CHAPTER XI
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.
The Democratic opposition which made some headway in the first half of 1863 comprised a more extreme opposition prevailing in the West and led by Clement Vallandigham, a Congressman from Ohio, and a milder opposition led by Horatio Seymour, who from the end of 1862 to the end of 1864, when he failed of re-election, was Governor of New York State. The extreme section were often called "Copperheads," after a venomous snake of that name. Strictly, perhaps, this political term should be limited to the few who went so far as to desire the victory of the South; more loosely it was applied to a far larger number who went no further than to say that the war should be stopped. This demand, it must be observed, was based upon the change of policy shown in the Proclamation of Emancipation. "The war for the Union," said Vallandigham in Congress in January, 1863, "is in your hands a most bloody and costly failure. War for the Union was abandoned; war for the negro openly begun. With what success? Let the dead at Fredericksburg answer.—Ought this war to continue? I answer no—not a day, not an hour. What then? Shall we separate? Again I answer, no, no, no.—Stop fighting. Make an armistice. Accept at once friendly foreign mediation." And further: "The secret but real purpose of the war was to abolish slavery in the States, and with it the change of our present democratical form of government into an imperial despotism." This was in no sense treason; it was merely humbug. The alleged design to establish despotism, chiefly revealed at that moment by the liberation of slaves, had of course no existence. Equally false, as will be seen later, was the whole suggestion that any peace could have been had with the South except on the terms of separation. Vallandigham, a demagogue of real vigour, had perhaps so much honesty as is compatible with self-deception; at any rate, upon his subsequent visit to the South his intercourse with Southern leaders was conducted on the footing that the Union should be restored. But his character inspired no respect. Burnside, now commanding the troops in Ohio, held that violent denunciation of the Government in a tone that tended to demoralise the troops was treason, since it certainly was not patriotism, and when in May, 1863, Vallandigham made a very violent and offensive speech in Ohio he had him arrested in his house at night, and sent him before a court-martial which imprisoned him. Loud protest was raised by every Democrat. This worry came upon Lincoln just after Chancellorsville. He regretted Burnside's action—later on he had to reverse the rash suppression of a newspaper by which Burnside provoked violent indignation—but on this occasion he would only say in public that he "regretted the necessity" of such action. Evidently he thought it his duty to support a well-intentioned general against a dangerous agitator. The course which after some consideration he took was of the nature of a practical joke, perhaps justified by its success. Vallandigham was indeed released; he was taken to the front and handed over to the Confederates as if he had been an exchanged prisoner of war. In reply to demands from the Democratic organisation in Ohio that Vallandigham might be allowed to return home, Lincoln offered to consent if their leaders would sign a pledge to support the war and promote the efficiency of the army. This they called an evasion. Vallandigham made his way to Canada and conducted intrigues from thence. In his absence he was put up for the governorship of Ohio in November, but defeated by a huge majority, doubtless the larger because of Gettysburg and Vicksburg. The next year he suddenly returned home, braving the chance of arrest, and, probably to his disappointment, Lincoln let him be. In reply to protests against Vallandigham's arrest which had been sent by meetings in Ohio and New York, Lincoln had written clear defences of his action, from which the foregoing account of his views on martial law has been taken. In one of them was a sentence which probably went further with the people of the North than any other: "Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wily agitator who induces him to desert?" There may or may not be some fallacy lurking here, but it must not be supposed that this sentence came from a pleader's ingenuity. It was the expression of a man really agonised by his weekly task of confirming sentences on deserters from the army.
Governor Seymour was a more presentable antagonist than Vallandigham. He did not propose to stop the war. On the contrary, his case was that the war could only be effectively carried on by a law-abiding Government, which would unite the people by maintaining the Constitution, not, as the Radicals argued, by the flagitious policy of freeing the slaves. It should be added that he was really concerned at the corruption which was becoming rife, for which war contracts gave some scope, and which, with a critic's obliviousness to the limitations of a human force, he thought the most heavily-burdened Administration of its time could easily have put down. With a little imagination it is easy to understand the difficult position of the orthodox Democrats, who two years before had voted against restricting the extension of slavery, and were now asked for the sake of the Union to support a Government which was actually abolishing slavery by martial law. Also the attitude of the thoroughly self-righteous partisan is perfectly usual. Many of Governor Seymour's utterances were fair enough, and much of his conduct was patriotic enough. His main proceedings can be briefly summarised. His election as Governor in the end of 1862 was regarded as an important event, the appearance of a new leader holding an office of the greatest influence. Lincoln, assuming, as he had a right to do, the full willingness of Seymour to co-operate in prosecuting the war, did the simplest and best thing. He wrote and invited Seymour after his inauguration in March, 1863, to a personal conference with himself as to the ways in which, with their divergent views, they could best co-operate. The Governor waited three weeks before he acknowledged this letter. He then wrote and promised a full reply later. He never sent this reply. He protested energetically and firmly against the arrest of Vallandigham. In July, 1863, the Conscription Act began to be put in force in New York city; then occurred the only serious trouble that ever did occur under the Act; and it was very serious. A mob of foreign immigrants, mainly Irish, put a forcible stop to the proceeding of the draft. It set fire to the houses of prominent Republicans, and prevented the fire brigade from saving them. It gave chase to all negroes that it met, beating some to death, stringing up others to trees and lamp-posts and burning them as they hung. It burned down an orphanage for coloured children after the police had with difficulty saved its helpless inmates. Four days of rioting prevailed throughout the city before the arrival of fresh troops restored order. After an interval of prudent length the draft was successfully carried out. Governor Seymour arrived in the city during the riots. He harangued this defiled mob in gentle terms, promising them, if they would be good, to help them in securing redress of the grievance to which he attributed their conduct. Thenceforward to the end of his term of office he persecuted Lincoln with complaints as to the unfairness of the quota imposed on certain districts under the Conscription Act. It is true that he also protested on presumably sincere constitutional grounds against the Act itself, begging Lincoln to suspend its enforcement till its validity had been determined by the Courts. As to this Lincoln most properly agreed to facilitate, if he could, an appeal to the Supreme Court, but declined, on the ground of urgent military necessity, to delay the drafts in the meantime. Seymour's obstructive conduct, however, was not confined to the intelligible ground of objection to the Act itself; it showed itself in the perpetual assertion that the quotas were unfair. No complaint as to this had been raised before the riots. It seems that a quite unintended error may in fact at first have been made. Lincoln, however, immediately reduced the quotas in question to the full extent which the alleged error would have required. Fresh complaints from Seymour followed, and so on to the end. Ultimately Seymour was invited to come to Washington and have out the whole matter of his complaints in conference with Stanton. Like a prudent man, he again refused to face personal conference. It seems that Governor Seymour, who was a great person in his day, was very decidedly, in the common acceptance of the term, a gentleman. This has been counted unto him for righteousness. It should rather be treated as an aggravation of his very unmeritable conduct.
Thus, since the Proclamation of Emancipation the North had again become possessed of what is sometimes considered a necessity of good government, an organised Opposition ready and anxious to take the place of the existing Administration. It can well be understood that honourable men entered into this combination, but it is difficult to conceive on what common principle they could hold together which would not have been disastrous in its working. The more extreme leaders, who were likely to prove the driving force among them, were not unfitly satirised in a novel of the time called the "Man Without a Country." Their chance of success in fact depended upon the ill-fortune of their country in the war and on the irritation against the Government, which could be aroused by that cause alone and not by such abuses as they fairly criticised. In the latter part of 1863 the war was going well. A great meeting of "Union men" was summoned in August in Illinois. Lincoln was tempted to go and speak to them, but he contented himself with a letter. Phrases in it might suggest the stump orator, more than in fact his actual stump speeches usually did. In it, however, he made plain in the simplest language the total fallacy of such talk of peace as had lately become common; the Confederacy meant the Confederate army and the men who controlled it; as a fact no suggestion of peace or compromise came from them; if it ever came, the people should know it. In equally simple terms he sought to justify, even to supporters of the Union who did not share his "wish that all men could be free," his policy in regard to emancipation. In any case, freedom had for the sake of the Union been promised to negroes who were now fighting or working for the North, "and the promise being made must be kept." As that most critical year of the war drew to a close there was a prevailing recognition that the rough but straight path along which the President groped his way was the right path, and upon the whole he enjoyed a degree of general favour which was not often his portion.
