Understanding that “Chase’s feelings were hurt,” Lincoln set about once again to sooth his ruffled pride. That evening, he later recounted, he called at Chase’s house with the resignation in hand. Placing his long arms on Chase’s shoulders, he said: “Chase, here is a paper with which I wish to have nothing to do; take it back, and be reasonable.” He then explained why he had felt compelled to make the decision, which had taken place in Chase’s absence from the city, and promised his touchy secretary that he would have complete authority to name the removed appointee’s successor. “I had to plead with him a long time, but I finally succeeded,” Lincoln happily noted.
Though irritated by Chase’s haughty yet fundamentally insecure nature, Lincoln recognized the superlative accomplishments of his treasury secretary. In the two months since Congress had adjourned, Chase had sold more than $45 million in bonds, and the demand for the bonds was steadily increasing. “Never before did the finances of any nation, in the midst of a great war, work so admirably as do ours,” the New York Times noted in a laudatory article on Chase. Even as Lincoln deferred to Chase, however, he placed his prickly secretary’s third resignation letter on file for future reference.
Monty Blair, meanwhile, resented Chase and showed little respect for his remaining colleagues. He considered Seward “an unprincipled liar” and Stanton “a great scoundrel.” In fact, Blair thought the entire cabinet save Welles, and perhaps Bates, whom he liked but did not consider a stalwart ally, should be replaced, and that his father, “the ablest and best informed politician in America,” should become Lincoln’s “private counsellor.” And so one personal struggle succeeded another, complicating the president’s job, absorbing his energies.
Lincoln’s uneasiness about his warring cabinet colleagues paled in comparison, however, to his disquietude about the impending movements of the Army of the Potomac. On April 13, 1863, three days after Lincoln returned from his trip, Hooker took the first step in what would become known as the Battle of Chancellorsville. He dispatched ten thousand cavalrymen under General George Stoneman to head south and insert themselves between Lee’s army and Richmond. With the Confederate supply lines to Richmond severed, Hooker intended to cross the Rappahannock, draw the enemy away from Fredericksburg, and engage him in battle. Heavy rains and impassable roads delayed the advance, but finally, during the last week of April, Hooker’s men began crossing the river.
For Lincoln and his cabinet, anxious days followed. “We have been in a terrible suspense here,” Nicolay wrote his fiancée on Monday, May 4. Fighting had begun, but there was no “definite information” on the battle’s progress. Welles joined Lincoln in the War Department to wait for news that did not come. Bates was particularly tense, knowing that his son John Coalter was with Hooker “in the most active and dangerous service.” Lincoln admitted to Francis Blair, Sr., that nobody seemed to know what was going on. Welles found it odd that “no reliable intelligence” was reaching them, correctly surmising that this boded ill. “In the absence of news the President strives to feel encouraged and to inspire others,” he wrote, “but I can perceive he has doubts and misgivings, though he does not express them.”
“While I am anxious, please do not suppose I am impatient, or waste a moment’s thought on me, to your own hindrance, or discomfort,” Lincoln had written Hooker at the outset of the campaign. Even when disturbing fragments filtered in, Lincoln refused to pressure Hooker. “God bless you, and all with you. I know you will do your best,” he wired his general on the morning of May 6. “Waste no time unnecessarily, to gratify our curiosity with despatches.”
At 3 p.m. that afternoon, the suspense ended with an unwelcome telegram from Hooker’s chief of staff. The Union forces had been defeated. The army had retreated to its original position on the north side of the Rappahannock, and seventeen thousand Union soldiers were dead, wounded, or missing. Hooker’s second in command, General Darius Couch, later claimed that Hooker was simply “outgeneraled” by Lee. Assuming that Lee would “fall back without risking battle,” Fighting Joe was “demoralized” by the fierceness of the Confederate attack. Had he committed all his troops, as Lincoln had directed him to do, the course of the battle might have been different. By immediately assuming a defensive stance, however, Hooker gave the initiative to Lee and never regained his footing. An injury sustained on the battlefield further dulled Hooker’s perceptions. Though his subordinates wanted to press the battle, he issued the order to retreat.
