The Commander-in-Chief (excerpts from chapter)
Delegations from Baltimore called to protest against the "pollution" of the soil of Maryland by the feet of the soldiers marching across it to fight against the South. They had no difficulty in understanding the President's reply:
"We must have troops; and, as they can neither crawl under Maryland nor fly over it, they must come across it."
When the war had actually begun he delighted in the soldiers' grim humor in the face of death. He told story after story about the "boys," laughing, with tears in his gray eyes, at their heroism in danger. He never laughed at the private soldier, except in the pride of his hearty patriotism. But he made constant fun of the assumptions of generals and other high officials. The stories he most enjoyed telling were of the soldiers' scoffing at rank and pretension. He delighted in the following:
A picket challenged a tug going up Broad River, South Carolina, with:
"Who goes there?"
"The Secretary of War and Major-General Foster," was the pompous reply.
"Aw! We've got major-generals enough up here—why don't you bring us up some hardtack?"
On another occasion a friend burst into his room to tell him that a brigadier-general and twelve army mules had been carried off by a Confederate raid.
"How unfortunate! Those mules cost us two hundred dollars apiece!" was the President's only reply.
Mr. Lincoln was a very abstemious man, ate very little and drank nothing but water, not from principle, but because he did not like wine or spirits. Once, in rather dark days early in the war, a temperance committee came to him and said that the reason we did not win was because our army drank so much whisky as to bring the curse of the Lord upon them. He said, in reply, that it was rather unfair on the part of the aforesaid curse, as the other side drank more and worse whisky than ours did.
Lincoln's orders to his generals are filled with the kindly courtesy, the direct argument, and the dry humor which are so characteristic of the man. To Grant, who had telegraphed, "If the thing is pressed, I think that Lee will surrender," Lincoln replied, "Let the thing be pressed."
To McClellan, gently chiding him for his inactivity: "I have just read your dispatch about sore tongue and fatigued horse. Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have done since the battle of Antietam that fatigues anything?"
Referring to General McClellan's inactivity, President Lincoln once expressed his impatience by saying, "McClellan is a pleasant and scholarly gentleman; he is an admirable engineer, but he seems to have a special talent for stationary engineering."
Writing to Hooker, who succeeded Burnside, Lincoln said:
"I believe you to be a brave and skilful soldier, which, of course, I like. I also believe you do not mix politics with your profession, in which you are right. You have confidence in yourself, which is a valuable, if not indispensable, quality. You are ambitious, which within reasonable bounds does good rather than harm; but I think that during General Burnside's command of the army you have taken counsel with your ambition, and thwarted him as much as you could, in which you did a great wrong to the country and to a most meritorious and honorable brother-officer. I have heard, in such a way as to believe it, of your recently saying that both the army and the government needed a dictator. Of course, it is not for this, but in spite of it, that I have given you the command. Only those generals who gain successes can set up dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship."
Commenting on Jeb Stuart's raid into Maryland and Pennsylvania and his complete circuit of McClellan's army and his return over the river unharmed despite McClellan's attempt to head him off, Lincoln remarked:
"When I was a boy we used to play a game, three times round and out. Stuart has been round twice; if he goes round him once more, gentlemen, McClellan will be out."
The General ascribed Stuart's success to his lack of horses, and telegraphed that unless the army got more horses there would be similar expeditions. To this Halleck telegraphed:
"The President has read your telegram, and directs me to suggest that if the enemy had more occupation south of the river his cavalry would not be so likely to make raids north of it."
A woman once approached the President rather imperiously. "Mr. President," she said, very theatrically, "you must give me a colonel's commission for my son. Sir, I demand it, not as a favor, but as a right. Sir, my grandfather fought at Lexington. Sir, my uncle was the only man that did not run away at Bladensburg. Sir, my father fought at New Orleans, and my husband was killed at Monterey."
"I guess, madam," answered Mr. Lincoln, dryly, "your family has done enough for the country. It is time to give somebody else a chance."
Some gentlemen were once finding fault with the President because certain generals were not given commands. "The fact is," replied Mr. Lincoln, "I've got more pegs than I have holes to put them in."
A person who wished to be commissioned as brigadier told Mr. Lincoln in a sarcastic tone, "I see there's no vacancy among the brigadiers from the fact that so many colonels are commanding brigades."
"My friend," said Mr. Lincoln, "let me tell you something about that. You are a farmer, I believe; if not, you will understand me also. Suppose you had a large cattle-yard, full of all sorts of cattle, cows, oxen, and bulls, and you kept killing, selling, and disposing of the cows and oxen in one way or another, taking good care of the bulls; by and by you would find out that you had nothing but a yard full of old bulls, good for nothing under heaven.