3. The War in 1864.
It is the general military opinion that before the war entered on its final stage Jefferson Davis should have concentrated all his forces for a larger invasion of the North than was ever in fact undertaken. In the Gettysburg campaign he might have strengthened Lee's army by 20,000 men if he could have withdrawn them from the forts at Charleston. Charleston, however, was threatened during 1863 by the sea and land forces of the North, in an expedition which was probably itself unwise, as Lincoln himself seems to have suspected, but which helped to divert a Confederate army. In the beginning of 1864 Davis still kept this force at Charleston; he persisted also in keeping a hold on his own State, Mississippi, with a further small army; while Longstreet still remained in the south-east corner of Tennessee, where a useful employment of his force was contemplated but none was made. The chief Southern armies with which we have to deal are that of Lee, lying south of the Rapidan, and that of Bragg, now superseded by Joseph Johnston, at Dalton, south of Chattanooga. The Confederacy, it is thought, was now in a position in which it might take long to reduce it, but the only military chance for it was concentration on one great counter-stroke. This seems to have been the opinion of Lee and Longstreet. Jefferson Davis clung, even late in the year 1864, to the belief that disaster must somehow overtake any invading Northern army which pushed far. Possibly he reckoned also that the North would weary of the repeated checks in the process of conquest. Indeed, as will be seen later, the North came near to doing so, while a serious invasion of the North, unless overwhelmingly successful, might really have revived its spirit. In any case Jefferson Davis, unlike Lincoln, had no desire to be guided by his best officers. He was for ever quarrelling with Joseph Johnston and often with Beauregard; the less capable Bragg, though removed from the West, was now installed as his chief adviser in Richmond; and the genius of Lee was not encouraged to apply itself to the larger strategy of the war.
At the beginning of 1864 an advance from Chattanooga southward into the heart of the Confederate country was in contemplation. Grant and Farragut wished that it should be supported by a joint military and naval attack upon Mobile, in Alabama, on the Gulf of Mexico. Other considerations on the part of the Government prevented this. In 1863 Marshal Bazaine had invaded Mexico to set up Louis Napoleon's ill-fated client the Archduke Maximilian as Emperor. As the so-called "Monroe Doctrine" (really attributable to the teaching of Hamilton and the action of John Quincy Adams, who was Secretary of State under President Monroe) declared, such an extension of European influence, more especially dynastic influence, on the American continent was highly unacceptable to the United States. Many in the North were much excited, so much so that during 1864 a preposterous resolution, which meant, if anything, war with France, was passed on the motion of one Henry Winter Davis. It was of course the business of Lincoln and of Seward, now moulded to his views, to avoid this disaster, and yet, with such dignity as the situation allowed, keep the French Government aware of the enmity which they might one day incur. They did this. But they apprehended that the French, with a footing for the moment in Mexico, had designs on Texas; and thus, though the Southern forces in Texas were cut off from the rest of the Confederacy and there was no haste for subduing them, it was thought expedient, with an eye on France, to assert the interest of the Union in Texas. General Banks, in Louisiana, was sent to Texas with the forces which would otherwise have been sent to Mobile. His various endeavours ended in May, 1864, with the serious defeat of an expedition up the Red River. This defeat gave great annoyance to the North and made an end of Banks' reputation. It might conceivably have had a calamitous sequel in the capture by the South of Admiral Porter's river flotilla, which accompanied Banks, and the consequent undoing of the conquest of the Mississippi. As it was it wasted much force.
Before Grant could safely launch his forces southward from Chattanooga against Johnston, it was necessary to deal in some way with the Confederate force still at large in Mississippi. Grant determined to do this by the destruction of the railway system by which alone it could move eastward. For this purpose he left Thomas to hold Chattanooga, while Sherman was sent to Meridian, the chief railway centre in the Southern part of Mississippi. In February Sherman arrived there, and, though a subsidiary force, sent from Memphis on a similar but less important errand somewhat further north, met with a severe repulse, he was able unmolested to do such damage to the lines around Meridian as to secure Grant's purpose.
There was yet a further preliminary to the great final struggle. On March 1, 1864, pursuant to an Act of Congress which was necessary for this object, Lincoln conferred upon Grant the rank of Lieutenant-General, never held by any one else since Washington, for it was only brevet rank that was conferred on Scott. Therewith Grant took the command, under the President, of all the Northern armies. Grant came to Washington to receive his new honour. He had taken leave of Sherman in an interchange of letters which it is good to read; but he had intended to return to the West. Sherman, who might have desired the command in the West for himself, had unselfishly pressed him to return. He feared that the dreaded politicians would in some way hurt Grant, and that he would be thwarted by them, become disgusted, and retire; they did hurt him, but not then, nor in the way that Sherman had expected. Grant, however, could trust Sherman to carry out the work he wanted done in the West, and he now saw that, as Lincoln might have told him and possibly did, the work he wanted done in the East must be done by him. He went West again for a few days only, to settle his plans with Sherman. Sherman with his army of 100,000 was to follow Johnston's army of about 60,000, wherever it went, till he destroyed it. Grant with his 120,000 was to keep up an equally unfaltering fight with Lee's army, also of 60,000. There was, of course, nothing original about this conception except the idea, fully present to both men's minds, of the risk and sacrifice with which it was worth while to carry it out. Lincoln and Grant had never met till this month. Grant at the first encounter was evidently somewhat on his guard. He was prepared to like Lincoln, but he was afraid of mistaken dictation from him, and determined to discourage it. Also Stanton had advised him that Lincoln, out of mere good nature, would talk unwisely of any plans discussed with him. This was probably quite unjust. Stanton, in order to keep politicians and officers in their places, was accustomed to bite off the noses of all comers. Lincoln, on the contrary, would talk to all sorts of people with a readiness which was sometimes astonishing, but there was a good deal of method in this—he learnt something from these people all the time—and he certainly had a very great power of keeping his own counsel when he chose. In any case, when Grant at the end of April left Washington for the front, he parted with Lincoln on terms of mutual trust which never afterwards varied. Lincoln in fact, satisfied as to his general purpose, had been happy to leave him to make his plans for himself. He wrote to Grant: "Not expecting to see you again before the spring campaign begins, I wish to express in this way my entire satisfaction with what you have done up to this time so far as I understand it. The particulars of your plan I neither know nor seek to know. You are vigilant and self-reliant, and, pleased with this, I wish not to obtrude any constraints or restraints upon you. While I am very anxious that any great disaster or capture of our men in great numbers shall be avoided, I know these points are less likely to escape your attention than they would be mine. If there is anything wanting which is within my power to give, do not fail to let me know it. And now, with a brave army and a just cause, may God sustain you." Grant replied: "From my first entrance into the volunteer service of the country to the present day I have never had cause of complaint—have never expressed or implied a complaint against the Administration, or the Secretary of War, for throwing any embarrassment in the way of my vigorously prosecuting what appeared to me my duty. Indeed, since the promotion which placed me in command of all the armies, and in view of the great responsibility and importance of success, I have been astonished at the readiness with which everything asked for has been yielded, without even an explanation being asked. Should my success be less than I desire or expect, the least I can say is, the fault is not with you." At this point the real responsibility of Lincoln in regard to military events became comparatively small, and to the end of the war those events may be traced with even less detail than has hitherto been necessary.
Upon joining the Army of the Potomac Grant retained Meade, with whom he was pleased, in a somewhat anomalous position under him as commander of that army. "Wherever Lee goes," he told him, "there you will go too." His object of attack was, in agreement with the opinion which Lincoln had from an early date formed, Lee's army. If Lee could be compelled, or should choose, to shut himself up in Richmond, as did happen, then Richmond would become an object of attack, but not otherwise. Grant, however, hoped that he might force Lee to give him battle in the open. In the open or behind entrenchments, he meant to fight him, reckoning that if he lost double the number that Lee did, his own loss could easily be made up, but Lee's would be irreparable. His hope was to a large extent disappointed. He had to do with a greater general than himself, who, with his men, knew every inch of a tangled country. In the engagements which now followed, Grant's men were constantly being hurled against chosen positions, entrenched and with the new device of wire entanglements in front of them. "I mean," he wrote, "to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer." It took summer, autumn, winter, and the early spring. Once across the Rapidan he was in the tract of scrubby jungle called the Wilderness. He had hoped to escape out of this unopposed and at the same time to turn Lee's right by a rapid march to his own left. But he found Lee in his way. On May 5 and 6 there was stubborn and indecisive fighting, with a loss to Grant of 17,660 and to Lee of perhaps over 10,000—from Grant's point of view something gained. Then followed a further movement to the left to out-flank Lee. Again Lee was to be found in the way in a chosen position of his own near Spottsylvania Court House. Here on the five days from May 8 to May 12 the heavy fighting was continued, with a total loss to Grant of over 18,000 and probably a proportionate loss to Lee. Another move by Grant to the left now caused Lee to fall back to a position beyond the North Anna River, on which an attack was made but speedily given up. Further movements in the same general direction, but without any such serious fighting—Grant still endeavouring to turn Lee's right, Lee still moving so as to cover Richmond—brought Grant by the end of the month to Cold Harbour, some ten miles east by north of Richmond, close upon the scene of McClellan's misadventures. Meanwhile Grant had caused an expedition under General Butler to go by sea up the James, and to land a little south of Richmond, which, with the connected fortress of Petersburg, twenty-two miles to the south of it, had only a weak garrison left. Butler was a man with remarkable powers of self-advertisement; he had now a very good chance of taking Petersburg, but his expedition failed totally. From June 1 to June 3 Grant was occupied on the most disastrous enterprise of his career, a hopeless attack upon a strong entrenched position, which, with the lesser encounters that took place within the next few days, cost the North 14,000 men, against a loss to the South which has been put as low as 1,700. It was the one battle which Grant regretted having fought. He gave up the hope of a fight with Lee on advantageous conditions outside Richmond. On June 12 he suddenly moved his army across the James to the neighbourhood of City Point, east of Petersburg. Lee must now stand siege in Richmond and Petersburg. Had he now marched north against Washington, Grant would have been after him and would have secured for his vastly larger force the battle in the open which he had so far vainly sought. Yet another disappointment followed. On July 30 an attempt was made to carry Petersburg by assault immediately after the explosion of an enormous mine. It failed with heavy loss, through the fault of the amiable but injudicious Burnside, who now passed into civil life, and of the officers under him. The siege was to be a long affair. In reality, for all the disappointment, and in spite of Grant's confessed mistake at Cold Harbour, his grim plan was progressing. The force which the South could ill spare was being worn down, and Grant was in a position in which, though he might have got there at less cost, and though the end would not be yet, the end was sure. His army was for the time a good deal shaken, and the estimation in which the West Point officers held him sank low. His own determination was quite unshaken, and, though Lincoln hinted somewhat mildly that these enormous losses ought not to recur, his confidence in Grant was unabated, too.
