The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln : Chapter 11 - The Turning Point Of The Way

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Chapter eleven of the Boy's Life of Abraham Lincoln by
Helen Nicolay. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain
recording by Tom Weiss Tom's audiobooks dot com. Chapter eleven
the turning point of the war. In the summer of
eighteen sixty three, the Confederate armies reached their greatest strength.

(00:24):
It was then that flushed with military ardor and made
bold by what seen to the Southern leaders an unbroken
series of victories on the Virginia battlefields, General Lee again
crossed the Potomac River and led his army into the north.
He went as far as Gettysburg in Pennsylvania, but there,
on the third of July eighteen sixty three, suffered a

(00:46):
disastrous defeat which shattered forever the Confederate dream of taking
Philadelphia and dictating peace from Independence Hall. This Battle of
Gettysburg should have ended the war for General Lee, on
retreating southward, found the Potomac River so swollen by heavy
reins that he was obliged to wait several days for
the floods to go down. In that time, it would

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have been quite possible for General Meade, the Union commander,
to follow him and utterly destroy his army. He proved
too slow, however, and Lee and his beaten Confederate soldiers escaped.
President Lincoln was inexpressibly grieved at this, and in the
first bitterness of his disappointment, sat down and wrote General
Mead a letter. Lee was within your easy grassp he

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told him, 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. Your
golden opportunity is gone, and I am distressed immeasurably because
of it. But need never received this letter deeply. As
the President felt Meade's fault, his spirit of forgiveness was

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so quick, and his thankfulness for the measure of success
that had been gained so great, that he put it
in his desk, and it was never signed or sent.
The Battle of Gettysburg was indeed a notable victory, and
compelled with the fall of Vicksburg, which surrendered General Grant
on that same third of July, proved the real turning
point of the war. It seems singularly appropriate, then that

(02:20):
Gettisburg should have been the place where President Lincoln made
his most beautiful and famous address. After the battle, the
dead and wounded of both the Union and Confederate armies
had received tender attention there. Later, it was decided to
set aside a portion of the battlefield for a great
national military cemetery in which the dead found orderly burial.

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It was dedicated to its sacred use on November nineteenth,
eighteen sixty three, at the end of the stately ceremonies,
President Lincoln rose and said, four score and seven years ago,
our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation
in liberty, and dedicate it to the proposition that all

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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

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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

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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 un finished work
which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to

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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 the government of the people,

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by the people, for the people shall not perish from
the earth. With these words, so brief, so simple, so
full of reverent feeling, he set aside the place of
strife to be the resting place of heroes, and then
went back to his own great task, for which he
too was to give the last full measure of devotion.

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Up to within a very short time, little had been
heard about Ulysses Grant, the man destined to become the
most successful general of the war. Like General McClellan, he
was a graduate of West Point, and also, like McClellan,
he had resigned from the army after serving gallantly in
the Mexican War. There the resemblance ceased, for he had

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not an atom of McClellan's vanity, and his persistent will
to do the best he could within the means the
government could give him was far removed from the younger
general's fault finding and complaint. He was about four years
older than McClellan, having been born on April twenty seventh,
eighteen twenty two. On offering his services to the War

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Department in eighteen sixty one, he had modestly written, I
feel myself competent to command a regiment if the President,
in his judgment, should see fit to entrust one to me.
For some reason, this letter remained unanswered, although the Department
then and later had need of trained and experienced officers.
After the Governor of Illinois made him a colonel of

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one of the three Years Volunteer regiments, and from that
time on he rose in rank, not as McLellan had done,
by leaps and bounds, but slowly, earning every promotion. All
of his service had been in the West, and he
first came into general notice by his persistent and repeated
efforts to capture Vicksburg, on whose fall the opening of

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the Mississippi River depended. Five different plans he tried before
he finally succeeded the last one, appearing utterly foolhardy, and
seeming to go against every known rule of military science.
In spite of this, it was successful, the Union Army
and Navy, thereby gaining control of the Mississippi River and
cutting off forever from the Confederacy a great extent of

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rich country from which up to that time it had
been drawing men and supplies. The North was greatly cheered
by these victories, and all eyes were turned upon the
successful commander. No one was more thankful than mister Lincoln.
He gave Grant quick promotion, and crowned the official act
with the most general letter. I do not remember that

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you and I ever met personally, he wrote. 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. Then, summing up the plans that the
general had tried, especially the last, when he added, I
feared it was a mistake. I now wished to make
the personal acknowledgment that you were right and I was wrong.

