CHAPTER XVI

THE TURN OF THE TIDE

It is now plain that when General Lee was defeated at Gettysburg the South lost its last reasonable hope of successful invasion of the North. It is equally clear that the capture of Vicksburg by General Grant, permitting the Mississippi, in the felicitous phrase of Abraham Lincoln, "to flow unvexed to the sea," effected a hopeless division of Confederate territory and established a base line from which the Confederacy of the East was certain to be pushed ever inward upon Richmond. The fate of the Merrimac destroyed any hope of the Confederates that they might dictate terms of peace by the capture of Washington, and it also served notice on foreign nations that the blockade of the Confederate ports would be made increasingly effective. Sherman's march to the sea cut another swath through the heart of the Confederacy. Before his advancing hosts was terror, and behind it were ashes. Apart from any discussion of the military value of his exploit, he showed that the Confederate defenses were a hollow shell and that the South was strained to the utmost to keep up her resistance. His path of devastation, three hundred miles long and sixty miles wide, divided again the Confederacy, which the gunboats of Commodore Foote had cut in twain along the Mississippi's length.

It is very easy now for us to see these facts and appreciate their true significance, but it was not easy nor even possible for the nation, or even its leaders, to understand them at that time. A fierce controversy waged for years, and is still unsettled, as to how far the victory at Gettysburg is one for which the commander of the army deserves credit. There were those, even among his own generals, who questioned whether General

Meade recognized his victory after he had won it. General Doubleday, in his history of the battles of Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, affirms that:

After the battle Meade had not the slightest desire to recommence the struggle. . . . It was hard to convince him that Lee was actually gone.

He also declared that on the morning of July fourth, after the defeat of Pickett's charge, and with Lee's army in full retreat, Meade said he thought he could hold out against Lee for part of another day.* Meade, however, in later years did not admit that he thus misunderstood his own victory.

Lincoln was sadly disappointed that Lee was not pursued, and his army captured or annihilated, after his defeat at Gettysburg. He said that he would give much to be free from the impression that Meade was willing to have him get away. He did not doubt Meade's loyalty, but gravely questioned his power of initiative. He sat down and wrote a letter to Meade containing the following rebuke:

My dear General, I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee's escape. He was within your easy grasp, and to have closed upon him would, in connection with our other late successes, have ended the war. As it is, the war will be prolonged indefinitely. If you could not safely attack Lee last Monday, how can you possibly do so south of the river, when you can take with you very few more than two-thirds of the force you then had in hand? It would be unreasonable to expect and I do not expect that you can now effect much. Your golden opportunity is gone, and I am distressed immeasurably because of it.

I beg you will not consider this a prosecution or persecution of yourself. As you had learned that I was dissatisfied, I have thought it best to kindly tell you why.

*Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, by Abner Doubleday, in Campaigns of the Civil War, Series VI, pp. 208, 209.

After he had written it he thought the matter over and decided not to send it, so it remained among his papers unpublished until years afterward.

This is not the only time Lincoln relieved his feelings by writing a letter and then deciding not to send it. Once hearing a man speak very abusively of another, Lincoln advised him to put all his invective into a letter addressed to the man in question. The letter was written and read to Lincoln, who commended it for its severity. The writer was pleased and asked him, "How would you advise me to send it?" "Send it," said Lincoln. "Oh, I wouldn't send it. I sometimes write a letter like that and it does me good, but I never send it."

At this time, however, Lincoln wrote another letter and did send it. If Meade had pursued Lee, it might have been mailed to him, but it was addressed to General Grant. The letter was as follows:

Major-General Grant.

Washington, July 13, 1863.

My Dear General: I do not remember that you and I ever met personally. I write this now as a grateful acknowledgment for the almost inestimable service you have done the country. I wish to say a word further. When you first reached the vicinity of Vicksburg, I thought you should do what you finally did -march the troops across the neck, run the batteries with the transports, and thus go below; and I never had any faith, except a general hope that you knew better than I, that the Yazoo Pass expedition and the like could succeed. When you got below and took Port Gibson, Grand Gulf, and vicinity, I thought you should go down the river and join General Banks, and when you turned northward, east of the Big Black, I feared it was a mistake. I now wish to make the personal acknowledgment that you were right and I was wrong. Yours very truly,

A. Lincoln.

Ulysses S. Grant was a graduate of West Point, where his record as a student was only moderately good. Among his associates while there in school and in subsequent service in the

Mexican War, were a number of brilliant leaders of the Confederate Army, most of whom could remember that their record in the class-room had been better than that of Grant. In the beginning of the Civil War he had been assigned a commonplace task of inspecting army equipments, but was called to more active service throught the influence of his friend and townsman, Elihu B. Washburne, Representative in Congress from Galena, Illinois.

General Grant's first services were inconspicuous but successful. He emerged into prominence by his capture of Fort Donelson, where he demanded and secured unconditional surrender. His firmness in demanding and his success in securing this result, while McClellan in the Army of the Potomac was timidly waiting for the enemy to come and offer to be captured, put great heart into the faltering hope of the Union. His initials came to be accepted as applicable to another name than that which at West Point had displaced the name of his baptism, and he was called "Unconditional Surrender" Grant. The laurels which he won at Donelson he almost lost at Shiloh. On the first day of that battle his army was defeated. Grant was criticized for having placed his army on the side of the Tennessee next to the enemy, and leaving it thus exposed to surprise and successful onslaught. He was criticized for being some miles from the front when the battle began. He was declared to have been intoxicated on the first day of the battle. It was still further alleged that if Buell had not arrived when he did, the success of the second day would have been in doubt. How keenly Grant felt these strictures is known to every reader of the Century War Book, Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, and of Grant's Memoirs. General Halleck disliked Grant, and virtually put him under arrest after the battle of Shiloh. The partisans of Buell loudly proclaimed that but for his timely arrival and superior generalship, Grant and his army would either have been captured or crowded into the Tennessee River. Men in high places declared him to be a man of very mediocre military ability.

But Lincoln had growing faith in the taciturn, bullet-headed soldier from Illinois. It gratified him that Grant took the command that was given to him and went ahead with it, not teasing for impossibilities. The memory of McClellan's perpetual wail for more men and munitions found a pleasant contrast in the silence and pertinacity of Grant. When people asked Lincoln what Grant was doing, Lincoln said frankly that he did not know. Said he, "General Grant is a very meager letter-writer and telegrapher, but a very copious fighter." He said, "I don't know General Grant's plans, and I do not care to know them; I know he has plans, and is at work carrying them out."

When he was told that General Grant drank, he asked, “Can you tell me the brand of liquor? I should like to send some of it to my other generals."

Thus Grant continued as a major general in spite of all efforts to discredit him.

Abraham Lincoln never considered himself an authority in military matters. He never used his own early title of captain.* His references to his own experiences in the Black Hawk War were generally humorous, and his one speech in Congress where he made reference to it, that reference was almost in burlesque. He was disposed to trust his general and his secretary of war.

Nevertheless, Abraham Lincoln was not without practical wisdom in military matters. It was his daily custom to go over to the War Department and read the despatches from beginning to end. He studied the maps of the various war fronts. The few suggestions that he made to army officers about plans of the campaign were intelligent suggestions and showed a certain. native shrewdness and practical sagacity which had in them the essentials of true military judgment.

*Mr. David Davis, of Bloomington, Illinois, has shown me his father's papers on Abraham Lincoln, which, unfortunately, are few in number. I find, however, a statement by Judge David Davis that when Lincoln first came upon the circuit he was sometimes called captain, and did not resent it but neither did he welcome it; and the title though evidently his, fell rather soon into disuse.