1863: Lincoln's Pivotal Year

8. The General Tide

123 8 The General Tide William C. Davis If President Abraham Lincoln felt buoyed at noon on January 1, 1863, when he signed the final Emancipation Proclamation, thus redeeming the promise of ultimate freedom from slavery always implicit in the Republican Party platform, he had little else to lift his spirits that day. By this time, the president had learned what some of his generals had still to divine, that the Confederacy lived in its armies. Remove them from the field, and the rebellion died with them. While there was no risk of a similar disappearance of his own legions, still he well knew that if they did not perform better than they had during the past eighteen months, then his hopes of reunifying the riven nation would evaporate, and the Union would be perhaps permanently cut in two. Given that, the epochal document he signed that noon would be pointless, one of history’s cruel and embarrassing jokes. The problem came down to the men in command. Lincoln knew that his soldiers were every bit the equals of their foemen. Moreover, they were better clothed, better fed, better trained, better equipped, and better paid. With only a few exceptions, however, what they had not been for the past year and one-half was better led. Army commanders had come and gone like a cruel surf, too often leaving defeat and demoralization in their ebb. Worse, some real successes went largely unappreciated because they came in far-flung theaters of the contest, while the most spectacular failures had beset Lincoln’s largest legion, the mighty Army of the Potomac, almost in Washington’s shadow and right under the eyes of most of the nation’s press, whose reports spread the word of defeat after defeat all across the nation and around the world. 124 William C. Davis Now on this first day of 1863, if Lincoln hoped for new resolution and a new vigor from his commanders, he saw little to give him encouragement. Several hundred miles west at Murfreesboro, Tennessee, his major army in that region was locked in battle with the Confederate Army of Tennessee and had been driven to the defensive, its commander struggling with the decision to stay on the field and await more enemy attacks or withdraw and leave the Rebels with another victory to their account. On the Mississippi, a once-promising movement aimed at taking the critical stronghold at Vicksburg from its rear, landward side had foundered at Chickasaw Bayou, its commander preparing now to retreat. Though Lincoln did not know it yet, this very day Confederates attacked and captured a Federal outpost at Galveston, Texas, opening an important port for blockade runners. Meanwhile in the capital, the president spent what should have been a pleasant holiday at his traditional White House reception contending with depressing manifestations of his problem commanders right in his Executive Mansion office. Major General Ambrose Everett Burnside, in command of the Union’s premier force the Army of the Potomac, had already led it to humiliating defeat less than three weeks earlier at Fredericksburg, Virginia, after only five weeks in command. Now he called on Lincoln with a plan for a new thrust at Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia in its positions south of the Rappahannock River. But Burnside also burdened the president with the disconcerting news that none of the general’s senior commanders had confidence in his plan. Worse, he informed the commander in chief that he believed that the rank and file of his own army had lost confidence in Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, in General-in-Chief Henry Wager Halleck, and worst of all in Burnside himself. “Old Burn” had always been a reluctant army commander, lacking confidence in himself. Lincoln had had to persuade him to take the command in November, and now Burnside suggested that he should resign. So now the commander of Lincoln’s principal army gave him a plan of campaign in which no one seemed to feel confidence and capped that with saying he wanted to resign. On top of that, Halleck resigned his position when Lincoln insisted on the general in chief taking a position on the Burnside plan. Both generals agreed to stay on, but the events of that day scarcely made a combination to sweeten the president’s expectations that the year ahead might see a turning of the tide in his favor in his armies’ leadership. Yet,signs...