People in Washington who had watched all this with alternations of feeling that ended in dejection had had another trial to their nerves early in July. The Northern General Sigel, who commanded in the lower part of the Shenandoah Valley, protecting the Baltimore and Ohio Railway, had marched southward in June in pursuance of a subsidiary part of Grant's scheme, but in a careless and rather purposeless manner. General Early, detached by Lee to deal with him, defeated him; outmanoeuvred and defeated General Hunter, who was sent to supersede him; overwhelmed with superior force General Lew Wallace, who stood in his way further on; and upon July 11 appeared before Washington itself. The threat to Washington had been meant as no more than a threat, but the garrison was largely made up of recruits; reinforcements to it sent back by Grant arrived only on the same day as Early, and if that enterprising general had not wasted some previous days there might have been a chance that he could get into Washington, though not that he could hold it. As it was he attacked one of the Washington forts. Lincoln was present, exhibiting, till the officers there insisted on his retiring, the indifference to personal danger which he showed on other occasions too. The attack was soon given up, and in a few days Early had escaped back across the Potomac, leaving in Grant's mind a determination that the Shenandoah Valley should cease to be so useful to the South.
Sherman set out from Chattanooga on the day when Grant crossed the Rapidan. Joseph Johnston barred his way in one entrenched position after another. Sherman, with greater caution than Grant, or perhaps with greater facilities of ground, manoeuvred him out of each position in turn, pushing him slowly back along the line of the railway towards Atlanta, the great manufacturing centre of Georgia, one hundred and twenty miles south by east from Chattanooga. Only once, towards the end of June at Kenesaw Mountain, some twenty miles north of Atlanta, did he attack Johnston's entrenchments, causing himself some unnecessary loss and failing in his direct attack on them, but probably thinking it necessary to show that he would attack whenever needed. Johnston has left a name as a master of defensive warfare, and doubtless delayed and hampered Sherman as much as he could. Jefferson Davis angrily and unwisely sent General Hood to supersede him. This less prudent officer gave battle several times, bringing up the Confederate loss before Atlanta fell to 34,000 against 30,000 on the other side, and being, by great skill on Sherman's part, compelled to evacuate Atlanta on September 2.
By this time there had occurred the last and most brilliant exploit of old Admiral Farragut, who on August 5 in a naval engagement of extraordinarily varied incident, had possessed himself of the harbour of Mobile, with its forts, though the town remained as a stronghold in Confederate hands and prevented a junction with Sherman which would have quite cut the Confederacy in two.
Nearer Washington, too, a memorable campaign was in process. For three weeks after Early's unwelcome visit, military mismanagement prevailed near Washington. Early was able to turn on his pursuers, and a further raid, this time into Pennsylvania, took place. Grant was too far off to exercise control except through a sufficiently able subordinate, which Hunter was not. Halleck, as in a former crisis, did not help matters. Lincoln, though at this time he issued a large new call for recruits, was unwilling any longer to give military orders. Just now his political anxieties had reached their height. His judgment was never firmer, but friends thought his strength was breaking under the strain. On this and on all grounds he was certainly wise to decline direct interference in military affairs. On August 1 Grant ordered General Philip H. Sheridan to the Shenandoah on temporary duty, expressing a wish that he should be put "in command of all the troops in the field, with instructions to put himself south of the enemy or follow him to the death." Lincoln telegraphed to Grant, quoting this despatch and adding, "This I think is exactly right; but please look over the despatches you may have received from here even since you made that order and see if there is any idea in the head of any one here of putting our army south of the enemy or following him to the death in any direction. I repeat to you it will neither be done nor attempted unless you watch it every day and hour and force it." Grant now came to Hunter's army and gently placed Sheridan in that general's place. The operations of that autumn, which established Sheridan's fame and culminated in his final defeat of Early at Cedar Creek on October 19, made him master of all the lower part of the valley. Before he retired into winter quarters he had so laid waste the resources of that unfortunate district that Richmond could no longer draw supplies from it, nor could it again support a Southern army in a sally against the North.
In the month of November Sherman began a new and extraordinary movement, of which the conception was all his own, sanctioned with reluctance by Grant, and viewed with anxiety by Lincoln, though he maintained his absolute resolve not to interfere. He had fortified himself in Atlanta, removing its civil inhabitants, in an entirely humane fashion, to places of safety, and he had secured a little rest for his army. But he lay far south in the heart of what he called "Jeff Davis' Empire," and Hood could continually harass him by attacks on his communications. Hood, now supervised by Beauregard, was gathering reinforcements, and Sherman learnt that he contemplated a diversion by invading Tennessee. Sherman determined to divide his forces, to send Thomas far back into Tennessee with sufficient men, as he calculated, to defend it, and himself with the rest of his army to set out for the eastern sea-coast, wasting no men on the maintenance of his communications, but living on the country and "making the people of Georgia feel the weight of the war." He set out for the East on November 15. Hood, at Beauregard's orders, shortly marched off for the North, where the cautious Thomas awaited events within the fortifications of Nashville. At Franklin, in the heart of Tennessee, about twenty miles south of Nashville, Hood's army suffered badly in an attack upon General Schofield, whom Thomas had left to check his advance while further reinforcements came to Nashville. Schofield fell back slowly on Thomas, Hood rashly pressing after him with a small but veteran army now numbering 44,000. Grant and the Washington authorities viewed with much concern an invasion which Thomas had suffered to proceed so far. Grant had not shared Sherman's faith in Thomas. He now repeatedly urged him to act, but Thomas had his own views and obstinately bided his time. Days followed when frozen sleet made an advance impossible. Grant had already sent Logan to supersede Thomas, and, growing still more anxious, had started to come west himself, when the news reached him of a battle on December 15 and 16 in which Thomas had fallen on Hood, completely routing him, taking on these days and in the pursuit that followed no less than 13,000 prisoners.
There was a song, "As we go marching through Georgia," which was afterwards famous, and which Sherman could not endure. What his men most often sang, while they actually were marching through Georgia, was another, and of its kind a great song:—
"John Brown's body lies amouldering in the grave,
But his soul goes marching on.
Glory, glory, Hallelujah."
Their progress was of the nature of a frolic, though in one way a very stern frolic. They had little trouble from the small and scattered Confederate forces that lay near their route. They industriously and ingeniously destroyed the railway track of the South, heating the rails and twisting them into knots; and the rich country of Georgia, which had become the chief granary of the Confederates, was devastated as they passed, for a space fifty or sixty miles broad, by the destruction of all the produce they could not consume. This was done under control by organised forage parties. Reasonable measures were taken to prevent private pillage of houses. No doubt it happened. Sherman's able cavalry commander earned a bad name, and "Uncle Billy," as they called him to his face, clearly had a soft corner in his heart for the light-hearted and light-fingered gentlemen called "bummers" (a "bummer," says the Oxford Dictionary, "is one who quits the ranks and goes on an independent foraging expedition on his own account"). They were, incidentally, Sherman found, good scouts. But the serious crimes committed were very few, judged by the standard of the ordinary civil population. The authentic complaints recorded relate to such matters as the smashing of a grand piano or the disappearance of some fine old Madeira. Thus the suffering caused to individuals was probably not extreme, and a long continuance of the war was rendered almost impossible. A little before Christmas Day, 1864, Sherman had captured, with slight opposition, the city of Savannah, on the Atlantic, with many guns and other spoils, and was soon ready to turn northwards on the last lap of his triumphant course. Lincoln's letter of thanks characteristically confessed his earlier unexpressed and unfulfilled fears.
Grant was proceeding all the time with his pressure on the single large fortress which Richmond and Petersburg together constituted. Its circuit was far too great for complete investment. His efforts were for a time directed to seizing the three railway lines which converged from the south on Petersburg and to that extent cutting off the supplies of the enemy. But he failed to get hold of the most important of these railways. He settled down to the slow process of entrenching his own lines securely and extending the entrenchment further and further round the south side of Petersburg. Lee was thus being forced to extend the position held by his own small army further and further. In time the lines would crack and the end come.
