Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [337]
Noah Brooks was with Lincoln when the news came. “I shall never forget that picture of despair,” he later wrote. “Had a thunderbolt fallen upon the President he could not have been more overwhelmed.” His beloved army, so healthy and spirited weeks earlier, had been “driven back, torn and bleeding, to our starting point, where the heart-sickening delay, the long and tedious work of reorganizing a decimated and demoralized army would again commence.” Observing the president’s “ashen” face, Brooks “vaguely took in the thought” that his complexion “almost exactly” matched the French gray wallpaper in the room. “Clasping his hands behind his back, he walked up and down the room, saying, ‘My God! my God! What will the country say! What will the country say!’”
The news traveled fast. The president informed Senator Sumner, who rushed to tell Welles. “Lost, lost, all is lost!” Sumner exclaimed, lifting both hands as he entered the navy secretary’s office. Welles went to the War Department, where Seward was with Stanton. “I asked Stanton if he knew where Hooker was. He answered curtly, No. I looked at him sharply, and I have no doubt with some incredulity, for he, after a moment’s pause, said he is on this side of the river, but I know not where.” As the afternoon wore on and endless casualty lists began streaming in, Stanton could no longer hide his despair. “This is the darkest day of the war,” he lamented. At the Willard Hotel, Brooks observed, secessionists suddenly “sprang to new life and animation and with smiling faces and ill-suppressed joy” moved openly through the gloomy crowds.
Within the hour of receiving the news, Lincoln ordered a carriage to drive him to the Navy Yard. Accompanied by General Halleck, he boarded a steamer bound for Hooker’s headquarters, a grim counterpoint to his joyous April visit. Once again, Lincoln found some redemption in the resolute determination of his troops. “All accounts agree,” one reporter wrote from army headquarters, “that the troops on the Rappahannock came out of their late bloody fight game to the backbone.” Though “fresh from all the horrors of the battlefield, with ranks decimated, and almost exhausted with exposure and fatigue,” they remained “undaunted and erect, composed and ready to turn on the instant and follow their leaders back into the fray.”
Moreover, while the Confederates had lost 4,000 fewer men, their casualty list of 13,000 represented a larger percentage of their total forces. In addition, they had lost one of their greatest generals: Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. Returning from a reconnaissance mission, Jackson had been mistaken for an enemy and was fired upon by some of his own men. His left arm was amputated in a nearby field hospital, but he died of pneumonia eight days later. The South went into mourning. “Since the death of Washington,” the Richmond Whig proclaimed, “no similar event has so profoundly and sorrowfully impressed the people of Virginia as the death of Jackson.”
Lincoln remained at army headquarters for only a few hours. Before leaving, he handed Hooker a letter expressing confidence in the continuing campaign. “If possible,” the president wrote, “I would be very glad of another movement early enough to give us some benefit from the fact of the enemies communications being broken, but neither for this reason or any other, do I wish anything done in desperation or rashness.” Lincoln made it clear that he stood ready to assist Hooker in the development of a new plan of action. As he had done so many times before, Lincoln withstood the storm of defeat by replacing anguish over an unchangeable past with hope in an uncharted future.
CHAPTER 20
“THE TYCOON IS IN FINE WHACK”
NO SOONER HAD LINCOLN returned