Noah Brooks was with Lincoln when the news came. “I shall never forget that picture of despair,” he later wrote. “Had a thunderbolt fallen upon the President he could not have been more overwhelmed.” His beloved army, so healthy and spirited weeks earlier, had been “driven back, torn and bleeding, to our starting point, where the heart-sickening delay, the long and tedious work of reorganizing a decimated and demoralized army would again commence.” Observing the president’s “ashen” face, Brooks “vaguely took in the thought” that his complexion “almost exactly” matched the French gray wallpaper in the room. “Clasping his hands behind his back, he walked up and down the room, saying, ‘My God! my God! What will the country say! What will the country say!’”
The news traveled fast. The president informed Senator Sumner, who rushed to tell Welles. “Lost, lost, all is lost!” Sumner exclaimed, lifting both hands as he entered the navy secretary’s office. Welles went to the War Department, where Seward was with Stanton. “I asked Stanton if he knew where Hooker was. He answered curtly, No. I looked at him sharply, and I have no doubt with some incredulity, for he, after a moment’s pause, said he is on this side of the river, but I know not where.” As the afternoon wore on and endless casualty lists began streaming in, Stanton could no longer hide his despair. “This is the darkest day of the war,” he lamented. At the Willard Hotel, Brooks observed, secessionists suddenly “sprang to new life and animation and with smiling faces and ill-suppressed joy” moved openly through the gloomy crowds.
Within the hour of receiving the news, Lincoln ordered a carriage to drive him to the Navy Yard. Accompanied by General Halleck, he boarded a steamer bound for Hooker’s headquarters, a grim counterpoint to his joyous April visit. Once again, Lincoln found some redemption in the resolute determination of his troops. “All accounts agree,” one reporter wrote from army headquarters, “that the troops on the Rappahannock came out of their late bloody fight game to the backbone.” Though “fresh from all the horrors of the battlefield, with ranks decimated, and almost exhausted with exposure and fatigue,” they remained “undaunted and erect, composed and ready to turn on the instant and follow their leaders back into the fray.”
Moreover, while the Confederates had lost 4,000 fewer men, their casualty list of 13,000 represented a larger percentage of their total forces. In addition, they had lost one of their greatest generals: Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. Returning from a reconnaissance mission, Jackson had been mistaken for an enemy and was fired upon by some of his own men. His left arm was amputated in a nearby field hospital, but he died of pneumonia eight days later. The South went into mourning. “Since the death of Washington,” the Richmond Whig proclaimed, “no similar event has so profoundly and sorrowfully impressed the people of Virginia as the death of Jackson.”
Lincoln remained at army headquarters for only a few hours. Before leaving, he handed Hooker a letter expressing confidence in the continuing campaign. “If possible,” the president wrote, “I would be very glad of another movement early enough to give us some benefit from the fact of the enemies communications being broken, but neither for this reason or any other, do I wish anything done in desperation or rashness.” Lincoln made it clear that he stood ready to assist Hooker in the development of a new plan of action. As he had done so many times before, Lincoln withstood the storm of defeat by replacing anguish over an unchangeable past with hope in an uncharted future.
CHAPTER 20
“THE TYCOON IS IN FINE WHACK”
NO SOONER HAD
LINCOLN returned from his May 7 visit to the troops than he was confronted by a colossal political uproar over the arrest and imprisonment of former Ohio congressman Clement Vallandigham on the charge of treason.
The arrest was ordered by General Burnside, who had assumed command of the Department of the Ohio after his replacement by Hooker. Responding to tumultuous peace demonstrations where speakers openly advocated the defeat of the Union’s cause, Burnside issued General Orders No. 38, proclaiming that “the habit of declaring sympathy for the enemy will not be allowed in this department.” All persons committing “treason, expressed or implied,” would be arrested and tried by a military court. In deliberate defiance, Vallandigham incited a large crowd to a frenzy with his passionate denunciations of a failed war. This demagogue of defeat railed that the conflict would end only if soldiers deserted en masse and the people acted to “hurl King Lincoln from his throne.”