It need hardly be said that despair was invading the remnant of the Confederacy; supplies began to run short in Richmond, recruiting had ceased, desertion was increasing. Before the story of its long resistance closes it is better to face the gravest charge against the South. That charge relates to the misery inflicted upon many thousands of Northern prisoners in certain prisons or detention camps of the South. The alleged horrors were real and were great. The details should not be commemorated, but it is right to observe that the pitiable condition in which the stricken survivors of this captivity returned, and the tale they had to tell, caused the bitterness which might be noted afterwards in some Northerners. The guilt lay mainly with a few subordinate but uncontrolled officials. In some degree it must have been shared by Jefferson Davis and his Administration, though a large allowance should be made for men so sorely driven. But it affords no ground whatever, as more fortunate prisoners taken by the Confederates have sometimes testified, for any general imputation of cruelty against the Southern officers, soldiers, or people. There is nothing in the record of the war which dishonours the South, nothing to restrain the tribute to its heroism which is due from a foreign writer, and which is irrepressible in the case of a writer who rejoices that the Confederacy failed.
4. The Second Election of Lincoln: 1864.
Having the general for whom he had long sought, Lincoln could now be in military matters little more than the most intelligent onlooker; he could maintain the attitude, congenial to him where he dealt with skilled men, that when he differed from them they probably knew better than he. This was well, for in 1864 his political anxieties became greater than they had been since war declared itself at Fort Sumter. Whole States which had belonged to the Confederacy were now securely held by the Union armies, and the difficult problem of their government was approaching its final settlement. It seemed that the war should soon end; so the question of peace was pressed urgently. Moreover, the election of a President was due in the autumn, and, strange as it is, the issue was to be whether, with victory in their grasp, the victors should themselves surrender.
It was not given to Lincoln after all to play a great part in the reconstruction of the South; that was reserved for much rougher and much weaker hands. But the lines on which he had moved from the first are of interest. West Virginia, with its solid Unionist population, was simply allowed to form itself into an ordinary new State. But matters were not so simple where the Northern occupation was insecure, or where a tiny fraction of a State was held, or where a large part of the people leaned to the Confederacy. Military governors were of course appointed; in Tennessee this position was given to a strong Unionist, Andrew Johnson, who was already Senator for that State. In Louisiana and elsewhere Lincoln encouraged the citizens who would unreservedly accept the Union to organise State Governments for themselves. Where they did so there was friction between them and the Northern military governor who was still indispensable. There was also to the end triangular trouble between the factions in Missouri and the general commanding there. To these little difficulties, which were of course unceasing, Lincoln applied the firmness and tact which were no longer surprising in him, with a pleasing mixture of good temper and healthy irritation. But further difficulties lay in the attitude of Congress, which was concerned in the matter because each House could admit or reject the Senators or Representatives claiming to sit for a Southern State. There were questions about slavery in such States. Lincoln, as we have seen, had desired, if he could, to bring about the abolition of slavery through gradual and through local action, and he had wished to see the franchise given only to the few educated negroes. Nothing came of this, but it kept up the suspicion of Radicals in Congress that he was not sound on slavery; and, apart from slavery, the whole question of the terms on which people lately in arms against the country could be admitted as participators in the government of the country was one on which statesmen in Congress had their own very important point of view. Lincoln's main wish was that, with the greatest speed and the least heat spent on avoidable controversy, State government of spontaneous local growth should spring up in the reconquered South. "In all available ways," he had written to one of his military governors, "give the people a chance to express their wishes at these elections. Follow forms of law as far as convenient, but at all events get the expression of the largest number of people possible." Above all he was afraid lest in the Southern elections to Congress that very thing should happen which after his death did happen. "To send a parcel of Northern men here as representatives, elected, as would be understood (and perhaps really so), at the point of the bayonet, would be disgraceful and outrageous." For a time he and Congress worked together well enough, but sharp disagreement arose in 1864. He had propounded a particular plan for the reconstruction of Southern States. Senator Wade, the formidable Chairman of the Joint Committee on the War, and Henry Winter Davis, a keen, acrid, and fluent man who was powerful with the House, carried a Bill under which a State could only be reconstructed on their own plan, which differed from Lincoln's. The Bill came to Lincoln for signature in the last hours of the session, and, amidst frightened protests from friendly legislators then in his room, he let it lie there unsigned, till it expired with the session, and went on with his work. This was in July, 1864; his re-election was at stake. The Democrats were gaining ground; he might be giving extreme offence to the strongest Republican. "If they choose," he said, "to make a point of this I do not doubt that they can do harm" (indeed, those powerful men Wade and Davis now declared against his re-election with ability and extraordinary bitterness); but he continued: "At all events I must keep some consciousness of being somewhere near right. I must keep some standard or principle fixed within myself." The Bill would have repressed loyal efforts already made to establish State Governments in the South. It contained also a provision imposing the abolition of slavery on every such reconstructed State. This was an attempt to remedy any flaw in the constitutional effect of the Proclamation of Emancipation. But it was certainly in itself flagrantly unconstitutional; and the only conclusive way of abolishing slavery was the Constitutional Amendment, for which Lincoln was now anxious. This was not a pedantic point, for there might have been great trouble if the courts had later found a constitutional flaw in some negro's title to freedom. But the correctness of Lincoln's view hardly matters. In lots of little things, like a tired man who was careless by nature, Lincoln may perhaps have yielded to influence or acted for his political convenience in ways which may justly be censured, but it would be merely immoral to care whether he did so or did not, since at the crisis of his fate he could risk all for one scruple. In an earlier stage of his controversies with the parties he had written: "From time to time I have done and said what appeared to me proper to do and say. The public knows it all. It obliges nobody to follow me, and I trust it obliges me to follow nobody. The Radicals and Conservatives each agree with me in some things and disagree in others. I could wish both to agree with me in all things; for then they would agree with each other, and be too strong for any foe from any quarter. They, however, choose to do otherwise, and I do not question their right. I, too, shall do what seems to be my duty. I hold whoever commands in Missouri or elsewhere responsible to me and not to either Radicals or Conservatives. It is my duty to hear all; but at last I must, within my sphere, judge what to do and what to forbear."
In this same month of July, after the Confederate General Early's appearance before Washington had given Lincoln a pause from political cares, another trouble reached a point at which it is known to have tried his patience more than any other trouble of his Presidency. Peace after war is not always a matter of substituting the diplomatist for the soldier. When two sides were fighting, one for Union and the other for Independence, one or the other had to surrender the whole point at issue. In this case there might appear to have been a third possibility. The Southern States might have been invited to return to the Union on terms which admitted their right to secede again if they felt aggrieved. The invitation would in fact have been refused. But, if it had been made and accepted, this would have been a worse surrender for the North than any mere acknowledgment that the South could not be reconquered; for national unity from that day to this would have existed on the sufferance of a factious or a foreign majority in any single State. Lincoln had faced this. He was there to restore the Union on a firm foundation. He meant to insist to the point of pedantry that, by not so much as a word or line from the President or any one seeming to act for him, should the lawful right of secession even appear to be acknowledged. Some men would have been glad to hang Jefferson Davis as a traitor, yet would have been ready to negotiate with him as with a foreign king. Lincoln, who would not have hurt one hair of his head, and would have talked things over with Mr. Davis quite pleasantly, would have died rather than treat with him on the footing that he was head of an independent Confederacy. The blood shed might have been shed for nothing if he had done so. But to many men, in the long agony of the war and its disappointments, the plain position became much obscured. The idea in various forms that by some sort of negotiation the issue could be evaded began to assert itself again and again. The delusion was freely propagated that the South was ready to give in if only Lincoln would encourage its approaches. It was sheer delusion. Jefferson Davis said frankly to the last that the Confederacy would have "independence or extermination," and though Stephens and many others spoke of peace to the electors in their own States, Jefferson Davis had his army with him, and the only result which agitation against him ever produced was that two months before the irreparable collapse the chief command under him was given to his most faithful servant Lee. But it was useless for Lincoln to expose the delusion in the plainest terms; it survived exposure and became a danger to Northern unity.