"Now it will be just so with the army if I don't stop making brigadier-generals."
When Lincoln pleaded for a commission for his son Robert he pleaded for it in his own peculiar and diffident way. This communication has a peculiar interest in view of the fact that it came from one who bestowed such favors by the thousand. Writing to General Grant, he says:
"Please read and answer this letter as though I was not President, but only a friend. My son, now in his twenty-second year, having graduated at Harvard, wishes to see something of the war before it ends. I do not wish to put him in the ranks, nor yet give him a commission to which those who have already served long are better entitled and better qualified to hold.
"Could he, without embarrassment to you or detriment to the service, go into your military family with some nominal rank, I, and not the public, furnishing his necessary means? If not, say so without the least hesitation, because I am as anxious and as deeply interested that you shall not be encumbered as you can be yourself."
Once upon learning that a woman he had seen in the halls of the War Department was there for the purpose of securing a pass to visit her husband in the Army of the Potomac, which was against the rules, in order to show him their first-born, Lincoln did not rest until he had telegraphed for the husband to come to Washington, and a bed had been assigned to the mother and child in one of the Washington hospitals.
His gentleness is also exhibited in the following incident related by Morgan. He once reproved a man who had been refused by every one else for following him to the Soldiers' Home, his only refuge, and sent him away. Next day, after a night of remorse, he sought the man out at his hotel, and begged his forgiveness for treating "with rudeness one who had offered his life for his country" and was in trouble. Taking him into his carriage, the President got him out of his troubles. When he told Stanton what he had done, the grim Secretary himself apologized for rejecting the appeal.
"No, no," said Lincoln, "you did right in adhering to your rules. If we had such a softhearted fool as I am in your place, there would be no rules that the army or the country could depend on."
A woman once requested of Lincoln that a church in Alexandria that was being used for a hospital be given up and rededicated for purposes of worship. Mr. Lincoln asked if she had applied to the post surgeon, and being assured that she had but that he could do nothing for her, Lincoln said, "Well, madam, that is an end of it then."
More for the purpose of testing her sentiments, Mr. Lincoln continued: "You say you live in Alexandria. How much would you be willing to subscribe toward building a hospital there?"
She replied: "You may be aware, Mr. Lincoln, that our property has been very much embarrassed by the war, and I could not afford to give much for such a purpose."
"Yes," said Mr. Lincoln, "and this war is not over yet; and I expect we shall have another fight soon, and that church may be very useful as a hospital in which to nurse our poor wounded soldiers. It is my candid opinion that God wants that church for our wounded fellows. So, madam, you will excuse me. I can do nothing for you."
Afterward, in speaking of this incident, Mr. Lincoln said that the lady as a representative of her class in Alexandria reminded him of a story of the young man who had an aged mother and father owning considerable property. The young man, being an only son, and believing that the old people had lived out their usefulness, assassinated them both. He was accused, tried, and convicted of the murder. When the judge came to pass sentence upon him, and called upon him to give any reason he might have why the sentence of death should not be passed upon him, he with great promptness replied that he hoped the court would be lenient to him because he was a poor orphan!
"His skill in parrying troublesome questions was wonderful," said Mr. Chauncey M. Depew. "I was in Washington at a critical period of the war, when the late John Ganson, of Buffalo, one of the ablest lawyers in our State, and who, though elected as a Democrat, supported all Mr. Lincoln's war measures, called on him for explanations. Mr. Ganson was very bald, with a perfectly smooth face, and had a most direct and aggressive way of stating his views or of demanding what he thought he was entitled to. He said:
"'Mr. Lincoln, I have supported all of your measures and think I am entitled to your confidence. We are voting and acting in the dark in Congress, and I demand to know—I think I have the right to ask and to know—what is the present situation and what are the prospects and conditions of the several campaigns and armies?'
"Mr. Lincoln looked at him quizzically for a moment, and then said, 'Ganson, how clean you shave!'
"Most men would have been offended, but Ganson was too broad and intelligent a man not to see the point and retire at once, satisfied, from the field."
The President was once called upon in reference to a newly invented gun, concerning which a committee had been appointed to make a report.
The "report" was sent for, and when it came it was found to be of the most voluminous description. Mr. Lincoln glanced at it, and said, "I should want a new lease of life to read this through!" Throwing it down upon the table, he added: "Why can't a committee of this kind occasionally exhibit a grain of common sense? If I send a man to buy a horse for me, I expect him to tell me his points—not how many hairs there are in his tail."
Here is a story told by General Fisk that Mr. Lincoln relished much and often repeated.