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Other important battles won by Grant that same fall added
to his growing fame, and by the beginning of eighteen
sixty four he was singled out as the greatest Union commander.
As a suitable reward for his victories, it was determined
to make him lieutenant general. This army rank had before
the Civil War been bestowed on only two American soldiers,

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on General Washington and on Scott, for his conquest of Mexico.
In eighteen sixty four, Congress passed and the President signed
an act revived the grade, and Grant was called to
Washington to receive his commission. He and mister Lincoln met
for the first time at a large public reception held
at the Executive Mansion on the evening of March eighth.

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A movement and rumor in the crowd heralded his approach,
and when at last the short, stocky, determined soldier and
the tall, careworn, deep eyed President stood face to face,
the crowd, moved by a sudden impulse of delicacy, drew
back and left them almost alone to exchange a few
words later, when Grant appeared in the Great East Room,

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the enthusiasm called forth by his presence could no longer
be restrained, and cheer after cheer went up, while his
admirers pressed about him so closely that, hot and blushing
with embarrassment, he was forced at last to mount a
sofa and from there shake hands with the eager people
who thronged up to him from all sides. The next day,
at one o'clock, the President, in the presence of the

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cabinet and a few other officials, made little speech and
gave him his commission. Grant replied with a few words
as modest as they were brief, and in conversation afterward,
asked what special duty was required of him. The President
answered that the people wanted him to take Richmond, and
asked if he could do it. Grant said that he

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could if he had the soldiers, and the President promised
that these would be furnished him. Grant did not stay
in Washington to enjoy the new honors of his high rank,
but at once set about preparations for his task. It
proved a hard one. More than a year passed before
it was ended, and all the losses in battle of
the three years that had gone before, seemed small in

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comparison with the terrible numbers of killed and wounded that
fell during these last months of the war. At first,
Grant had a fear that the President might wish to
control his plans, but this was soon quieted and his
lingering doubt on the subject vanished, when as he was
about to start on his final campaign, mister Lincoln sent
him a letter stating his satisfaction with all he had done,

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and assuring him that in the coming campaign he neither
knew or desired to know the details of his plans.
In his reply, Grant confessed the groundlessness of his fears,
and abbot, should my success be less than I desire
and expect, the least I can say is the fault
is not with you. He made no complicated plan for

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the problem before him, but proposed to solve it by plain, hard,
persistent fighting. Lee's army will be your objective point, he
instructed General Meade. Where Lee goes, there you will go. Also.
Nearly three years earlier, the opposing armies had fought their
first Battle of bull Run, only a short distance north
of where they now confronted each other. Campaign and battle

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between them had swayed to the north and the south,
but neither could claim any great gain of ground or
of advantage. The final struggle was before them. Grant had
two to one in numbers lead the advantage in position,
for he knew by heart every road, hill and forest
in Virginia, had for his friendly scout, every white inhabitant,

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and could retire into prepared fortifications. Perhaps the greatest element
of his strength lay in the conscious pride of his
army that for three years it had steadily barred the
way to Richmond. To offset this, there now menaced it
what had always been absent before the grim on flinching
will of the new Union commander, who had rightly won

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for himself the name of unconditional surrender Grant. On the
night of May fourth, eighteen sixty four, his army entered
upon the campaign which, after many months, was to end
the war. It divided itself into two parts. For the
first six weeks there was almost constant swift marching and
hard fighting, a nearly equally matched contest of strategy in

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battle between the two armies, the difference being that Grant
was always advancing and Lee was always retiring. Had hoped
to defeat Lee outside of his fortifications, and early in
the campaign had expressed his resolution to fight it out
on this line if it takes all summer. But the
losses were so appalling, sixty thousand of his best troops

