Rise to Greatness (60 page)

At the town of Murfreesboro, on the west fork of the Stones River, Braxton Bragg came out to meet Rosecrans’s troops with some 40,000 Rebels. Late in the afternoon of December 30, the two armies settled so close together that their regimental bands staged a fight, blasting “Yankee Doodle” and “Dixie” at each other until they settled on a song they could play in unison: “Home Sweet Home.” As the sad tune sounded in the dying light, the rival generals in their headquarters tents bent over their plans, and somehow they settled on precisely the same idea. Rosecrans and Bragg both decided to begin the last day of the year by throwing a hard left hook, thus crashing the enemy’s right and cutting his supply line.

Bragg swung first, thundering into the Union lines at daybreak on December 31 and driving the Federals back like a folding knife. But just as the blue wall was about to break, the Confederates came up against a reorganized line fighting under Philip Sheridan. His dark eyes blazing over a slash of mustache, Little Phil refused to let the Rebels through. During four of the hottest hours of the war, the young general lost three brigade commanders and a third of his men, but he and his fighters were unconquerable. When his troops ran out of ammunition, Sheridan ordered them to fix bayonets. And when night fell, his soldiers safely occupied a strong position on favorable high ground.

John Dahlgren had indeed been wrong about the Union’s ability to make soldiers and leaders. At the battle of Stones River, Rosecrans lost 31 percent of his army—the highest proportional toll of the war. But the general held his ground, Bragg’s exhausted forces turned back, and the terrible confrontation proved to be an important Union victory. For Lincoln, it was a critical success to set against the failure at Fredericksburg, a “check … to a dangerous sentiment” of defeat “which was spreading in the North.” Two weeks earlier, it seemed that Providence had set its face against the Union, but the news that Bragg’s men had been beaten back strengthened Lincoln’s confidence that he remained on the right side of history.

In the end, William Rosecrans would not measure up to the president’s hopes for him, but Lincoln never lost sight of the service he rendered at Murfreesboro. Months later, after Union victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg had lifted Northern spirits and put the memory of Stones River behind the scrim of time, the president still felt the debt keenly. In a letter to the general, Lincoln reaffirmed what he owed: “I can never forget, whilst I remember anything, that about the end of last year … you gave us a hard earned victory which, had there been a defeat instead, the nation could hardly have lived over.”

EPILOGUE

“A NEW BIRTH OF FREEDOM”

As the White House clocks chimed midnight, 1862 passed into history trailing a ragged tail of loose ends. Abraham Lincoln spent another nearly sleepless night, not least because news of the war’s progress remained so bleak. On the Rappahannock, Burnside’s tether on the Army of the Potomac had frayed almost to nothing. In the wake of his frontal assault on Fredericksburg, made against the advice of senior officers, the general now faced a mutiny. Though he had given up on another confrontation at Marye’s Heights, Burnside remained determined to recross the river and try again to seize the offensive. However, as Lincoln noted, “his Grand Division commanders all oppose[d] the movement,” and they made their opposition clear by going over the general’s head to Washington. The president wanted Halleck to visit army headquarters at Falmouth and straighten things out by surveying the ground, interviewing the contending generals, and deciding whether Burnside should give the order. But to Lincoln, Halleck seemed to be dodging responsibility. “Your military skill is useless to me, if you will not do this,” the president scolded his general in chief in a letter dated January 1, 1863.

Lincoln also had the Army of the Cumberland to worry about that night. He knew that Rosecrans’s troops were joined in battle with Bragg’s Rebels in Tennessee, but he had no idea how that confrontation would turn out, much less how he could deal with another defeat if one came. Farther west, the military situation was cloaked in perplexing near-silence, for Grant’s communications were cut and Sherman’s strike force was somewhere in the bayous around Vicksburg. Much had changed in the year since the president wrote his first tentative telegrams asserting his authority over the far-flung Union troops, but one truth was permanent: during these dark vigils, Lincoln was always a lonely commander in chief.