When Fisk became a colonel he organized his regiment with the understanding that he was to do all the swearing of the regiment. One of the teamsters, however, as the roads were not always of the best, had difficulty in controlling his temper and his tongue. Once, under unusual difficulties, through a series of mud-pools a little worse than usual, unable to control himself any longer, this teamster burst forth into a volley of energetic oaths.
The Colonel took him to account and reminded him that he had agreed to let him (the Colonel) do all the swearing of the regiment.
"Yes, I did, Colonel," he replied. "But the fact was, the swearing had to be done then or not at all, and you weren't there to do it."
Being informed of the death of John Morgan, he said, "Well, I wouldn't crow over anybody's death; but I can take this as resignedly as any dispensation of Providence."
Speaking of resentment, he said:
"Perhaps I have too little of it; but I never thought it paid. A man has no time to spend half his life in quarrels."
Once, in reply to a delegation of bank presidents who urged whether it was not time to give up all thought of the Union, he told the following story:
"When I was a young man in Illinois I boarded for a time with the deacon of the Presbyterian church. One night I was roused from my sleep by a rap at the door, and I heard the deacon's voice exclaiming, 'Arise, Abraham! The Day of Judgment has come!' I sprang from my bed and rushed to my window, and saw stars falling in great showers; but, looking back of them in the heavens, I saw the grand old constellations, with which I was so well acquainted, fixed and true in their places. Gentlemen, the world did not come to an end then, nor will the Union now."
It is a lasting loss to American history that there was not a special secretary at the White House during Lincoln's administration to record the stories of all Lincoln's pardons. Think of the story that lies back of the short and simple order, "Let this woman have her boy."
In passing upon a case of a lad condemned to death for falling asleep upon his post, Lincoln said: "I could not think of going into eternity with the blood of that poor young man on my skirts. It is not to be wondered at that a boy raised on a farm, probably in the habit of going to bed at dark, should, when required to watch, fall asleep; and I cannot consent to shoot him for such an act." The impressive sequel of this act of mercy was brought to light when the dead body of this soldier boy was found on the field of Fredericksburg, and next to his heart a photograph of the President, across which he had written, "God bless Abraham Lincoln."
When his generals remonstrated with him for his laxity in enforcing army rules, he never could forget that after all a volunteer army was a human organization and that every soldier was a son of his. And when it is considered that of two and a half million enlistments more than two million were boys under twenty-one, and that they graded all the way down to fifteen, they were indeed children.
"There are already too many weeping widows," Lincoln insisted, when objection was made because he had forbidden the shooting of twenty-four deserters in a row; "for God's sake, don't ask me to add to the number, for I won't do it."
"They are shooting a boy to-day," he once said; "I hope I have not done wrong to allow it."
"Tomorrow is butcher's day," he said, one Thursday, as he was looking over a heap of sentences that lay upon his desk, "and I must go through these papers and see if I can't find some excuse to let these poor fellows off."
The most whimsical reason for granting a pardon was that given to a German girl, who came, poorly dressed, to plead, in broken English, for the life of her brother, who, not understanding English very well, had enlisted and deserted. The President said to her, kindly:
"I'll be whipped if I don't pardon your brother. Here you have come without an influential friend to help you—but you seem to be a good, honest girl." Then his eye fell upon her scant skirts. "Yes, I'll pardon him—because—because—you don't wear hoops!"
An officer had disobeyed, or failed to comprehend an order.
"I believe I'll sit down," said Secretary Stanton, "and give that man a piece of my mind."
"Do so," said Lincoln; "write him now while you have it on your mind. Make it sharp. Cut him all up."
Stanton did not need a second invitation. It was a "bone-crusher" that he read to the President.
"That's right," said Lincoln; "that's a good one."
"Whom can I send it by?" mused the Secretary.
"Send it!" replied Lincoln, "send it! Why, don't send it at all. Tear it up. You have freed your mind on the subject, and that is all that is necessary. Tear it up. You never want to send such letters. I never do."
Once, as he drove up to a hospital, Lincoln saw one of the inmates walking directly in front of his team, and he cried out to the driver to stop. The horses were checked none too soon to avoid running the man down. Then Lincoln saw that the poor fellow, only a boy, had been shot in both eyes. He got out of his carriage, and, taking the blind soldier by the hand, asked him in trembling tones for his name, his service, and his residence. "I am Abraham Lincoln," he himself said as he was leaving, and the sightless face of the youth was lit up with gratitude as he listened to the President's words of honest sympathy. The next day the chief of the hospital laid in the boy's hands a commission as first lieutenant in the army of the United States, bearing the President's signature, and with it an order retiring him on three-quarters pay for the years of helplessness that until then had stretched before him through a hopeless future.
