Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [345]
After inconclusive fighting on the first day, a dispatch from Meade on Thursday night, July 2, reported that “after one of the severest contests of the war,” the rebels had been “repulsed at all points.” Still, given recent reversals and the protracted uncertainty in the present, everyone held their breath. As of 9 p.m. the following night, the New York Times reported, “no reliable advices have been received here from the Pennsylvania battlefield. It is generally felt that this is the crisis of the war. Intense anxiety prevails.” At midnight, a messenger handed Welles a telegram from a Connecticut editor named Byington, who had left the battlefield a few hours earlier and reported that “everything looked hopeful.” Welles assured Lincoln that Byington was “reliable,” but the hours of uncertainty continued until shortly after dawn, July 4, when a telegram from Meade reported that the battle had been successfully concluded. The rebels were withdrawing after severe losses. Casualties were later calculated at 28,000, nearly a third of Lee’s army.
General Abner Doubleday described the tenacious fighting, which cost 23,000 Union lives, “as being the most desperate which ever took place in the world.” He told a reporter that “nothing can picture the horrors of the battlefield around the ruined city of Gettysburg. Each house, church, hovel, and barn is filled with the wounded of both armies. The ground is covered with the dead.”
On the morning of the Fourth of July, Lincoln issued a celebratory press release that was carried by telegram across the country. For young Fanny Seward, waiting anxiously in Auburn, the day had started as “the gloomiest Fourth” she had ever known. “No public demonstration here—No ringing of bells.” Everything changed in the late afternoon when the “extra” arrived, carrying the tidings of victory. Fireworks were set off to glorify simultaneously the country’s independence and the long-awaited victory.
In New York City, George Templeton Strong exulted in the colorful newspaper accounts of Lee’s retreat. “The results of this victory are priceless,” he wrote. “Government is strengthened four-fold at home and abroad. Gold one hundred and thirty-eight today, and government securities rising. Copperheads are palsied and dumb for the moment at least.”
Triumphant news from Vicksburg followed on the heels of victory at Gettysburg. Grant’s forty-six-day siege had finally forced Pemberton to surrender his starving troops. Welles had received the first tiding that Vicksburg had surrendered to Grant in a dispatch from Admiral David Porter. The bespectacled, “slightly fossilized” Welles hurried to the White House, dispatch in hand. Reaching the room where Lincoln was talking with Chase and several others, Welles reportedly “executed a double shuffle and threw up his hat by way of showing that he was the bearer of glad tidings.” Lincoln affirmed that “he never before nor afterward saw Mr. Welles so thoroughly excited as he was then.”
The elated president “caught my hand,” recorded Welles, “and throwing his arm around me, exclaimed: ‘what can we do for the Secretary of the Navy for this glorious intelligence—He is always giving us good news. I cannot, in words, tell you my joy over this result. It is great, Mr. Welles, it is great!’” With the fall of Vicksburg, as Linclon later said, “The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea.”
Dana described the surrender in a telegram to Stanton the next day. “The rebel troops marched out and stacked arms in front of their works while Genl. Pemberton appeared for a moment with his staff upon the parapet of the central post…. No troops remain outside—everything quiet here. Grant entered the city at 11 o’clock and was rec’d by Pemberton,” whom he treated with great “courtesy & dignity.” Dana estimated the number of prisoners, for whom rations were being distributed, to be about thirty thousand.
Lincoln expressed