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melting away and killed and wounded during the first six weeks,
that this was seen to be impossible. Lee's army was
therefore driven into its fortifications around the Confederate capital, and
then came the Siege of Richmond, lasting more than nine months,
but pushed forward all that time with relentless energy in
spite of Grant's heavy losses. In the west. Meanwhile, General

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William T. Sherman, Grant's closest friend and brother officer, pursued
a task of almost equal importance, taking Atlanta, Georgia, which
the Confederates had turned into a city of foundries and
workshops for the manufacture and repair of guns. Then starting
from Atlanta, marching with his best troops three hundred miles
to the sea, laying the country waste as they went through,

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which turning northward, he led them straight through South and
North Carolina to bring his army in touch with Grant
against this battleground of fighting the life of the country
went on. The end of the war was approaching surely,
but so slowly that the people hoping for it and
watching day by day could scarcely see it. They schooled

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themselves to a dogged endurance, but there was no more enthusiasm.
Many lost courage. Volunteering almost ceased, and the government was
obliged to begin drafting men to make up the numbers
of soldiers needed by Grant in his campaign against Richmond.
The President had many things to dishearten him at this time,

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many troublesome questions to settle. For instance, there were new
loyal state governments to provide in those parts of the
South which had again come under the control of the
Union armies. No easy matter. Were every man, woman and
child harbored angry feelings against the North, and no matter
how just and forbearing he might be, his plans were

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sure to be thwarted and bitterly opposed at every step.
There were serious questions too to be decided about Negro soldiers,
For the South had raised a mighty outcry against the
Emancipation Proclamation, especially against the use of the freed slaves
as soldiers, vowing that white officers of Negro troops would
be shown small mercy if ever they were taken prisoner.

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No act of such vengeance occurred, but in eighteen sixty
four a fort man by Colored soldiers was captured by
the Confederates and almost the entire garrison was put to death.
Must the order that the War Department had issued some
time earlier to offset the Confederate threats now be put
in force. The order said that for every Negro prisoner

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killed by the Confederates, a Confederate prisoner in the hands
of the Union armies would be taken out and shot.
It fell upon mister Lincoln to decide. The idea seemed
unbearable to him. Yet, on the other hand, could he
afford to let the massacre go unavenged and thus encourage
the South in the belief that it could commit such

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barbarous acts and escape unharmed. Two reasons finally decided him
against putting the order in force. One was that General
Grant was about to start on his campaign against Richmond,
and that it would be most unwise to begin this
by the tragic spectacle of a military punishment, however merited.
The other was his tender heart of humanity. He could not.

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He said, take men out and kill them in cold
blood for crimes committed by other men. If he could
get hold of the persons who were guilty of killing
the colored prisoners in cold blood, the case would be different.
But he could not kill the innocent for the guilty. Fortunately,
the offense was not repeated, and no one had caused

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to criticize his clemency. Numbers of good and influential men,
dismayed at the amount of blood and treasure that the
war had already cost, and Maarten, by the calls for
still more soldiers that Grant's campaign made necessary, began to
clamor for peace, were ready to grant almost anything that
the Confederates chose to ask. Rebel agents were in Canada

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professing to be able to conclude a peace. Mister Lincoln,
wishing to convince these northern peacemen of the groundlessness of
their claim and of the injustice of their charges that
the government was continuing the war, unnecessarily sent Horace Greeley,
the foremost among them, to Canada to talk with self
styled ambassadors of Jefferson Davis. Nothing came of it, of course,

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except abuse of mister Lincoln for sending such a messenger,
and a lively quarrel between Greenley and the rebel agents
as to who was responsible for the misunderstandings that arose.
The summer and autumn of eighteen sixty four was likewise
filled with the bitterness and high excitement of a presidential campaign,
for according to law, mister Lincoln's successor had to be