However vague and troubling the news from the battlefield, though, the day had arrived when Lincoln was to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. Despite the president’s repeated assurances to Sumner, the cabinet, and various others, many Americans North and South continued to speculate that Lincoln’s determination would fail at the last minute, that he would suspend the decree in favor of some final attempt at compromise. Even Mary Lincoln, who knew the enormous pressure her husband was under from conservative supporters to find some excuse to shelve the proclamation, is said to have asked him: “Well, what do you intend doing?” Lincoln answered her by sending a glance heavenward and saying: “I am a man under orders; I cannot do otherwise.” The decision was final.

For Lincoln, standing by his commitments was a matter of pride: he once described the “ability to keep my resolves” as “the gem of my character.” Yet he understood, more than many of his contemporaries, that his actions on the first day of 1863 would be far more significant than any earlier promise he had pledged and kept. As he would put it later, the Emancipation Proclamation was “the central act of my administration and the great event of the nineteenth century,” for it “knocked the bottom out of slavery.” Here was the “new birth of freedom” he would speak of so brilliantly at Gettysburg.

Lincoln had come a long way in a year—and a very long way from a New Year’s Day twenty-two years earlier, one of the lowest moments of his life. On that occasion, anguish over his muddled future left Lincoln bedridden with depression, so wretched that Joshua Speed feared his friend would try to kill himself. Yet despite—or because of—his torment, this unschooled, unmarried, unpolished man of thirty-one confessed to Speed the true scale of his ambition and the shape of his greatest fear. He wanted to be remembered forever, Lincoln admitted—to engage so impressively with “the events transpiring in his day and generation” as to “link his name with something that would redound to the interest of his fellow man.” Only by accomplishing something great could he register his existence on this sad earth beyond his own life span and the lives of those who knew him personally.

Lincoln feared oblivion the way others feared death, and this dread had stalked him from childhood, when, according to one family story, he worked alongside his father fashioning the pegs that would hold his mother’s coffin together. They buried his mother in a tiny graveyard on a wild hillside; a dozen years later, they left her behind when they moved away. Revisiting the place as a grown man, Lincoln felt as if the whole world was saturated in death: “Every sound appears a knell / And every spot a grave.” Yet no one could name all the anonymous men, women, and children lost to time; it was as if they had never lived. Lincoln’s dream was to be the rare individual whose name and story would live on.

Now the moment he sought had come; today he would step across the threshold from mortality to permanence. Later, he would speak in exactly these terms when talking about the Emancipation Proclamation with Joshua Speed. When Lincoln reminded his friend of their long-ago conversation about ambition and fear, Speed remembered it clearly. Lincoln then said he had come to believe that “my fondest hopes will be realized,” thanks to his signature on the momentous decree. As Lincoln put it to Charles Sumner on another occasion: “I know very well that the name which is connected with this act will never be forgotten.”

As faint light rose in the White House windows, the new year dawned clear and mild—“very smilingly,” as one Washingtonian put it. After crossing the second floor from the family quarters to his office, Lincoln inked his pen and began work on the final draft of his decree. At a meeting the previous day, members of the cabinet had suggested a few small changes to the document, and Lincoln decided to incorporate several of them. First, to defend himself against accusations that he was deliberately stirring up a slave insurrection, he added a sentence calling on the freed slaves of the South to “abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defense.” He also retreated slightly from the promise in his preliminary proclamation that the liberated slaves would be “forever” free. His reasoning, as he deleted that ringing word, was that the order drew its constitutional authority from the president’s war powers, and the war would not go on forever. Still, the final proclamation pledged the strength of the U.S. Army and Navy to “maintain” the freedom of the former slaves, and called on the armed forces to enlist freed black troops. These revolutionary commitments would secure lasting freedom far beyond the power of that single missing word.

After filling nearly three pages with his careful handwriting, Lincoln ended the decree with a new flourish. Suggested by Chase and others, it was designed to give this dust-dry document a glow of glory. “And upon this act,” Lincoln wrote, “sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God.” With that, he summoned a messenger to carry the order to the State Department, where, despite the holiday, a scribe was waiting to make an official copy.