After reading a transcript of Vallandigham’s remarks, Burnside sent his soldiers to arrest him at his home in the middle of the night. “The door resisted the efforts of the soldiers,” a local journalist wrote, “and Vallandigham flourished a revolver at the window, and fired two or three shots,” but the soldiers made their entry through a side entrance. With unprecedented speed, a military tribunal found him guilty and sentenced him to prison for the remainder of the war. His application for a writ of habeas corpus was denied. When the Chicago Times exacerbated the incident with its incendiary coverage, Burnside, on his own authority, shut the paper down.
Learning of these events in the morning newspaper, Lincoln found himself in a difficult position. While he later admitted that the news of the arrest brought him pain, he felt compelled to uphold Burnside. Nonetheless, he anticipated the damaging political fallout. Criticism came not only from Copperheads and Democrats but from loyal Republicans. Thurlow Weed deplored the arrest. Senator Trumbull warned Browning that if such arbitrary arrests continued, “the civil tribunals will be completely subordinated to the military, and the government overthrown.” A friend of Seward cautioned him that “by a large and honest portion of the community,” the arrest was considered an “invasion of a great principle—the right of free speech,” and that it might well precipitate civil war within the loyal states. Seward agreed. Indeed, in a moment of rare accord, every member of the cabinet united in opposition to the Vallandigham arrest.
Lincoln, searching for compromise, publicly supported Vallandigham’s arrest but commuted the sentence to banishment within the Confederate lines. There, it was playfully remarked, his Copperhead body could go “where his heart already was.” The New York Times recorded “general satisfaction” at the solution, which “so happily meets the difficulties of the case—avoiding the possibility of making him a martyr, and yet effectually destroying his power for evil.” Escorted by Union cavalry holding a flag of truce, Vallandigham was removed to Tennessee. In an act that further diminished his reputation, he quickly escaped to Canada. Meanwhile, Stanton revoked Burnside’s suspension of the Chicago Times and informed local officials that they were not to suppress newspapers.
Thus, Lincoln was able to maintain his support for General Burnside while minimizing any violation of civil liberties necessitated by war. Asked months later by a radical to “suppress the infamous ‘Chicago Times,’” Lincoln told her, “I fear you do not fully comprehend the danger of abridging the liberties of the people. Nothing but the very sternest necessity can ever justify it. A government had better go to the very extreme of toleration, than to do aught that could be construed into an interference with, or to jeopardize in any degree, the common rights of its citizens.”
After he dealt with Vallandigham, Lincoln’s next priority was to comfort Burnside. Upon hearing that the entire cabinet had opposed his action, the general had offered to resign. Lincoln not only refused the resignation but insisted that while “the cabinet regretted the necessity” of the arrest, once it was done, “all were for seeing you through with it.”
Finally, knowing that the public would ultimately be the judge of the administration’s actions on the home front, Lincoln began drafting a document that would put the complex matter of military arrests into perspective. He had contemplated the subject for months, but his delineation of his ideas assumed new urgency with the public outrage at the arrest of Vallandigham. “Often an idea about it would occur to me which seemed to have force and make perfect answer to some of the things that were said and written about my actions,” he later told a visitor. “I never let one of those ideas escape me, but wrote it on a scrap of paper.” Now he would have to cobble those scraps into a cogent argument that the American public would accept.
Furthermore, Lincoln needed the proper forum in which to present his ideas. It came in late May, when a meeting of New York Democrats passed a set of resolutions condemning his military arrests as unconstitutional. Lincoln’s extensive response to the Democratic resolutions took “less time than any other of like importance” because he had already “studied it from every side.” In early June, the president read his draft to the cabinet. “It has vigor and ability,” a delighted Welles noted. Blair advised the president to emphasize that “we are Struggling against a Conspiracy to put down popular Govt.” Blair realized that Lincoln had often reiterated this theme, but as Thomas Hart Benton used to say, the “ding dong” proved to be “the best figure in Rhetoric.”