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elected on the Tuesday after the first Monday of November,
and that at year the great mass of Republicans wished
mister Lincoln to be reelected. The Democrats had long ago
fixed upon General McLellan, with his grievances against the President,
as their future candidate. It is not unusual for presidents
to discover would be rivals in their own cabinets. Considering

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the strong men who had formed mister Lincoln's cabinet, and
the fact that four years earlier more than one of
them had active hopes of being chosen in his stead,
it is remarkable that there was so little of this.
The one who developed the most serious desire to succeed
him was Samon P. Chase, his Secretary of the Treasury,

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devoted with all his powers to the cause of the Union.
Mister Chase was yet strangely at fault in his judgment
of men. He regarded himself as a friend of mister Lincoln,
but nevertheless held so poor an opinion of the President's
mind and character compared with his own, that he could
not believe people blind enough to prefer the president to himself.

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He imagined that he did not want the office, and
was anxious only for the public good. Yet he listened
eagerly to the critics of the President, who flattered his hopes,
and found time, in spite of his great labors, to
write letters to all parts of the country, which, although
protesting that he did not want the honor, showed his
entire willingness to accept it. Mister Lincoln was well aware

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of this, Indeed, it was impossible not to know about it,
though he refused to hear the matter discussed or to
read any letters concerning it. He had his own opinion
of the taste displayed by mister Chase, but chose to
take no notice of his actions. I have determined, he said,
to shut my eyes so far as possible to everything

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of the sort. Mister Chase makes a good secretary, and
I shall keep him where he is if he becomes president.
All right, I hope we may never have a worse man.
And he not only kept him where he was, but
went on appointing Chase's friends to office. There was also
some talk of making General Grant the Republican candidate for president,

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and an attempt was even made to trap mister Lincoln
into taking part in a meeting where this was to
be done. Mister Lincoln refused to attend, and instead wrote
a letter of such hearty and generous approval of Grant
and his army that the meeting naturally fell into the
hands of mister Lincoln's friends. General Grant never, at that
time or any other, gave the least encouragement to the

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efforts which were made to array him against the president.
Mister Lincoln, on his part, received all warnings to beware
of Grant in the most serene manner, saying tranquility, if
he takes Richmond, let him have it. It was not
so with General Fremont. At a poorly attended meeting held
in Cleveland, he was actually nominated by a handful of

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people calling themselves the Radical Democracy, and taking the matter
seriously accepted, although three months later, having found no response
from the public, he withdrew from the contest. All these
various attempts to discredit the name of Abraham Lincoln caused
hardly a ripple on the great current of public opinion,
and death alone could have prevented his choice by the

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Republican National Convention. He took no measures to help on
his own candidacy. With strangers, he would not talk about
the probability of his reelection, But with friends he'd made
no secret of his readiness to continue the work he
was engaged in. If such should be the general wish,
a second term would be a great honor and a
great labor, which together, perhaps I would not decline, he

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wrote to one of them. He discouraged office holders, either
civil or military, who showed any special zeal in his behalf.
To General Shirtz, who wrote asking permission to take an
active part in the campaign for his reelection, he answered,
I proceed no objection to your making a political speech
when you are where one is to be made. But

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quite surely, speaking in the north and fighting in the
South at the same time are not possible, nor could
I be justified to detail any officer to the political campaign.
And then returned into the army. He himself made no
long speeches during the summer, and in his short addresses
at sanitary fields in answer to visiting delegations, and on

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similar occasions where custom and courtesy obliged him to say
a few words, he kept his quiet, ease and self command,
speaking heartily into the point, yet avoiding all the pitfalls
that beset the candidate who talks. When the Republican National
Convention came together in Baltimore on June seventh, eighteen sixty four,
it had very little to do, for its delegates were

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bound by rigid instructions to vote for Abraham Lincoln. He
was chosen on the first ballot, every state voting for
him except Missouri, whose representatives had been instructed to vote
for Grant. Missouri at once changed its vote, and the
secretary of the Convention read the grand total of five
hundred and six for Lincoln, his announcement being greeted by

