This year is the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. Some time after the battle President Lincoln traveled to Gettysburg to deliver the Gettysburg Address, than which none of his speeches is more famous. He traveled by train.
I couldn’t find a picture of Lincoln and the train at Gettysburg. The closest I could get is one of Lincoln at Hanover Junction. The President is the person in the tall hat standing at the edge of a white window. Here is a link to the photograph: http://crow_t_robot.rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=2398028
This year there will be two re-enactments of the Gettysburg Battle, one the last weekend of June and the next the following weekend. Information about them is easily available on Google. However, no one will be arriving by train.
I followed the link to the photo of Abe Lincoln at Hanover Junction. I’ve seen the picture before, and like most photos of Lincoln that are fuzzy and a bit indistinct there’s some controversy as to whether it’s really the Man himself.
But you know, whoever it is is tall enough, looks like he’s got a beard, has the right stance and stovepipe hat, and sometimes you just gotta believe!
I’ve seen this picture before too but I never knew some people question whether or not it is Abe Lincoln. As the 150th anniversary of Gettysburg approaches it seems appropriate.
One think that interests me is how much at a loss Lincoln was when he thought of secession. When he left Springfield to become President he gave a farewell speech at. the railroad station. He said he now faced problems more difficult than George Washington faced during the Revolution and he didn’t know what to do. And he asked his neighbors to pray for him, that the Lord would guide when when he tried to deal with the crisis.
But he did understand the importance of railroads to the war effort. He immediately set about putting good people in charge of organizing them and giving those people the support they needed. This is one area where he was far more successful than the Confederates. Jefferson Davis did not recognize the importance of of railroads to the war effort until very late in the conflict, far too late to catch up with the north.
Lincoln also recognized the importance of a rail connection to the Pacific although many others did also. But he was the person who signed the Pacific Railroad Acts and our earliest cross country railroads could not have been built during the 1860’s without that government support.
Let’s see, Lincoln’s thoughts on secession. It’s been my understanding that Lincoln though of the relationship of states to the country as a whole as analagous to countys within a state. It was unrealistic to think a county could secede from a state, therefore it was equally unrealistic to think a state could secede from the Union.
However, if Lincoln had his doubts about this I can well understand them. I’ve read the pro-secession arguments of the time, and they sound right, and I’ve also read the anti-secession arguments and THEY sound right!
My own thoughts paralell General Grant’s, by the way. Grant believed that if any states had the right to secede it was the original thirteen signatories to the Constitution. All the states that came after them were constructs of the Federal government out of US territorys and as such were “children” of the Union to begin with, and as such didn’t have the right to secede.
The Confederate States might have sued to secede. Roger Taney was still the Chief Justice. Had the Supreme Court agreed there would be no question but that they had the right to secede.
However, they chose a political path of simply doing it. Because of that the question of their legal right was never asked and never answered. Abe Lincoln did advance arguments against that right but they are just that, arguments, and other people had other arguments.
However, in his First Inaugural Address Lincoln pointed out he did have a legal obligation to uphold the Constitution. To Lincoln this meant upholding it in every state. For example, when he denied the right of habeas corpus to Clement Vallendigham and other Copperheads people argued that was unconstitutional. But Lincoln responded “Shall every law be broken in order that this one may be enforced?” And when Roger Taney sent his servant with a memo demanding that the people held be charged and appear in court Lincoln told the servant that Roger Taney should send “his soldiers” to get the prisoners.
No doubt it was, as you say, “a quandry.” But if the Confederates had the right to seek a political solution to that quandry it seems to me that the Union had the same right to seek a political solution.
I think the Confederate leaders, who were familiar with most o the Union Leaders in the government, expected that they would be allowed to leave the Union. However, they did not really consider Abe Lincoln’s views on the matter. If you read his First Inaugural Address it sounds like he is begging them not to go. They mistook those statements for weakness and paid a high price for that mistake.
You know, the Confederate states may very well have gotten away with secession. There certainly wasn’t any desire to force them back into the Union at bayonet point. But then there was one thing…
They fired on Fort Sumter.
At once, what was an act of questionable constitutionality became an open act of rebellion. Just a dumb, dumb, DUMB thing to do.
Certainly no self-respecting nation in the 19th Century wanted foreign troops on their soil, but the Confederates should have waited for the U.S. Army to evacuate Fort Sumter, and Fort Pickens in Florida for that matter, even if it took ten years. Dumb, dumb, dumb,
Being a Civil War buff myself, I have been to Gettysburg more times then I can count. The train station renovation was top notch. On my last two trips (this past March and this past May), I have been lucky enough to photograph a CSX mixed freight train parked under the famed “railroad cut” that was unfinished during the battle and became a death trap from many Confederates during the first days battle on July 1st. Kind of gives you a spooky feeling seeing this modern day locomotive idling in a spot where so many lost their lives.
