This letter from President Lincoln to Major General Ulysses Grant in July 1863 might be the last documented instance of a president apologizing for anything:
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 Gen. 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
After reading Edmund Morris’s trilogy on the life of Theodore Roosevelt I made TR my new favorite president, but I think I have to revert back to Lincoln.
The theme that has defined my 2014, I only now realize, is synchronicity. That Jungian concept (“the occurrence of two or more events that appear to be meaningfully related but not causally related”) bubbled up several times this year, especially in what I was reading, watching, or listening to concurrently. For instance:
Seeing Interstellar as I worked my way through Walter Isaacson’s biography of Albert Einstein;
and seeing the Dorothy Day in Paul Elie’s The Life You Save May Be Your Ownpop up in the bombastic yet beautifully rendered Noah
To name only the ones I blogged about. But I’d like to add one last synchronous moment to this list, which arrived courtesy of John Wilkes Booth and an avalanche.
In Force Majeure, the new film from Ruben Östlund, a Swedish family vacationing at a French ski resort eats lunch in an outdoor restaurant flanking the majestic, snow-laden mountains. The resort performs routine controlled avalanches to regulate the snow’s movement and safeguard against a truly deadly avalanche, and the lunchgoers witness one while they eat. Except this one careens right toward them. The father, initially wowed by the view, suddenly senses danger and ditches his wife and two children for cover (after making sure to take his phone). Turns out it was just the snow-dust that crashed into them, not the avalanche itself, so everyone returns to their tables, including Tomas, the father who just abandoned his post—literally and figuratively. The rest of the film documents the unraveling from this moment, which each character remembers differently yet causes shared emotional upheaval and provokes a deep and unsettling reconsideration of masculinity, human nature, and the incumbent expectations of gender.
I watched this movie while in the midst of James Swanson’s Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer. It’s a gripping if a bit overheated retelling of the Lincoln assassination and aftermath, which indeed is stranger than any fiction. The moment of synchronicity here occurred during the assassination itself, when Booth shot Lincoln in the Ford’s Theatre presidential box and leapt onto the stage. Harry Hawk was the lone actor on stage at that moment and got an up-close view of Booth’s famous cry “Sic semper tyrannis!” and “The South is avenged!” Then, the key moment, recounted by Hawk himself in a letter to his parents written soon after:
[Booth] ran toward me, and I, seeing the knife, thought I was the one he was after, ran off the stage and up a flight of stairs. He made his escape out of a door, directly in the rear of the theatre, mounted a horse and rode off. The above all occurred in the space of a quarter of a minute, and at the time I did not know that the President was shot; although, if I had tried to stop him, he would have stabbed me.
In Manhunt, Swanson subtly criticizes Hawk for turning and running, linking his supposed moment of cowardice to one at the end of the chase for Booth, when John Garrett, owner of the barn that housed an armed Booth in a standoff with the cavalry, fled from the barn after thinking Booth was going to shoot him.
All of these moments might provoke some knee-jerk judgments but beg the same question: What are you prepared to do? Harry Hawk was not prepared to fight an armed assassin after the shock of that moment. But should he have anyway? Other times in Manhunt, men show courage in moments of terror and some pay the price for it in blood. Tomas in Force Majeure had time to take his family to shelter or at least shield them. But why didn’t he? He pays the price later on: not in blood like the people in Manhunt, but in self-esteem and dignity.
It’s easy as a viewer or future observer to question the decisions these men made or didn’t make. It’s not so easy to make them ourselves in real life, man or woman. What are you prepared to do? What cost are you willing to pay?
This guy, for better or worse, was like the Karl Rove of his time. The sources differ on the details about his life, but we know that before he turned into the Turd Blossom of the mid-19th century Weed apprenticed as a printer and editor of various New York newspapers during the 1820s, which got him interested in politics. No fan of Andrew Jackson, Weed supported John Quincy Adams in 1824 and even won himself a seat in the New York State Assembly, where he met future bigwig William Seward.