Lincoln therefore took a strange course, which generally succeeded. When honest men came to him and said that the South could be induced to yield, he proposed to them that they should go to Jefferson Davis and see for themselves. The Chairman of the Republican organisation ultimately approached Lincoln on this matter at the request of a strong committee; but he was a sensible man whom Lincoln at once converted by drafting the precise message that would have to be sent to the Confederate President. On two earlier occasions such labourers for peace were allowed to go across the lines and talk with Davis; it could be trusted to their honour to pretend to no authority; they had interesting talks with the great enemy, and made religious appeals to him or entertained him with wild proposals for a joint war on France over Mexico. They returned, converted also. But in July Horace Greeley, the great editor, who was too opinionated to be quite honest, was somehow convinced that Southern agents at Niagara, who had really come to hold intercourse with the disloyal group among the Democrats, were "two ambassadors" from the Confederacy seeking an audience of Lincoln. He wrote to Lincoln, begging him to receive them. Lincoln caused Greeley to go to Niagara and see the supposed ambassadors himself. He gave him written authority to bring to him any person with proper credentials, provided, as he made plain in terms that perhaps were blunt, that the basis of any negotiation should include the recognition of the Union and the abolition of slavery. The persons whom Greeley saw had no authority to treat about anything. Greeley in his irritation now urged Lincoln to convey to Jefferson Davis through these mysterious men his readiness to receive them if they were accredited. In other words, the North was to begin suing for peace—a thing clearly unwise, which Lincoln refused. Greeley now involved Lincoln in a tangled controversy to which he gave such a turn that, unless Lincoln would publish the most passionately pacific of Greeley's letters, to the great discouragement of the public with whom Greeley counted, he must himself keep silent on what had passed. He elected to keep silent while Greeley in his paper criticised him as the person responsible for the continuance of senseless bloodshed. This was publicly harmful; and, as for its private bearing, the reputation of obstinate blood-thirstiness was certain to be painful to Lincoln.
The history of Lincoln's Cabinet has a bearing upon what is to follow. He ruled his Ministers with undisputed authority, talked with them collectively upon the easiest terms, spoke to them as a headmaster to his school when they caballed against one another, kept them in some sort of unison in a manner which astonished all who knew them. Cameron had had to retire early; so did the little-known Caleb Smith, who was succeeded in his unimportant office as Secretary of the Interior by a Mr. Usher, who seems to have been well chosen. Bates, the Attorney-General, retired, weary of his work, towards the end of 1864, and Lincoln had the keen pleasure of appointing James Speed, the brother of that unforgotten and greatly honoured friend whom he honoured the more for his contentedness with private station. James Speed himself was in Lincoln's opinion "an honest man and a gentleman, and one of those well-poised men, not too common here, who are not spoiled by a big office."
Blair might be regarded as a delightful, or equally as an intolerable man. He attacked all manner of people causelessly and violently, and earned implacable dislike from the Radicals In his party. Then he frankly asked Lincoln to dismiss him whenever it was convenient. There came a time when Lincoln's re-election was in great peril, and he might, it was urged, have made it sure by dismissing Blair. It is significant that Lincoln then refused to promote his own cause by seeming to sacrifice Blair, but later on, when his own election was fairly certain, but a greater degree of unity in the Republican party was to be gained, did ask Blair to go; (Blair's quarrels, it should be added, had become more and more outrageous). So he went and immediately flung himself with enthusiasm into the advocacy of Lincoln's cause. All the men who left Lincoln remained his friends, except one who will shortly concern us. Of Lincoln's more important ministers Welles did his work for the Navy industriously but unnoted. Stanton, on the other hand, and Lincoln's relations with Stanton are the subjects of many pages of literature. These two curious and seemingly incompatible men hit upon extraordinary methods of working together. It can be seen that Lincoln's chief care in dealing with his subordinates was to give support and to give free play to any man whose heart was in his work. In countless small matters he would let Stanton disobey him and flout him openly. ("Did Stanton tell you I was a damned fool? Then I expect I must be one, for he is almost always right and generally says what he means.") But every now and then, when he cared much about his own wish, he would step in and crush Stanton flat. Crowds of applicants to Lincoln with requests of a kind that must be granted sparingly were passed on to Stanton, pleased with the President, or mystified by his sadly observing that he had not much influence with this Administration but hoped to have more with the next. Stanton always refused them. He enjoyed doing it. Yet it seems a low trick to have thus indulged his taste for unpopularity, till one discovers that, when Stanton might have been blamed seriously and unfairly, Lincoln was very careful to shoulder the blame himself. The gist of their mutual dealings was that the hated Stanton received a thinly disguised, but quite unfailing support, and that hated or applauded, ill or well, wrong in this detail and right in that, he abode in his department and drove, and drove, and drove, and worshipped Lincoln. To Seward, who played first and last a notable part in history, and who all this time conducted foreign affairs under Lincoln without any mishap in the end, one tribute is due. When he had not a master it is said that his abilities were made useless by his egotism; yet it can be seen that, with his especial cause to be jealous of Lincoln, he could not even conceive how men let private jealousy divide them in the performance of duty.
It was otherwise with the ablest man in the Cabinet. Salmon P. Chase must really have been a good man in the days before he fell in love with his own goodness. Lincoln and the country had confidence in his management of the Treasury, and Lincoln thought more highly of his general ability than of that of any other man about him. He, for his part, distrusted and despised Lincoln. Those who read Lincoln's important letters and speeches see in him at once a great gentleman; there were but few among the really well-educated men of America who made much of his lacking some of the minor points of gentility to which most of them were born; but of these few Chase betrayed himself as one. At the beginning of 1864 Chase was putting it about that he had himself no wish to be President, but—; that of course he was loyal to Mr. Lincoln, but—; and so forth. He had, as indeed he deserved, admirers who wished he should be President, and early in the year some of them expressed this wish in a manifesto. Chase wrote to Lincoln that this was not his own doing; Lincoln replied that he himself knew as little of these things "as my friends will allow me to know." To those who spoke to him of Chase's intrigues he only said that Chase would in some ways make a very good President, and he hoped they would never have a worse President than he. The movement in favour of Chase collapsed very soon, and it evidently had no effect on Lincoln. Chase, however, was beginning to foster grievances of his own against Lincoln. These related always to appointments in the service of the Treasury. He professed a horror of party influences in appointments, and imputed corrupt motives to Lincoln in such matters. He shared the sound ideas of the later civil service reformers, though he was far too easily managed by a low class of flatterers to have been of the least use in carrying them out. Lincoln would certainly not at that crisis have permitted strife over civil service reform, but some of his admirers have probably gone too far in claiming him as a sturdy supporter of the old school who would despise the reforming idea. Letters of his much earlier betray his doubts as to the old system, and he was exactly the man who in quieter times could have improved matters with the least possible fuss. However that may be, all the tiresome circumstances of Chase's differences with him are well known, and in these instances Lincoln was clearly in the right, and Chase quarrelled only because he could not force upon him appointments that would have created fury. Once Chase was overruled and wrote his resignation. Lincoln went to him with the resignation in his hand, treated him with simple affection for a man whom he still liked, and made him take it back. Later on Chase got his own way on the whole, but was angry and sent another resignation. Some one heard of it and came to Lincoln to say that the loss of Chase would cause a financial panic. Lincoln's answer was to this effect: "Chase thinks he has become indispensable to the country; that his intimate friends know it, and he cannot comprehend why the country does not understand it. He also thinks he ought to be President; has no doubt whatever about that. It is inconceivable to him why people do not rise as one man and say so. He is a great statesman, and at the bottom a patriot. Ordinarily he discharges the duties of a public office with greater ability than any man I know. Mind, I say 'ordinarily,' but he has become irritable, uncomfortable, so that he is never perfectly happy unless he is thoroughly miserable and able to make everybody else just as uncomfortable as he is himself. He is either determined to annoy me, or that I shall pat him on the shoulder and coax him to stay. I don't think I ought to do it. I will not do it. I will take him at his word." So he did. This was at the end of June, 1864, when Lincoln's apprehensions about his own re-election were keen, and the resignation of Chase, along with the retention of Blair, seemed likely to provoke anger which was very dangerous to himself. An excellent successor to the indispensable man was soon found. Chase found more satisfaction than ever in insidious opposition to Lincoln. Lincoln's opportunity of requiting him was not yet.
The question of the Presidency loomed large from the beginning of the year to the election in November. At first, while the affairs of war seemed to be in good train, the chief question was who should be the Republican candidate. It was obviously not a time when a President of even moderate ability and character, with all the threads in his hands, could wisely have been replaced except for overwhelming reasons. But since 1832, when Jackson had been re-elected, the practice of giving a President a second term had lapsed. It has been seen that there was friction, not wholly unnatural, between Lincoln and many of his party. The inner circles of politicians were considering what candidate could carry the country. They were doing so with great anxiety, for disaffection was growing serious in the North and the Democrats would make a good fight. They honestly doubted whether Lincoln was the best candidate, and attributed their own excited mood of criticism to the public at large. They forgot the leaning of ordinary men towards one who is already serving them honestly. Of the other possible candidates, including Chase, Frémont had the most energetic backers. Enough has been said already of his delusive attractiveness. General Butler had also some support. He was an impostor of a coarser but more useful stamp. A successful advocate in Massachusetts, he had commanded the militia of the State when they first appeared on the scene at Baltimore in 1861, and he had been in evidence ever since without sufficient opportunity till May, 1864, of proving that real military incapacity of which some of Lincoln's friends suspected him. He had a kind of resourceful impudence, coupled with executive vigour and a good deal of wit, which had made him useful in the less martial duties of his command. Generals in a war of this character were often so placed that they had little fighting to do and much civil government, and Butler, who had first treated slaves as "contraband" and had dealt with his difficulties about negroes with more heart and more sense than many generals, had to some extent earned his reputation among the Republicans. Thus of those volunteer generals who never became good soldiers he is said to have been the only one that escaped the constant process of weeding out. To the end he kept confidently claiming higher rank in the Army, and when he had signally failed under Grant at Petersburg he succeeded somehow in imposing himself upon that, at first indignant, general. Nothing actually came of the danger that the public might find a hero in this man, who was neither scrupulous nor able, but he had so captivated experienced politicians that some continued even after Lincoln's re-election to think Butler the man whom the people would have preferred. Last but not least many were anxious to nominate Grant. It was an innocent thought, but Grant's merits were themselves the conclusive reason why he should not be taken from the work he had already in hand.