The spookiest Civil War site I’ve visited is the stone wall at the base of Maryes Heights in Fredericksburg. I get the wierdest vibe from the place every time I go there. I’ve never gotten that “vibe” from any other battle site I’ve visited, either Civil War or Revolutionary War.
I get a good “vibe” from Washington’s Headquarters, the Potts House, in Valley Forge. Strange. I’ve been to Valley Forge at least 15 times and it’s always there.
Firelock76, I deeply appreciate the point you raised (Ft. Sumpter), and I wish I had thought of it in conversations that went on for years with dear Southern friends and relatives.
The moderator may block this, but an analogy is that the British started Israel’s war of Independence when they disabled the Exodus “illegal” immigrant ship and unnecessarily killed the (American) captain!
Well, Wayne, Abe Lincoln certainly saw it as an act of rebellion against the legal government. Jefferson Davis disagreed. And Lincoln seemed not to know what to do. He was inaugurated March 4 and in early April had done nothing.
President Davis had tried to negotiate a peaceful settlement. He sent Commissioners to Washington. Early on, before Lincoln got to Washington, the contacted William Seward who would become Secretary of State. Seward wanted to negotiate a peace but knew he needed Lincoln’s agreement. He encouraged them to wait but did not actually negotiate. They waited and waited and waited. Finally Seward sent Lincoln a memo proposing peace. Lincoln rejected the whole idea and Seward knew he would have to stop communications with the Commissioners. They then tried to approach Lincoln directly. They went to the Whitehouse and knocked on the door. A servant admitted them to an ante room and announced them to Lincoln. Lincoln wrote a note saying Confederate leaders were nothing more than criminals and should stop their illegal activity and return to the Union. He gate the note to his servant to give to the Commissioners. Jefferson Davis was unhappy with the note; he knew he needed to do something to show he could not be so easily dismissed.
For Davis the Federal Government was simply the agent of the states. He used an analogy to describe it. A father may buy his son a coat. The son puts on and wears that coat but the father’s authority is still intact. Wearing the coat does not give the son the father’s authority. And just as the father has every right to take back the coat to to have the states the right
Hi John! Certainly only Congress has the right to declare war, but remember that means a war against a foreign power, it doesn’t preclude a president from taking any steps he has to to put down a domestic insurrection. At that point the only thing Congress has to do is pay the bills.
The Confederates may have considered themselves an independant power but no-one else did, neither Britain or France or Spain or Russia and certainly not Abe Lincoln. I’ve never read anything anywhere that said Lincoln wanted to use force to return the seceded states, he didn’t have a mandate to do so anyway. But that firing on Fort Sumter changed everything.
I suppose a good analogy is the US in the 1930’s. Americans saw the newsreels of what the Japanese were doing in China, it was awful, we didn’t like it, but we weren’t going to go to war over it.
And then came Pearl Harbor. THAT miscalulation made the Confederates look like beginners!
Yes, it sure did Wayne. The following July 4, 1861 Lincoln addressed the Congress explaining why he did whad he had done. And he asked for and got $4 million to begin to restore the Union. I think by this time he was willing to do what ever it took to maintain the Union.
Two years later, after the battle of Gettysburg, he deeply regreted that General Meade didn’t pursue the Army of Northern Virginia and destroy it. Because of that the war would draw out for almost 2 more years.
Lincoln wrote a letter to Meade after Gettysburg, first congratulating him on the victory, but then slowly the tone of the letter changes to irritation and then anger that Meade didn’t pursue Lee and finish him off.
Lincoln never sent the letter, at least not the angry part. Most Civil War students (myself included) don’t blame Meade for not going for the kill. The reasons? Well, Meades army was almost as badly torn up by the battle as Lees was. A bit disorganized too. Add the fact that Meade had only been in command for about a week and possibly figured he should quit while he was ahead. And of course Meade knew what his casualties had been but could only guess at Lees.
Meade finally got the army organized and in pursuit of Lee but it was too late, Lee had reached the Potomac and was crossing into Virginia by the time Meade caught up with his rear guard, who still put up a pretty stiff fight.
Like I say, I can’t blame Meade too much. I suppose when he learned the facts Lincoln really couldn’t blame him either.
I’m sure you are correct, Wayne. Gettysburg was more than Pickett’s charge and the battle had been hard on the Union too.
But I have to add that had the war ended in 1863 or even early 1864 fewer lives would have been lost and less property would have been destroyed. From a railroad perspective, one of the things General Sherman destroyed when he marched east from Vicksburg was all of the railroads in his path. Confederate railroads were worn out but intact. In 1860 there had been a through line from Charleston and Savannah through Atlanta and on to Memphis on the Mississippi River. Very little of it was left after Sherman. And that is only a small part of the loss of productivity to the south and well as the loss of lives to both north and south.