Mr. Lincoln's love for the soldiers was well known, and he was a frequent visitor at the hospitals in Washington. A young doctor was showing him around one afternoon to let him speak to the men. The guide took him past the entrance to a large room, saying that he didn't suppose the President wanted to go in there, as they were "only rebels."
"But I do want to go in there," said Lincoln, "and don't you call them 'rebels'; call them 'Johnnies.' It sounds friendlier. Would you want to be called a 'Yank' and neglected because you did the best you knew?"
A gentleman asked Lincoln to give him a pass through the Federal lines in order to visit Richmond. "I should be very happy to oblige you," said the President, "if my passes were respected; but the fact is, within the past two years I have given passes to Richmond to two hundred and fifty thousand men, and not one has got there yet."
In 1863 a certain captain of volunteers was on trial in Washington for a misuse of the funds of his company. The accused officer made only a feeble defense, and seemed to treat the matter with indifference. After a while, however, a new charge, that of disloyalty to the Government, came into the case. The accused was at once excited to a high degree of indignation, and made a very vigorous defense. He appeared to think lightly of being convicted of embezzling, but to be called a traitor was more than he could bear. At the breakfast-table, one morning, the President, who had been reading an account of this case in the newspaper, began to laugh, and said: "This fellow reminds me of a juror in a case of hen-stealing which I tried in Illinois many years ago. The accused man was summarily convicted. After adjournment of court, as I was riding to the next town, one of the jurors in the case came cantering up behind me and complimented me on the vigor with which I had pressed the prosecution of the unfortunate hen-thief. Then he added, 'Why, when I was young, and my back was strong, and the country was new, I didn't mind taking off a sheep now and then. But stealing hens! Oh, Jerusalem!' Now, this captain has evidently been stealing sheep, and that is as much as he can bear."
Some enemies and critics of General Grant once called upon Mr. Lincoln and urged him to oust Grant from his command. They repeated with malicious intent the gossip that Grant drank. "What does he drink?" asked Lincoln.
"Whisky," was the answer, "and in unusual quantities." "Well," said the President, "just find out what particular kind he uses, and I'll send a barrel to each of the other generals."
When again pressed on other grounds to get rid of Grant, he declared, "I can't spare that man; he fights."
Wade once came to the President to demand the dismissal of Grant. In reply to one of his remarks Lincoln said, "Senator, that reminds me of a story."
"Yes, yes," Wade replied, "it is with you, sir, all story, story! You are the father of every military blunder that has been made during the war. You are on your road to hell, sir, with this government, by your obstinacy; and you are not a mile off this minute."
Lincoln answered, "Senator, that is just about the distance from here to the Capitol, is it not?" Wade, as Lincoln put it, "grabbed up his hat and cane and went away."
No collection of Lincolniana is really complete without his greatest masterpiece—the famous Gettysburg oration. It is deservedly placed and ranked among the world's most eloquent and most touching orations. Curiously, its great beauty, its masterly construction, its extreme simplicity were first discerned by Englishmen.
"Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field 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 their 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 power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us; that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
"I wish, Mr. President," said a government official after a disastrous defeat of the Union army, "that I might be a messenger of good news instead of bad. I wish I could tell you how to conquer or to get rid of those rebellious States."
At this President Lincoln looked up, and a smile came across his face as he said: "That reminds me of two boys out in Illinois who took a short cut across an orchard. When they were in the middle of the field they saw a vicious dog bounding toward them. One of the boys was sly enough to climb a tree, but the other ran around the tree, with the dog following. He kept running until, by making smaller circles than it was possible for his pursuer to make, he gained upon the dog sufficiently to grasp his tail. He held on to the tail with a desperate grip until nearly exhausted, when he called to the boy up the tree to come down and help.
"'What for?' said the boy.
"'I want you to help me let this dog go.'
"Now," concluded the President, "if I could only let the rebel States go, it would be all right. But I am compelled to hold on to them and make them stay."
But even in the darkest days of the Rebellion he gave himself up to the lighter things, saying, "I laugh because I must not cry; that's all—that's all."
It was in the last days of the great struggle, when the armies of Grant and Lee were in the throes of the final fight for the possession of the Old Dominion that Lincoln watched them from the rear. "How many prisoners?" he asked, eagerly. Every prisoner meant a merciful ending and a saving of life.
On the night of the surrender of Lee at Appomattox Mr. Lincoln was serenaded by many friends and enthusiastic Northerners. He made the usual kindly conciliatory speech, and cordially invited the erring States to come back into the family.
The band played all sorts of patriotic airs— "Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean," "Star-spangled Banner," and others. Mr. Lincoln, looking toward the band-master, suggested: "Play 'Dixie' now. It's ours."
So throughout his whole career his attitude was generous toward the South.