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“THE MONTH OF AUGUST does not open cheerfully,” Noah Brooks reported. The steady progression of unfavorable events—the shocking slaughter at Petersburg, the raid on Washington, and the failure to capture Jubal Early’s troops—had created a mood of widespread despondency throughout the North. In addition, the president’s mid-July call for five hundred thousand additional volunteers had disturbed many Republicans, who feared negative repercussions on the fall elections. Lincoln himself acknowledged the “dissatisfaction” with his new recruiting effort but emphasized that “the men were needed, and must be had, and that should he fall in consequence, he would at least have the satisfaction of going down with the colors flying.”

Meanwhile, dispatches from Grant revealed a continuing stalemate in the siege against Petersburg. An ingenious attempt by a regiment of former coal miners to mine under the Confederate earthworks and blow a hole in the enemy lines had resulted in a spectacular tragedy instead. In the confusion after the explosion, Union soldiers advanced into the 32-foot-deep crater itself, rather than circle around it, and had become trapped. “Piled on top of each other like frightened sheep,” they were easy targets for slaughter. By day’s end, Grant had lost nearly four thousand men. “It was the saddest affair I have witnessed in the war,” Grant wired Halleck. “Such opportunity for carrying fortifications I have never seen and do not expect again to have.”

The appalling event left Gideon Welles in a depressed state, “less however from the result, bad as it is, than from an awakening apprehension that Grant is not equal to the position assigned him…. A blight and sadness comes over me like a dark shadow when I dwell on the subject, a melancholy feeling of the past, a foreboding of the future.” Edward Bates shared his colleague’s despair. In his diary he admitted feeling heartsick when he contemplated “the obstinate errors and persistent blunders of certain of our generals.”

Unlike Welles or Bates, Lincoln refused to let the incident shake his faith in Grant. The day after the Battle of the Crater, he met with Grant at Fort Monroe, where the two men looked resolutely toward the future. Grant had received intelligence that the hard-riding Early had once again crossed the Potomac, spreading fear and devastation in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. He dispatched General Philip Sheridan, one of his best commanders, to the Shenandoah Valley with instructions to find Early “and follow him to the death. Wherever the enemy goes let our troops go also.” Lincoln, as determined as Grant to take the battle directly to the enemy without respite, replied: “This, I think, is exactly right.”

A few days later, Commissioner French enjoyed “a long and very pleasant talk” with Lincoln. “He said we must be patient, all would come out right—that he did not expect Sherman to take Atlanta in a day, nor that Grant could walk right into Richmond,—but that we should have them both in time.” Lincoln’s confidence was not now shared by the country. The ongoing disasters had combined to create “much wretchedness and great humiliation in the land,” a doleful Welles noted. “The People are wild for Peace,” Thurlow Weed cautioned Seward.

Even before this train of events, Horace Greeley had taken it upon himself to counsel Lincoln. Greeley had received word that “two Ambassadors” representing Jefferson Davis had come to Niagara Falls in Canada “with full & complete powers for a peace.” Urging the president to meet with them immediately, he reminded Lincoln that “our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying country also longs for peace—shudders at the prospect of fresh conscriptions, of further wholesale devastations, and of new rivers of human blood. And a wide-spread conviction that the Government…[is] not anxious for Peace, and do not improve proffered opportunities to achieve it, is doing great harm.”

Though fairly certain that the so-called “ambassadors” had not been authorized by Jefferson Davis,