While the proclamation was being prepared for his signature, Lincoln ate his usual Spartan breakfast of egg, toast, and coffee. After the meal, Burnside arrived for a dispiriting meeting to settle on a strategy for ending the standoff at Fredericksburg: the general seemed to want nothing more than to awaken from the bad dream of leading the world’s largest army. At midmorning, Seward entered the president’s office, carrying what was meant to be the final proclamation. But the historic signing was delayed when Lincoln, proofreading carefully, found that the wrong official boilerplate had been added at the end; it was language appropriate to a treaty, not an executive order. Even the smallest mistake was intolerable in a document that would be so closely scrutinized; the president sent Seward back to the scribe to have it redone. By now there was barely enough time to dress for the annual reception and join the receiving line downstairs.

*   *   *

The morning was another midwinter delight, much like the previous New Year’s Day. The streets were jammed and the doors at the homes of Washington’s luminaries opened wide. At the Seward mansion, six police officers stood sentinel at the entrance, while an usher loudly announced the name of each visitor who entered the parlor. Stanton’s house was a sea of blue jackets and yellow braid. Callers at the Chase mansion greeted not only the Treasury secretary but also his daughter Kate, twenty-two and glorious, with limpid eyes and a slender figure that made her the most celebrated beauty in the capital. As intelligent as she was lovely, Kate was chief counselor and collaborator in her widowed father’s barely masked campaign for the next Republican presidential nomination. Somehow, neither father nor daughter—both astute in so many ways—was able to see that in Abraham Lincoln they had met their match.

The Welles home was quiet, the door shut, for it was not yet two months since the death of Hubert Welles, aged nine, a boy with what his father called “a light, bright, cherub face.” Of the eight children born to Gideon and Mary Jane Welles, only two were still living, and the navy secretary was glad to have the constant press of crisis to distract him from his grief. Rather than receive callers, he crossed Lafayette Square in the “bright and brilliant” sunshine shortly before eleven
A.M.
to take his place in the line of dignitaries. Soon thereafter, his hand was swallowed up in the enveloping grip of the Lincoln handshake, and he congratulated the president on the year they had survived together. Welles lingered only a half hour or so, long enough to see the arrival of the costumed diplomatic corps, the Supreme Court justices, the members of Congress, and a legion of preening officers. After heading home again, Welles found himself reflecting on the profound changes wrought by the events and decisions of the past year. “The character of the country is in many respects undergoing a transformation,” he wrote.

Mary Lincoln was in a similar mood, a ruminative blend of grief and wonder. She wore black velvet to the reception, signifying mourning, and as she took her place beside Benjamin French in the receiving line, she thought back to their first open house in Washington, precisely one year earlier. “Oh, Mr. French!” she exclaimed. “How much we have passed through since we last stood here.”

Her husband towered over her, looking “quite as well as he did a year ago,” according to one undoubtedly generous description. If in fact his fatigue wasn’t readily apparent, the stream of visitors must have lifted his spirits and lit the dark-ringed hollows of his eyes. After all, the parade of distinguished callers through the Blue Room was, in subtle ways, a measure of his successes. A year ago, when Her Majesty’s ambassador, Lord Lyons, electrified the room with his arrival, the United States had narrowly avoided a suicidal war with England. Now, thanks to the skillful diplomacy of the past twelve months, the threat of European intervention in the Civil War had been erased. By holding the North together while mobilizing its latent strength, Lincoln had made the United States too powerful to cross—and thereby opened the door to a new era of cooperation between the United States and Great Britain, an alliance that would eventually become one of the most durable and important in world history.

The previous year, Chief Justice Roger Taney had been an absent yet hovering spirit at the White House reception; this year, the elderly judge decided to pay his respects. Once an openly hostile force at the head of the third branch of government, Taney now shared the Supreme Court with three Lincoln appointees. A fourth was just a few months away. As 1863 began, his once great influence had been largely neutralized. Taney would die in October 1864, and the drafts of opinions already written and tucked into his desk—striking down military conscription, for instance, and invalidating paper money—were destined to remain forever unpublished by the court that Lincoln remade.