It’s then when Weed latched on to the Anti-Masonic movement (largely due to Jackson being a Mason). The movement dissipated in the ’30s, but was eventually folded into the more mainstream Whig Party, which was bolstered by Weed’s Albany Evening Journal throughout the ’30s and ’40s. Between his journalistic and political endeavors, Weed made a lot of friends and a lot deals – so much so that his adversaries nicknamed him the “Lucifer of the Lobby” (a pretty killer nickname).
As the Whigs dissolved into the nascent Republican Party, so did Weed. When the 1860 election came around, Weed’s old buddy Seward was the frontrunner but may have been screwed by his relationship with Weed, who some Republican delegates that were former Democrats were in hate with. Of course, that scraggly, rangy lawyer from Springfield then swooped in, got the nod, became president, etc.
Being the pragmatic man he was, Weed jumped on the Abe Bandwagon and even served as a European envoy during the war – after which he returned to newspapering before slowly fading from the public view and dying in 1882.
Up next on CCWN, the querulous WILLIAM CLARKE QUANTRILL.
There’s so much Civil War in this guy it makes me want to cry. “Old Jube” (as Robert E. Lee would later come to call him) and his brawny beard fought early and often in the war between the states, but for reasons you wouldn’t suspect from an eventual Southern fire-breather. But before all that silly war stuff, Early graduated from West Point in 1837 ranked eighteenth (like his Union counterpart Rufus Saxton) in his class of fifty. After a brief stint in an artillery regiment, Early took up law for a while before returning to the military for the Mexican War.
But when the war drums started beating in his home state of Virginia, Early was an unlikely opponent of secession; that is until Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to fight the South—that pissed him off mightily. Soon Brigadier General Early was on a greatest hits tour of all the key battles: Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg. He even spearheaded a Lee-ordered run on Washington D.C., which was eventually swatted back by General Grant’s reinforcements. The rest of the war was downhill for Early: defeated by Sheridan, he fled to Mexico and then to Canada, where he wrote his “Lost Cause” tinged memoirs about the “war of independence.”
Lucky for Early, upon his arrival back in the States the Southern-sympathizing President Johnson issued him a pardon, which allowed him to resume his law career.
Up next on CCWN, the glory-bound GOUVERNEUR KEMBLE WARREN.
Saxton was, in the argot of youth, the bomb diggity. A Massachusetts native, his father was a transcendentalist, feminist, and abolitionist, which helped form Rufus’ anti-slavery sentiments from a young age. He graduated from West Point eighteenth in this class, then spent the rest of his antebellum days fighting the Seminoles in Florida, teaching at West Point, and surveying the Rocky Mountains for the Northern Pacific Railroad with none other than Mr. It’s-Everyone-Else’s-Fault, George McClellan.
And then, as the future Great Emancipator said, the war came. Saxton joined up with McClellan’s staff until partaking in what would become a pivotal moment in his career: leading a defense as brigadier general at Harper’s Ferry to push back Stonewall Jackson’s Shenandoah campaign. Saxton would receive the Medal of Honor for his work there, specifically for “distinguished gallantry and good conduct in the defense.”
But he didn’t stop there. Tasked with raising the first regiment of liberated slaves, Saxton put together the 1st South Carolina Colored Volunteers and helped organize the post-Emancipation recruitment of black soldiers. He continued along this line of work until the war ended, after which he gradually moved up the ranks before retiring to Massachusetts a colonel and all-around cool guy.
This guy’s tale helps puncture a few holes into the Abraham Lincoln Was An American Jesus Who Was Perfect In Every Way story that kids get fed in grade school. Milligan was a lawyer from Indiana (who had actually taken the bar exam with future Secretary of War Edwin Stanton), who held fervent anti-Union views that were pretty commonplace where he was living in northeastern Indiana. The problem was Milligan and some compadres took their views to another level by plotting in 1864 to steal weapons and free Confederate prisoners of war.
