had resigned from the army after serving gallantly in
the Mexican war. There the resemblance ceased, for he had not an atom of
McClellan's vanity, and his persistent will to do the best he could with
the means the government could give him was far removed from the younger
general's faultfinding and complaint. He was about four years older than
McClellan, having been born on April 27, 1822. On offering his services
to the War Department in 1861 he had modestly written: "I feel myself
competent to command a regiment if the President in his judgment should
see fit to intrust one to me." For some reason this letter remained
unanswered, although the Department, then and later, had need of trained
and experienced officers. Afterward the Governor of Illinois made him
a colonel of one of the three years' volunteer regiments; and from that
time on he rose in rank, not as McClellan had done, by leaps and bounds,
but slowly, earning every promotion. All of his service had been in
the West, and he first came into general notice by his persistent and
repeated efforts to capture Vicksburg, on whose fall the opening of
the Mississippi River depended. Five different plans he tried before he
finally succeeded, the last one appearing utterly foolhardy, and seeming
to go against every known rule of military science. In spite of this it
was successful, the Union army and navy thereby gaining control of the
Mississippi River and cutting off forever from the Confederacy a great
extent of rich country, from which, up to that time, it had been drawing
men and supplies.
The North was greatly cheered by these victories, and all eyes were
turned upon the successful commander. No one was more thankful than Mr.
Lincoln. He gave Grant quick promotion, and crowned the official act
with a most generous letter. "I do not remember that you and I ever met
personally," he wrote. "I write this now as a grateful acknowledgement
for the almost inestimable service you have done the country. I wish
to say a word further." Then, summing up the plans that the General had
tried, especially the last one, he added: "I feared it was a mistake. I
now wish to make the personal acknowledgement that you were right and I
was wrong."
Other important battles won by Grant that same fall added to his growing
fame, and by the beginning of 1864 he was singled out as the greatest
Union commander. As a suitable reward for his victories it was
determined to make him Lieutenant-General. This army rank had, before
the Civil War, been bestowed on only two American soldiers--on General
Washington, and on Scott, for his conquest of Mexico. In 1864 Congress
passed and the President signed an act to revive the grade, and Grant
was called to Washington to receive his commission. He and Mr. Lincoln
met for the first time at a large public reception held at the Executive
Mansion on the evening of March 8. A movement and rumor in the crowd
heralded his approach, and when at last the short, stocky, determined
soldier and the tall, care-worn, deep-eyed President stood face to face
the crowd, moved by a sudden impulse of delicacy, drew back, and left
them almost alone to exchange a few words. Later, when Grant appeared in
the great East Room, the enthusiasm called forth by his presence could
no longer be restrained, and cheer after cheer went up, while his
admirers pressed about him so closely that, hot and blushing with
embarrassment, he was forced at last to mount a sofa, and from there
shake hands with the eager people who thronged up to him from all sides.
The next day at one o'clock the President, in the presence of the
cabinet and a few other officials, made a little speech, and gave him
his commission. Grant replied with a few words, as modest as they
were brief, and in conversation afterward asked what special duty was
required of him. The President answered that the people wanted him to
take Richmond, and asked if he could do it. Grant said that he could
if he had the soldiers, and the President promised that these would be
furnished him. Grant did not stay in Washington to enjoy the new honors
of his high rank, but at once set about preparations for his task. It
proved a hard one. More than a year passed before it was ended, and
all the losses in battle of the three years that had gone before seemed
small in comparison with the terrible numbers of killed and wounded that
fell during these last months of the war. At first Grant had a fear
that the President might wish to control his plans, but this was soon
quieted; and his last lingering doubt on the subject vanished when,
as he was about to start on his final campaign, Mr. Lincoln sent him a
letter stating his satisfaction with all he had done, and assuring him
that in the coming campaign he neither knew, for desired to know, the
details of his plans. In his reply Grant confessed the groundlessness
of his fears, and added, "Should my success be less than I desire and
expect, the least I can say is, the fault is not with you."