Through the early months of the year the active politicians earnestly collogued among themselves about possible candidates, and it seems there was little sign among them of that general confidence in Lincoln which a little while before had been recognised as prevailing in the country. In May the small and light-headed section of the so-called Radicals who favoured Frémont organised for themselves a "national meeting" of some few people at which they nominated him for the Presidency. They had no chance of success, but they might have helped the Democrats by carrying off some Republican votes. Besides, there are of course men who, having started as extremists in one direction and failed, will go over to the opposite extreme rather than moderate their aims. Months later, when a Republican victory of some sort became certain, unanimity among Republicans was secured; for some passions were appeased by the resignation of Blair, and Frémont was prevailed upon to withdraw. But in the meantime the Republican party had sent its delegates to a Convention at Baltimore early in June. This Convention met in a comparatively fortunate hour. In spite of the open disaffection of small sections, the Northern people had been in good spirits about the war when Grant set out to overcome Lee. At first he was felt to be progressing pretty well, and, though the reverse at Cold Harbour had happened a few days before, the size of that mishap was not yet appreciated. Ordinary citizens, called upon now and then to decide a broad and grave issue, often judge with greater calm than is possible to any but the best of the politicians and the journalists. Indeed, some serious politicians had been anxious to postpone the Convention, justly fearing that these ignorant delegates were not yet imbued with that contempt for Lincoln which they had worked up among themselves. At the Baltimore Convention the delegates of one State wanted Grant, but the nomination of Lincoln was immediate and almost unanimous. This same Convention declared for a Constitutional Amendment to abolish slavery. Lincoln would say nothing as to the choice of a candidate for the Vice-Presidency. He was right, but the result was most unhappy in the end. The Convention chose Andrew Johnson. Johnson, whom Lincoln could hardly endure, began life as a journeyman tailor. He had raised himself like Lincoln, and had performed a great part in rallying the Unionists of Tennessee. But—not to dwell upon the fact that he was drunk when he was sworn in as Vice-President—his political creed was that of bitter class-hatred, and his character degenerated into a weak and brutal obstinacy. This man was to succeed Lincoln. Lincoln, in his letter to accept the nomination, wrote modestly, refusing to take the decision of the Convention as a tribute to his peculiar fitness for his post, but was "reminded in this connection of a story of an old Dutch farmer, who remarked to a companion that it was not best to swap horses when crossing a stream."
It remained possible that the dissatisfied Republicans would revolt later and put another champion in the field. But now attention turned to the Democrats. Their Convention was to meet at Chicago at the end of August, and in the interval the North entered upon the period of deepest mental depression that came to it during the war. It is startling to learn now that in the course of that year, when the Confederacy lay like a nut in the nutcrackers, when the crushing of its resistance might indeed require a little stronger pressure than was expected, and the first splitting in its hard substance might not come on the side on which it was looked for, but when no wise man could have a doubt as to the end, the victorious people were inclined to think that the moment had come for giving in. "In this purpose to save the country and its liberties," said Lincoln, "no class of people seem so nearly unanimous as the soldiers in the field and the sailors afloat. Do they not have the hardest of it? Who should quail while they do not?" Yet there is conclusive authority for saying that there was now more quailing in the North than there had ever been before. When the war had gone on long, checks to the course of victory shook the nerves of people at home more than crushing defeats had shaken them in the first two years of the struggle, and men who would have wrapped the word "surrender" in periphrasis went about with surrender in their hearts. Thus the two months that went before the great rally of the Democrats at Chicago were months of good omen for a party which, however little the many honourable men in its ranks were willing to face the fact, must base its only hope upon the weakening of the national will. For public attention was turned away from other fields of war and fixed upon the Army of the Potomac. Sherman drove back Johnston, and routed Hood; Farragut at Mobile enriched the annals of the sea; but what told upon the imagination of the North was that Grant's earlier progress was followed by the definite failure of his original enterprise against Lee's army, by Northern defeats on the Shenandoah and an actual dash by the South against Washington, by the further failure of Grant's first assault upon Petersburg, and by hideous losses and some demoralisation in his army. The candidate that the Democrats would put forward and the general principle of their political strategy were well known many weeks before their Convention met; and the Republicans already despaired of defeating them. In the Chicago Convention there were men, apparently less reputable in character than their frank attitude suggests, who were outspoken against the war; their leader was Vallandigham. There were men who spoke boldly for the war, but more boldly against emancipation and the faults of the Government; their leader was Seymour, talking with the accent of dignity and of patriotism. Seymour, for the war, presided over the Convention; Vallandigham, against the war, was the master spirit in its debates. It was hard for such men, with any saving of conscience, to combine. The mode of combination which they discovered is memorable in the history of faction. First they adopted a platform which meant peace; then they adopted a candidate intended to symbolise successful war. They resolved "that this Convention does explicitly declare, as the sense of the American people, that after four years of failure to restore the Union by the experiment of war . . . justice, humanity, liberty, and the public welfare demand that immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities, with a view to an ultimate convention of the States or other peaceable means, to the end that at the earliest practicable moment peace may be restored on the basis of the Federal Union of the States." The fallacy which named the Union as the end while demanding as a means the immediate cessation of hostilities needs no demonstration. The resolution was thus translated: "Resolved that the war is a failure"; and the translation had that trenchant accuracy which is often found in American popular epigram. The candidate chosen was McClellan; McClellan in set terms repudiated the resolution that the war was a failure, and then accepted the candidature. He meant no harm to the cause of the Union, but he meant no definite and clearly conceived good. Electors might now vote Democratic because the party was peaceful or because the candidate was a warrior. The turn of fortune was about to arrest this combination in the really formidable progress of its crawling approach to power. Perhaps it was not only, as contemporary observers thought, events in the field that began within a few days to make havoc with the schemes of McClellan and his managers. Perhaps if the patience of the North had been tried a little longer the sense of the people would still have recoiled from the policy of the Democrats, which had now been defined in hard outline. As a matter of fact it was only in the months while the Chicago Convention was still impending and for a few days or weeks after it had actually taken place that the panic of the Republicans lasted. But during that time the alarm among them was very great, whether it was wholly due to the discouragement of the people about the war or originated among the leaders and was communicated to their flock. Sagacious party men reported from their own neighbourhoods that there was no chance of winning the election. In one quarter or another there was talk of setting aside Lincoln and compelling Grant to be a candidate. About August 12 Lincoln was told by Thurlow Weed, the greatest of party managers, that his election was hopeless. Ten days later he received the same assurance from the central Republican Committee through their chairman, Raymond, together with the advice that he should make overtures for peace.
Supposing that in the following November McClellan should have been elected, and that in the following March he should have come into office with the war unfinished, it seems now hardly credible that he would have returned to slavery, or at least disbanded without protection the 150,000 negroes who were now serving the North. Lincoln, however, seriously believed that this was the course to which McClellan's principles and those of his party committed him, and that (policy and honour apart) this would have been for military reasons fatal. McClellan had repudiated the Peace Resolution, but his followers and his character were to be reckoned with rather than his words, and indeed his honest principles committed him deeply to some attempt to reverse Lincoln's policy as to slavery, and he clearly must have been driven into negotiations with the South. The confusion which must inevitably be created by attempts to satisfy the South, when it was in no humour of moderation, and by the fury which yielding would have provoked in half the people of the North, was well and tersely described by Grant in a letter to a friend, which that friend published in support of Lincoln. At a fair at Philadelphia for the help of the wounded Lincoln said: "We accepted this war; we did not begin it. We accepted it for an object, and when that object is accomplished the war will end, and I hope to God that it will never end until that object is accomplished." Whatever the real mind of McClellan and of the average Democrat may have been, it was not this; and the posterity of Mr. Facing-both-ways may succeed in an election, but never in war or the making of lasting peace.