The finished letter, addressed to New York Democrat Erastus Corning, was released to the New York Tribune on June 12. Conceding that in ordinary times, military arrests would be unconstitutional, Lincoln reminded his critics that the Constitution specifically provided for the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus “in cases of Rebellion or Invasion.” He went on to say that Vallandigham was not arrested for his criticism of the administration but “because he was laboring, with some effect, to prevent the raising of troops, to encourage desertions from the army, and to leave the rebellion without an adequate military force to suppress it.”
Pointing out that “long experience has shown that armies can not be maintained unless desertion shall be punished by the severe penalty of death,” Lincoln posed a question that was soon echoed by supporters everywhere: “Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wiley agitator who induces him to desert? This is none the less injurious when effected by getting a father, or brother, or friend, into a public meeting, and there working upon his feelings, till he is persuaded to write the soldier boy, that he is fighting in a bad cause, for a wicked administration of a contemptable government, too weak to arrest and punish him if he shall desert.”
The president’s letter garnered extravagant praise throughout the North. “It is full, candid, clear and conclusive,” the New York Times affirmed. Even Democrats were impressed. While Edward Everett told Lincoln he would not have advocated Vallandigham’s arrest, he considered the president’s “defence of the step complete.” Supporters were thrilled. “It is a grand document, strong, plain, simple, without one sparkle of tinsel ornament,” Stoddard enthused, “yet dignified as becomes the ruler of a great people when the nation is listening to what he says. It should be printed in every Northern paper, and read by every citizen.” In fact, Lincoln took every step to ensure that his words would shape public opinion. Printed in a great variety of formats, the letter eventually reached an astonishing 10 million people in their homes and workplaces, on isolated farms and in the cities. And as the American people absorbed the logic of Lincoln’s argument, popular sentiment began to shift.
WITH THE APPROACH OF SUMMER, the tempers of the cabinet ministers grew shorter. Welles noted with disapproval that Stanton attended only half the cabinet meetings and said little when present. “Not unfrequently he has a private conference with the President in the corner of the room, or with Seward in the library,” griped Welles. Seward, too, would turn up when a session commenced, speak privately with the president, then leave his son, Fred Seward, to represent his department.
Stanton, who claimed he would never raise “any important question, when an assistant is present,” was infuriated. Blair, frustrated by the superior access granted Seward and Stanton, often lingered after cabinet meetings in hopes of a private word with Lincoln.
“At such a time as this, it would seem there should be free, full and constant intercourse and interchange of views,” fumed Welles. Bates, also discontented, agreed. “There is now no mutual confidence among the members of the Govt.—and really no such thing as a C.[abinet] C.[ouncil],” he grumbled. “The more ambitious members, who seek to control—Seward—Chase—Stanton—never start their projects in C. C. but try first to commit the Prest., and then, if possible, secure the apparent consent of the members.” Chase found the lack of collective deliberation demeaning. “But how idle it seems to me to speculate on Military affairs!” he complained to David Dudley Field. “The President consults only Stanton & Halleck in the management of the War. I look on from the outside and, as well as I can, furnish the means.” If he were president, Chase assured Congressman Garfield, surely he “would have a system of information which should at least keep my Secretary of the Treasury advised of every thing of importance.”
More strongly than Chase, Blair decried the lack of more formal meetings, attributing the cabinet’s failings to the machinations of Seward and Stanton. They had also been responsible, he believed, for Lincoln’s unwillingness to replace Halleck, whom Blair despised, and restore McClellan. In Blair’s mind, both Seward and Chase were “scheming for the succession. Stanton would cut the President’s throat if he could.” Blair’s hatred for Stanton was so virulent that he refused to set foot in the War Department, the primary source of military information. Talking with Welles one evening at the depot, Blair admitted that Lincoln’s behavior puzzled him. “Strange, strange,” he exclaimed, “that the President who has sterling ability should give himself over so completely to Stanton and Seward.”