He made no complicated plan for the problem before him, but proposed to
solve it by plain, hard, persistent fighting. "Lee's army will be your
objective point," he instructed General Meade. "Where Lee goes there you
will go also." Nearly three years earlier the opposing armies had fought
their first battle of Bull Run only a short distance north of where they
now confronted each other. Campaign and battle between them had swayed
to the north and the south, but neither could claim any great gain of
ground or of advantage. The final struggle was before them. Grant had
two to one in numbers; Lee the advantage in position, for he knew by
heart every road, hill and forest in Virginia, had for his friendly
scout every white inhabitant, and could retire into prepared
fortifications. Perhaps the greatest element of his strength lay in the
conscious pride of his army that for three years it had steadily barred
the way to Richmond. To offset this there now menaced it what had
always been absent before--the grim, unflinching will of the new Union
commander, who had rightly won for himself the name of "Unconditional
Surrender" Grant.
On the night of May 4, 1864, his army entered upon the campaign which,
after many months, was to end the war. It divided itself into two parts.
For the first six weeks there was almost constant swift marching and
hard fighting, a nearly equally matched contest of strategy and battle
between the two armies, the difference being that Grant was always
advancing, and Lee always retiring. Grant had hoped to defeat Lee
outside of his fortifications, and early in the campaign had expressed
his resolution "to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer";
but the losses were so appalling, 60,000 of his best troops melting away
in killed and wounded during the six weeks, that this was seen to be
impossible. Lee's army was therefore driven into its fortifications
around the Confederate capital and then came the siege of Richmond,
lasting more than nine months, but pushed forward all that time with
relentless energy, in spite of Grant's heavy losses.
In the West, meanwhile, General William T. Sherman, Grant's closest
friend and brother officer, pursued a task of almost equal importance,
taking Atlanta, Georgia, which the Confederates had turned into a city
of foundries and workshops for the manufacture and repair of guns; then,
starting from Atlanta, marching with his best troops three hundred miles
to the sea, laying the country waste as they went; after which, turning
northward, he led them through South and North Carolina to bring his
army in touch with Grant.
Against this background of fighting the life of the country went on. The
end of the war was approaching, surely, but so slowly that the people,
hoping for it, and watching day by day, could scarcely see it. They
schooled themselves to a dogged endurance, but there was no more
enthusiasm. Many lost courage. Volunteering almost ceased, and the
government was obliged to begin drafting men to make up the numbers of
soldiers needed by Grant in his campaign against Richmond.
The President had many things to dishearten him at this time, many
troublesome questions to settle. For instance, there were new loyal
State governments to provide in those parts of the South which had again
come under control of the Union armies--no easy matter, where every man,
woman and child harbored angry feelings against the North, and no matter
how just and forbearing he might be, his plans were sure to be thwarted
and bitterly opposed at every step.
There were serious questions, too, to be decided about negro soldiers,
for the South had raised a mighty outcry against the Emancipation
Proclamation, especially against the use of the freed slaves as
soldiers, vowing that white officers of negro troops would be shown
small mercy, if ever they were taken prisoners. No act of such vengeance
occurred, but in 1864 a fort manned by colored soldiers was captured by
the Confederates, and almost the entire garrison was put to death.
Must the order that the War Department had issued some time earlier, to
offset the Confederate threats, now be put in force? The order said
that for every negro prisoner killed by the Confederates a Confederate
prisoner in the hands of the Union armies would be taken out and shot.
It fell upon Mr. Lincoln to decide. The idea seemed unbearable to him,
yet, on the other hand, could he afford to let the massacre go unavenged
and thus encourage the South in the belief that it could commit such
barbarous acts and escape unharmed? Two reasons finally decided him
against putting the order in force. One was that General Grant was about
to start on his campaign against Richmond, and that it would be most
unwise to begin this by the tragic spectacle of a military punishment,
however merited. The other was his tender-hearted humanity. He could
not, he said, take men out and kill them in cold blood for crimes
committed by other men. If he could get hold of the persons who were
guilty of killing the colored prisoners in cold blood, the case would
be different; but he could not kill the innocent for the guilty.
Fortunately the offense was not repeated, and no one had cause to
criticize his clemency.
Numbers of good and influential men, dismayed at the amount of blood and
treasure that the war had already cost, and disheartened by the calls
for still more soldiers that Grant's campaign made necessary, began
to clamor for peace--were ready to grant almost anything that the
Confederates chose to ask. Rebel agents were in Canada professing to
be able to conclude a peace. Mr. Lincoln, wishing to convince these
northern "Peace men" of the groundlessness of their claim, and of the
injustice of their charges that the government was continuing the war
unnecessarily, sent Horace Greeley, the foremost among them, to Canada,
to talk with the self-styled ambassadors of Jefferson Davis. Nothing
came of it, of course, except abuse of Mr. Lincoln for sending such a
messenger, and a lively quarrel between Greeley and the rebel agents as
to who was responsible for the misunderstandings that arose.