Lincoln looked forward with happiness, after he was actually re-elected, to the quieter pursuits of private life which might await him in four years' time. He looked forward not less happily to a period of peace administration first, and there can be no doubt that he would have prized as much as any man the highest honour that his countrymen could bestow, a second election to the Presidency. But, even in a smaller man who had passed through such an experience as he had and was not warped by power, these personal wishes might well have been merged in concern for the cause in hand. There is everything to indicate that they were completely so in his case. A President cannot wisely do much directly to promote his own re-election, but he appears to have done singularly little. At the beginning of 1864, when the end of the war seemed near, and the election of a Republican probable, he may well have thought that he would be the Republican candidate, but he had faced the possible choice of Chase very placidly, and of Grant he said, "If he takes Richmond let him have the Presidency." It was another matter when the war again seemed likely to drag on and a Democratic President might come in before the end of it. An editor who visited the over-burdened President in August told him that he needed some weeks of rest and seclusion. But he said, "I cannot fly from my thoughts. I do not think it is personal vanity or ambition, though I am not free from those infirmities, but I cannot but feel that the weal or woe of the nation will be decided in November. There is no proposal offered by any wing of the Democratic party but that must result in the permanent destruction of the Union." He would have been well content to make place for Grant if Grant had finished his work. But that work was delayed, and then Lincoln became greatly troubled by the movement to force Grant, the general whom he had at last found, into politics with his work undone; for all would have been lost if McClellan had come in with the war still progressing badly. Lincoln had been invited in June to a gathering in honour of Grant, got up with the thinly disguised object of putting the general forward as his rival. He wrote, with true diplomacy: "It is impossible for me to attend. I approve nevertheless of whatever may tend to strengthen and sustain General Grant and the noble armies now under his command. He and his brave soldiers are now in the midst of their great trial, and I trust that at your meeting you will so shape your good words that they may turn to men and guns, moving to his and their support." In August he told his mind plainly to Grant's friend Eaton. He never dreamed for a moment that Grant would willingly go off into politics with the military situation still insecure, and he believed that no possible pressure could force Grant to do so; but on this latter question he wished to make himself sure; with a view to future military measures he really needed to be sure of it. Eaton saw Grant, and in the course of conversation very tactfully brought to Grant's notice the designs of his would-be friends. "We had," writes Eaton, "been talking very quietly, but Grant's reply came in an instant and with a violence for which I was not prepared. He brought his clenched fists down hard on the strap arms of his camp chair, 'They can't do it. They can't compel me to do it.' Emphatic gesture was not a strong point with Grant. 'Have you said this to the President?' I asked. 'No,' said Grant. 'I have not thought it worth while to assure the President of my opinion. I consider it as important for the cause that he should be elected as that the army should be successful in the field.'" "I told you," said Lincoln afterwards, "they could not get him to run till he had closed out the rebellion." Since the great danger was now only that McClellan would become President in March, there was but one thing to do—to try and finish the war before then. Raymond's advice in favour of negotiations with the South now came, and Lincoln's mode of replying to this has been noticed. Rumours were afloat that if McClellan won in November there would be an attempt to bring him irregularly into power at once. Lincoln let it be known that he should stay at his post at all costs till the last lawful day. On August 23, in that curious way in which deep emotion showed itself with him, he wrote a resolution upon a paper, which he folded and asked his ministers to endorse with their signatures without reading it. They all wrote their names on the back of it, ready, if that were possible, to commit themselves blindly to support of him in whatever he had resolved; a great tribute to him and to themselves. He sealed it up and put it away.
How far in this dark time the confidence of the people had departed from Lincoln no one can tell. It might be too sanguine a view of the world to suppose that they would have been proof against what may be called a conspiracy to run him down. There were certainly quarters in which the perception of his worth came soon and remained. Not all those who are poor or roughly brought up were among those plain men whose approval Lincoln desired and often expected; but at least the plain man does exist and the plain people did read Lincoln's words. The soldiers of the armies in the East by this time knew Lincoln well, and there were by now, as we shall see, in every part of the North, honest parents who had gone to Washington, and entered the White House very sad, and came out very happy, and taken their report of him home. No less could there be found, among those to whom America had given the greatest advantages that birth and upbringing can offer, families in which, when Lincoln died, a daughter could write to her father as Lady Harcourt (then Miss Lily Motley) wrote: "I echo your 'thank God' that we always appreciated him before he was taken from us." But if we look at the political world, we find indeed noble exceptions such as that of Charles Sumner among those who had been honestly perplexed by Lincoln's attitude on slavery; we have to allow for the feelings of some good State Governor who had come to him with a tiresome but serious proposition and been adroitly parried with an untactful and coarse apologue; yet it remains to be said that a thick veil, woven of self-conceit and half-education, blinded most politicians to any rare quality in Lincoln, and blinded them to what was due in decency to any man discharging his task. The evidence collected by Mr. Rhodes as to the tone prevailing in 1864 at Washington and among those in touch with Washington suggests that strictly political society was on the average as poor in brain and heart as the court of the most decadent European monarchy. It presents a stern picture of the isolation, on one side at least, in which Lincoln had to live and work.
A little before this crowning period of Lincoln's career Walt Whitman described him as a man in the streets of Washington could see him, if he chose. He has been speaking of the cavalry escort which the President's advisers insisted should go clanking about with him. "The party," he continues, "makes no great show in uniform or horses. Mr. Lincoln on the saddle generally rides a good-sized, easy-going grey horse, is dressed in plain black, somewhat rusty and dusty, and looks about as ordinary in attire, etc., as the commonest man. The entirely unornamental cortège arouses no sensation; only some curious stranger stops and gazes. I see very plainly Abraham Lincoln's dark brown face, with the deep-cut lines, the eyes always to me with a deep latent sadness in the expression. We have got so that we exchange bows, and very cordial ones. Sometimes the President goes and comes in an open barouche" (not, the poet intimates, a very smart turn-out). "Sometimes one of his sons, a boy of ten or twelve, accompanies him, riding at his right on a pony. They passed me once very close, and I saw the President in the face fully as they were moving slowly, and his look, though abstracted, happened to be directed steadily in my eye. He bowed and smiled, but far beneath his smile I noticed well the expression I have alluded to. None of the artists or pictures has caught the deep though subtle and indirect expression of this man's face. There is something else there. One of the great portrait painters of two or three centuries ago is needed."
The little boy on the pony was Thomas, called "Tad," a constant companion of his father's little leisure, now dead. An elder boy, Robert, has lived to be welcomed as Ambassador in this country, and was at this time a student at Harvard. Willie, a clever and lovably mischievous child, "the chartered libertine of the White House" for a little while, had died at the age of twelve in the early days of 1862, when his father was getting so impatient to stir McClellan into action. These and a son who had long before died in infancy were the only children of Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln. Little has been made public concerning them, but enough to convey the impression of a wise and tender father, trusted by his children and delighting in them. John Nicolay, his loyal and capable secretary, and the delightful John Hay must be reckoned on the cheerful side—for there was one—of Lincoln's daily life. The life of the home at the White House, and sometimes in summer at the "Soldiers' Home" near Washington, was simple, and in his own case (not in that of his guests) regardless of the time, sufficiency, or quality of meals. He cannot have given people much trouble, but he gave some to the guard who watched him, themselves keenly watched by Stanton; for he loved, if he could, to walk alone from his midnight conferences at the War Department to the White House or the Soldiers' Home. The barest history of the events with which he dealt is proof enough of long and hard and anxious working days, which continued with hardly a break through four years. In that history many a complication has here been barely glanced at or clean left out; in this year, for example, the difficulty about France and Mexico and the failure of the very estimable Banks in Texas have been but briefly noted. And there must be remembered, in addition, the duty of a President to be accessible to all people, a duty which Lincoln especially strove to fulfil.
Apart from formal receptions, the stream of callers on him must have given Lincoln many compensations for its huge monotony. Very odd, and sometimes attractive, samples of human nature would come under his keen eye. Now and then a visitor came neither with a troublesome request, nor for form's sake or for curiosity, but in simple honesty to pay a tribute of loyalty or speak a word of good cheer which Lincoln received with unfeigned gratitude. Farmers and back-country folk, of the type he could best talk with, came and had more time than he ought to have spared bestowed on them. At long intervals there came a friend of very different days. Some ingenious men, for instance, fitted out Dennis Hanks in a new suit of clothes and sent him as their ambassador to plead for certain political offenders. It is much to be feared that they were more successful than they deserved, though Stanton intervened and Dennis, when he had seen him, favoured his old companion, the President, with advice to dismiss that minister. But the immense variety of puzzling requests to be dealt with in such interviews must have made heavy demands upon a conscientious and a kind man, especially if his conscience and his kindness were, in small matters, sometimes at variance. Lincoln sent a multitude away with that feeling, so grateful to poor people, that at least they had received such hearing as it was possible to give them; and in dealing with the applications which imposed the greatest strain on himself he made an ineffaceable impression upon the memory of his countrymen.