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a storm of cheers that lasted several minutes. It was
not so easy to choose a vice president. Mister Lincoln
had been besieged by many people to make known his
wishes in the matter, but had persistently refused. He rightly
felt that it would be presumptuous in him to dictate
who should be his companion on the ticket, and, in

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case of his death, his successor in office. This was
for the delegates to the convention to decide, for they
represented the voters of the country. He had no more
right to dictate who should be selected than the Emperor
of China would have had. It is probable that Vice
President Hamlin would have been renominated if it had not
been for the general feeling both in and out of

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the Convention that under all the circumstances, it would be
wiser to select some man who had been a Democrat
and had yet upheld the war. The choice fell upon
Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, who was not only a Democrat,
but had been appointed by mister Lincoln military governor of
Tennessee in eighteen sixty two. The Democrats, it first meant

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to have the national Convention of their party meet on
the fourth of July, but after Fremont had been nominated
at Cleveland and Lincoln at Baltimore, they postponed it to
a later date, hoping that something in the Chapter of
Accidents might happen to their advantage. At first, it appeared
as if this might be the case, the outlook for
the Republicans was far from satisfactory. The terrible fighting and

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great losses of Grant's army in Virginia had profoundly shocked
and depressed the country. The campaign of General Sherman, who
was then in Georgia, showed as yet no promise of
the brilliant results it afterward attained. General Early's sudden raid
into Maryland, when he appeared so unexpectedly before Washington and
threatened the city, had been the cause of much exasperation,

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and mister Chase, made bitter by his failure to receive
the covetant nomination for president, had resigned from the cabinet.
This seemed to certain leading Republicans to point to a
breaking up of the government. The peacemen were clamoring loudly
for an end of the war, and the Democrats, not
having yet formally chosen a candidate, were free to devote

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all their leisure to attacks upon the administration. Mister Lincoln
realized fully the tremendous issues at stake. He looked worn
and weary to a friend who urged him to go
away for a fortnight's rest. He replied, I cannot fly
from my thoughts. My solicitude for this great country follows
me wherever I go. I do not think it is

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personal vanity or ambition, though I am not free from
these infirmities. But I cannot but feel that the weal
or woe of this great nation will be decided in November.
There is no program offered by any wing of the
Democratic Party, but that must result in the permanent destruction
of the Union. The political situation grew still darker toward

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the end of August. The General bloom enveloped even the
President himself. Then what he did was most original and characteristic.
Feeling that the campaign was going against him, he made
up his mind deliberately the course he ought to pursue,
and laid down for himself the action demanded by his
strong sense of duty. He wrote on August twenty three

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the following memorandum. 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
cooperate 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

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save it. Afterward, he folded and pasted the sheet of
paper in such a way that its contents could not
be seen, and as the cabinet came together, handed it
to each member, successively asking him to write his name
across the back of it. In this peculiar fashion, he
pledged himself and his administration to accept loyally the verdict
of the people if it should be against them, and

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to do their utmost to save the union. In the
brief remainder of his term of office, he gave no
hint to any member of his cabinet of the nature
of the paper thus signed, until after his re election.
The Democratic Convention finally came together in Chicago on August
twenty nine. It declared the war of failure and that
efforts ought to be made at once to bring it

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to a close, and nominated General mc clellan for President.
Mc clellan's only chance of success lay in his war record.
His position as a candidate on a platform of dishonorable
peace would have been no less desperate than ridiculous. In
his letter accepting the nomination, therefore, he calmly ignored the
platform and renewed his assurances of devotion to the Union,

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the Constitution, and the flag of his country. But the stars,
in their courses, fought against him. Even before the Democratic
Convention met, the tide of battle had turned, the darkest
hour of the war had passed, and dawn was at hand,
And amid the thanksgivings of a grateful people and the
joyful salute of great guns, the real presidential campaign began.

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The country awoke to the true meaning of the democratic platform.
General Sherman's successes in the South excited the enthusiasm of
the people, and when at last the Unionists, rousing from
their Midsummer languor, began to show their faith in the
Republican candidate, the hopelessness of all efforts to undermine him
became evident. End of Chapter eleven. Recording by Tom Weiss

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