The summer and autumn of 1864 were likewise filled with the bitterness
and high excitement of a presidential campaign; for, according to law,
Mr. Lincoln's successor had to be elected on the "Tuesday after the
first Monday" of November in that year. The great mass of Republicans
wished Mr. Lincoln to be reelected. The Democrats had long ago fixed
upon General McClellan, with his grievances against the President, as
their future candidate. It is not unusual for Presidents to discover
would-be rivals in their own cabinets. Considering the strong men who
formed Mr. Lincoln's cabinet, and the fact that four years earlier more
than one of them had active hopes of being chosen in his stead, it is
remarkable that there was so little of this.
The one who developed the most serious desire to succeed him was Salmon
P. Chase, his Secretary of the Treasury. Devoted with all his powers
to the cause of the Union, Mr. Chase was yet strangely at fault in his
judgment of men. He regarded himself as the friend of Mr. Lincoln,
but nevertheless held so poor an opinion of the President's mind and
character, compared with his own, that he could not believe people blind
enough to prefer the President to himself. He imagined that he did
not want the office, and was anxious only for the public good; yet
he listened eagerly to the critics of the President who flattered his
hopes, and found time in spite of his great labors to write letters to
all parts of the country, which, although protesting that he did not
want the honor, showed his entire willingness to accept it. Mr. Lincoln
was well aware of this. Indeed, it was impossible not to know about it,
though he refused to hear the matter discussed or to read any letters
concerning it. He had his own opinion of the taste displayed by Mr.
Chase, but chose to take no notice of his actions. "I have determined,"
he said, "to shut my eyes, so far as possible, to everything of the
sort. Mr. Chase makes a good Secretary, and I shall keep him where he
is. If he becomes President, all right. I hope we may never have a
worse man," and he not only kept him where he was, but went on
appointing Chase's friends to office.
There was also some talk of making General Grant the Republican
candidate for President, and an attempt was even made to trap Mr.
Lincoln into taking part in a meeting where this was to be done. Mr.
Lincoln refused to attend, and instead wrote a letter of such hearty and
generous approval of Grant and his army that the meeting naturally fell
into the hands of Mr. Lincoln's friends. General Grant, never at that
time or any other, gave the least encouragement to the efforts which
were made to array him against the President. Mr. Lincoln, on his part,
received all warnings to beware of Grant in the most serene manner,
saying tranquilly, "If he takes Richmond, let him have it." It was not
so with General Fremont. At a poorly attended meeting held in Cleveland
he was actually nominated by a handful of people calling themselves
the "Radical Democracy," and taking the matter seriously, accepted,
although, three months later, having found no response from the public,
he withdrew from the contest.
After all, these various attempts to discredit the name of Abraham
Lincoln caused hardly a ripple on the great current of public opinion,
and death alone could have prevented his choice by the Republican
national convention. He took no measures to help on his own candidacy.
With strangers he would not talk about the probability of his
reelection; but with friends he made no secret of his readiness to
continue the work he was engaged in if such should be the general wish.
"A second term would be a great honor and a great labor; which together,
perhaps, I would not decline," he wrote to one of them. He discouraged
officeholders, either civil or military, who showed any special zeal in
his behalf. To General Schurz, who wrote asking permission to take an
active part in the campaign for his reelection, he answered: "I perceive
no objection to your making a political speech when you are where one is
to be made; but quite surely, speaking in the North and fighting in the
South at the same time are not possible, nor could I be justified to
detail any officer to the political campaign... and then return him to
the army."
He himself made no long speeches during the summer, and in his short
addresses, at Sanitary Fairs, in answer to visiting delegations, and
on similar occasions where custom and courtesy obliged him to say a few
words, he kept his quiet ease and self-command, speaking heartily and
to the point, yet avoiding all the pitfalls that beset the candidate who
talks.
When the Republican national convention came together in Baltimore on
June 7, 1864, it had very little to do, for its delegates were bound by
rigid instructions to vote for Abraham Lincoln.
He was chosen on the first ballot, every State voting for him except
Missouri, whose representatives had been instructed to vote for Grant.