Now Lincoln, who by this time in the war had become quite adept at locking up rabble-rousers and outspoken critics under questionable Constitutional authority, took things a little too far with Milligan and his crew. The men were tried in a military tribunal and sentenced to death, which was a big Constitutional no-no for regular citizens so they appealed for their right to habeus corpus. Since Indiana wasn’t under attack, Milligan wasn’t involved with the military, and the civilian courts were up and running at the time, the Court swatted Lincoln back a little bit and released Milligan. He later sued the General who tried him in the tribunal for libel and false imprisonment, asking for $500,000 in damages. He got $5. Ouch.
But get this: the Supreme Court Justice who wrote the majority opinion of his case – David Davis – was a Lincoln appointee and close friend. He even chaired Abe’s 1860 campaign. Very ouch.
Bonus trivia: One of Lambdin’s lawyers in his first trial was future U.S. president James Garfield, and the lawyer who represented the General in the libel case was future U.S. president Benjamin Harrison.
Opinions abound about this guy, but I think the nickname Lincoln gave him describes him best: the Wily Agitator. An Ohio-born lawyer and Congressman with Southern ancestry, Vallandigham took it upon himself to lead a crusade against the anti-slavery Republican Party before and during the war and assumed leadership of the Copperheads, a coalition of pro-Confederate Northern Democrats who wanted to settle with the CSA and generally make Lincoln’s life miserable.
It’s one thing to lead the opposition; it’s quite another to be a dick about it. Vallandigham vocally hoped for Northern defeat and threw all kinds of hyperbolic vitriol at Lincoln and the North. He eventually pissed one too many people off and got himself arrested and jailed for sedition. But Lincoln of all people commuted his sentence to banishment to behind Confederate lines. Yet instead of staying below the Mason-Dixon, Vallandigham took to Canada, where he declared himself a candidate for Ohio governor. He might have won if not for Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in mid-1863. He kept up his opprobrium against Lincoln, but ol’ Abe decided not to arrest him again and instead let him shoot himself in the foot. It worked because the 1864 Democratic platform, which Vall helped write, failed spectacular in the election when Lincoln was decidedly reelected.
The strangest part of his story, though, was its end. Vallandigham ACTUALLY SHOT HIMSELF in 1871 during a trial while trying to prove his client’s innocence. The client walked free, but Clement did not. Karma’s a bitch.
Up next in CWWN, the law-breaking LAMBDIN P MILLIGAN.
I finally went on the most important pilgrimage a history buff must go on: to Springfield, IL, for the loads of Lincoln lore there.
First, I went with my dad to the Old State Capitol where Lincoln worked as a state legislator. Though mostly recreated, the building smacked of authenticity.
But the biggest and best place to be in Springfield is the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum. Packed to the brim with memorabilia, the museum had a traveling exhibit of campaign gear from presidential elections past. The exhibit also displayed one of the three cameras used in the Kennedy-Nixon debate of 1960.
Lincoln's hat.
Next, a recreation of Lincoln’s early life locales: his log cabin home, the general store he owned for a bit, and the law offices in Springfield. My favorite part, however, was the walk-through of his White House years, where we saw Mary Todd’s dresses, a tableau of the famed “team of rivals” in the Cabinet room debating the Emancipation Proclamation, and finally the assassination at Ford’s Theater. Outside of that section was more memorabilia: locks of Lincoln’s hair, personal letters, and one of his three trademarked stove pipe hats which had two worn spots on the brim from when he would tip his hat to passersby.
I repeat: I saw Lincoln’s stove pipe hat.
Later we visited the Lincoln home. We walked where the man walked and touched the same banister. I know I’m nearing idol-worship here, but I appreciate the man more having been through his life a little bit. We also visited the Lincoln tomb, which was very solemn and reverant experience.
I’ve started reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals. I’ve been meaning to get to it for a while, but now I actually have some motivation to delve further into the man’s life, having now been through it (albeit superficially).
With Lincoln’s 200th birthday coming up in February 2009, I’d highly recommend checking out Springfield, if only for a day. Make sure to get to the museum and the Lincoln home. They far exceed the worth of the drive.
Part of the 