The American soldier did not take naturally to discipline. Death sentences, chiefly for desertion or for sleeping or other negligence on the part of sentries, were continually being passed by courts-martial. In some cases or at some period these used to come before the President on a stated day of the week, of which Lincoln would often speak with horror. He was continually being appealed to in relation to such sentences by the father or mother of the culprit, or some friend. At one time, it may be, he was too ready with pardon; "You do not know," he said, "how hard it is to let a human being die, when you feel that a stroke of your pen will save him." Butler used to write to him that he was destroying the discipline of the army. A letter of his to Meade shows clearly that, later at least, he did not wish to exercise a merely cheap and inconsiderate mercy. The import of the numberless pardon stories really is that he would spare himself no trouble to enquire, and to intervene wherever he could rightly give scope to his longing for clemency. A Congressman might force his way into his bedroom in the middle of the night, rouse him from his sleep to bring to his notice extenuating facts that had been overlooked, and receive the decision, "Well, I don't see that it will do him any good to be shot." It is related that William Scott, a lad from a farm in Vermont, after a tremendous march in the Peninsula campaign, volunteered to do double guard duty to spare a sick comrade, slept at his post, was caught, and was under sentence of death, when the President came to the army and heard of him. The President visited him, chatted about his home, looked at his mother's photograph, and so forth. Then he laid his hands on the boy's shoulders and said with a trembling voice, "My boy, you are not going to be shot. I believe you when you tell me that you could not keep awake. I am going to trust you and send you back to the regiment. But I have been put to a great deal of trouble on your account. . . . Now what I want to know is, how are you going to pay my bill?" Scott told afterwards how difficult it was to think, when his fixed expectation of death was suddenly changed; but how he managed to master himself, thank Mr. Lincoln and reckon up how, with his pay and what his parents could raise by mortgage on their farm and some help from his comrades, he might pay the bill if it were not more than five or six hundred dollars. "But it is a great deal more than that," said the President. "My bill is a very large one. Your friends cannot pay it, nor your bounty, nor the farm, nor all your comrades. There is only one man in the world who can pay it, and his name is William Scott. If from this day William Scott does his duty, so that, when he comes to die, he can look me in the face as he does now and say, 'I have kept my promise and I have done my duty as a soldier,' then my debt will be paid. Will you make the promise and try to keep it?" And William Scott did promise; and, not very long after, he was desperately wounded, and he died, but not before he could send a message to the President that he had tried to be a good soldier, and would have paid his debt in full if he had lived, and that he died thinking of Lincoln's kind face and thanking him for the chance he gave him to fall like a soldier in battle. If the story is not true—and there is no reason whatever to doubt it—still it is a remarkable man of whom people spin yarns of that kind.
When Lincoln's strength became visibly tried friends often sought to persuade him to spare himself the needless, and to him very often harrowing, labour of incessant interviews. They never succeeded. Lincoln told them he could not forget what he himself would feel in the place of the many poor souls who came to him desiring so little and with so little to get. But he owned to the severity of the strain. He was not too sensitive to the ridicule and reproach that surrounded him. "Give yourself no uneasiness," he had once said to some one who had sympathised with him over some such annoyance, "I have endured a great deal of ridicule without much malice, and have received a great deal of kindness not quite free from ridicule. I am used to it." But the gentle nature that such words express, and that made itself deeply felt by those that were nearest him, cannot but have suffered from want of appreciation. With all this added to the larger cares, which before the closing phases of the war opened had become so intense, Lincoln must have been taxed near to the limit of what men have endured without loss of judgment, or loss of courage or loss of ordinary human feeling. There is no sign that any of these things happened to him; the study of his record rather shows a steady ripening of mind and character to the end. It has been seen how throughout his previous life the melancholy of his temperament impressed those who had the opportunity of observing it. A colleague of his at the Illinois bar has told how on circuit he sometimes came down in the morning and found Lincoln sitting alone over the embers of the fire, where he had sat all night in sad meditation, after an evening of jest apparently none the less hilarious for his total abstinence. There was no scope for this brooding now, and in a sense the time of his severest trial cannot have been the saddest time of Lincoln's life. It must have been a cause not of added depression but of added strength that he had long been accustomed to face the sternest aspect of the world. He had within his own mind two resources, often, perhaps normally, associated together, but seldom so fully combined as with him. In his most intimate circle he would draw upon his stores of poetry, particularly of tragedy; often, for instance, he would recite such speeches as Richard II.'s:
"For God's sake let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings.
. . . . . All murdered."
Slighter acquaintances saw, day by day, another element in his thoughts, the companion to this; for the hardly interrupted play of humour in which he found relief continued to help him to the end. Whatever there was in it either of mannerism or of coarseness, no one can grudge it him; it is an oddity which endears. The humour of real life fades in reproduction, but Lincoln's, there is no doubt was a vein of genuine comedy, deep, rich, and unsoured, of a larger human quality than marks the brilliant works of literary American humorists. It was, like the comedy of Shakespeare, plainly if unaccountably akin with the graver and grander strain of thought and feeling that inspired the greatest of his speeches. Physically his splendid health does not seem to have been impaired beyond recovery. But it was manifestly near to breaking; and the "deep-cut lines" were cut still deeper, and the long legs were always cold.
The cloud over the North passed very suddenly. The North indeed paid the penalty of a nation which is spared the full strain of a war at the first, and begins to discover its seriousness when the hope of easy victory has been many times dashed down. It has been necessary to dwell upon the despondency which at one time prevailed; but it would be hard to rate too highly the military difficulty of the conquest undertaken by the North, or the trial involved to human nature by perseverance in such a task. If the depression during the summer was excessive, as it clearly was, at least the recovery which followed was fully adequate to the occasion which produced it. On September 2 Sherman telegraphed, "Atlanta is ours and fairly won." The strategic importance of earlier successes may have been greater, but the most ignorant man who looked at a map could see what it signified that the North could occupy an important city in the heart of Georgia. Then they recalled Farragut's victory of a month before. Then there followed, close to Washington, putting an end to a continual menace, stirring and picturesquely brilliant beyond other incidents of the war, Sheridan's repeated victories in the Shenandoah Valley. The war which had been "voted a failure" was evidently not a failure. At the same time men of high character conducted a vigorous campaign of speeches for Lincoln. General Schurz, the German revolutionary Liberal, who lived to tell Bismarck at his table that he still preferred democracy to his amused host's method of government, sacrificed his command in the Army—for Lincoln told him it could not be restored—to speak for Lincoln. Even Chase was carried away, and after months of insidious detraction, went for Lincoln on the stump. In the elections in November Lincoln was elected by an enormous popular majority, giving him 212 out of the 233 votes in the electoral college, where in form the election is made. Three Northern States only, one of them his native State, had gone against him. He made some little speeches to parties which came to "serenade" him; some were not very formal speeches, for, as he said, he was now too old to "care much about the mode of doing things." But one was this: "It has long been a grave question whether any Government not too strong for the liberties of its people can be strong enough to maintain its existence in great emergencies. On this point the present rebellion brought our Government to a severe test, and a Presidential election occurring in regular course during the rebellion added not a little to the strain. But we cannot have a free Government without elections; and if the rebellion could force us to forego or postpone a national election it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us. But the election along with its incidental and undesirable strife has done good too. It has demonstrated that a people's Government can sustain a national election in the midst of a great civil war. Until now it has not been known to the world that this was a possibility. But the rebellion continues, and now that the election is over may not all have a common interest to reunite in a common effort to save our common country? For my own part I have striven and shall strive to avoid placing any obstacle in the way. So long as I have been here I have not willingly planted a thorn in any man's bosom. While I am duly sensible to the high compliment of a re-election, and duly grateful as I trust to Almighty God for having directed my countrymen to a right conclusion, as I think, for their good, it adds nothing to my satisfaction that any man may be disappointed by the result. May I ask those who have not differed from me to join with me in this same spirit towards those who have? And now let me close by asking three hearty cheers for our brave soldiers and seamen, and their gallant and skilful commanders."
In the Cabinet he brought out the paper that he had sealed up in the dark days of August; he reminded his ministers of how they had endorsed it unread, and he read it them. Its contents ran thus: "This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate 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 afterwards." Lincoln explained what he had intended to do if McClellan had won. He would have gone to him and said, "General, this election shows that you are stronger, have more influence with the people of this country than I"; and he would have invited him to co-operate in saving the Union now, by using that great influence to secure from the people the willing enlistment of enough recruits. "And the general," said Seward, "would have said, 'Yes, yes'; and again the next day, when you spoke to him about it, 'Yes, yes'; and so on indefinitely, and he would have done nothing."
"Seldom in history," wrote Emerson in a letter after the election, "was so much staked upon a popular vote. I suppose never in history."
And to those Americans of all classes and in all districts of the North, who had set their hearts and were giving all they had to give to preserve the life of the nation, the political crisis of 1864 would seem to have been the most anxious moment of the war. It is impossible—it must be repeated—to guess how great the danger really was that their popular government might in the result betray the true and underlying will of the people; for in any country (and in America perhaps more than most) the average of politicians, whose voices are most loudly heard, can only in a rough and approximate fashion be representative. But there is in any case no cause for surprise that the North should at one time have trembled. Historic imagination is easily, though not one whit too deeply, moved by the heroic stand of the South. It is only after the effort to understand the light in which the task of the North has presented itself to capable soldiers, that a civilian can perceive what sustained resolution was required if, though far the stronger, it was to make its strength tell. Notwithstanding the somewhat painful impression which the political chronicle of this time at some points gives, it is the fact that the wisest Englishmen who were in those days in America and had means of observing what passed have retained a lasting sense of the constancy, under trial, of the North.