Missouri at once changed its vote, and the secretary of the convention
read the grand total of 506 for Lincoln, his announcement being greeted
by a storm of cheers that lasted several minutes.
It was not so easy to choose a Vice-President. Mr. Lincoln had been
besieged by many people to make known his wishes in the matter, but had
persistently refused. He rightly felt that it would be presumptuous in
him to dictate who should be his companion on the ticket, and, in case
of his death, his successor in office. This was for the delegates to the
convention to decide, for they represented the voters of the country. He
had no more right to dictate who should be selected than the Emperor of
China would have had. It is probable that Vice-President Hamlin would
have been renominated, if it had not been for the general feeling both
in and out of the convention that, under all the circumstances, it would
be wiser to select some man who had been a Democrat, and had yet upheld
the war. The choice fell upon Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, who was not
only a Democrat, but had been appointed by Mr. Lincoln military governor
of Tennessee in 1862.
The Democrats at first meant to have the national convention of their
party meet on the fourth of July; but after Fremont had been nominated
at Cleveland and Lincoln at Baltimore, they postponed it to a later
date, hoping that something in the chapter of accidents might happen to
their advantage. At first it appeared as if this might be the case.
The outlook for the Republicans was far from satisfactory. The terrible
fighting and great losses of Grant's army in Virginia had profoundly
shocked and depressed the country. The campaign of General Sherman, who
was then in Georgia, showed as yet no promise of the brilliant results
it afterward attained. General Early's sudden raid into Maryland, when
he appeared so unexpectedly before Washington and threatened the city,
had been the cause of much exasperation; and Mr. Chase, made bitter
by his failure to receive the coveted nomination for President, had
resigned from the cabinet. This seemed, to certain leading Republicans,
to point to a breaking up of the government. The "Peace" men were
clamoring loudly for an end of the war; and the Democrats, not having
yet formally chosen a candidate, were free to devote all their leisure
to attacks upon the administration.
Mr. Lincoln realized fully the tremendous issues at stake. He looked
worn and weary. To a friend who urged him to go away for a fortnight's
rest, he replied, "I cannot fly from my thoughts. My solicitude for this
great country follows me wherever I go. I do not think it is personal
vanity or ambition, though I am not free from these infirmities, but
I cannot but feel that the weal or woe of this great nation will be
decided in November. There is no program offered by any wing of the
Democratic party but that must result in the permanent destruction of
the Union."
The political situation grew still darker. Toward the end of August the
general gloom enveloped even the President himself. Then what he did was
most original and characteristic. Feeling that the campaign was going
against him, he made up his mind deliberately the course he ought to
pursue, and laid down for himself the action demanded by his strong
sense of duty. He wrote on August 23 the following memorandum: "This
morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this
administration will not be reelected. Then it will be my duty to so
cooperate with the President-elect as to save the Union between the
election and the inauguration, as he will have secured his election on
such ground that he cannot possibly save it afterward."
He folded and pasted the sheet of paper in such a way that its contents
could not be seen, and as the cabinet came together handed it to each
member successively, asking him to write his name across the back of it.
In this peculiar fashion he pledged himself and his administration to
accept loyally the verdict of the people if it should be against them,
and to do their utmost to save the Union in the brief remainder of his
term of office. He gave no hint to any member of his cabinet of the
nature of the paper thus signed until after his reelection.
The Democratic convention finally came together in Chicago on August 29.
It declared the war a failure, and that efforts ought to be made at once
to bring it to a close, and nominated General McClellan for President
McClellan's only chance of success lay in his war record. His position
as a candidate on a platform of dishonorable peace would have been no
less desperate than ridiculous. In his letter accepting the nomination,
therefore, he calmly ignored the platform, and renewed his assurances
of devotion to the Union, the Constitution, and the flag of his country.
But the stars in their courses fought against him. Even before the
Democratic convention met, the tide of battle had turned. The darkest
hour of the war had passed, and dawn was at hand, and amid the
thanksgivings of a grateful people, and the joyful salute of great guns,
the real presidential campaign began. The country awoke to the true
meaning of the Democratic platform; General Sherman's successes in
the South excited the enthusiasm of the people; and when at last the
Unionists, rousing from their midsummer languor, began to show their
faith in the Republican candidate, the hopelessness of all efforts to
undermine him became evident.