I Still Am Not Sure

I can’t answer the question, but suggest the H-Net discussion list “H-CivWar” might be another good place to fish for expertise. Their web face is here: http://www.h-net.org/~civwar/ Good luck on your quest!

I know several people who absolutely believe Lincoln ordered the killing of Davis and burning of Richmond without any proof at all. I always suspected it had more to do with their view of Lincoln (and by extension their view of government) than in any evidence that existed.
Personnally I find it hard to picture Kilpatrick calmly unraveling a plan to Lincoln that he will ride to Richmond, free all the Union Prisoners, hunt down and kill the Confederate President and Cabinet, and burn Richmond for good measure before riding in triumph back to Washington at which point we’re supposed to think Lincoln says “great idea!”.
It doesn’t sound like something Lincoln would do. Whatever you think about Lincoln, he was much smarter than that.

Although I have known the outlines of the Dahlgreen story for years, it is only recently that I have delved into, reading whatever I can, including the EIGHT HOURS BEFORE RICHMOND. Some of Dahlgren’s actions seem so contradictory–He stops at the home of Confederate Sec. of War James Seddon who, of course, was in Richmond and partakes of wine with his wife who remembers Dahlgren as a small child. Such a gentle, pleasant sitting in the parlor picture we have before us. Remarkably, if we accept the Dahlgren papers as authentic and not concocted by the Confederate government (nothing thus far convinces me to view them as fakes) he may soon have to capture or kill her husband if all goes according to plan.

I’m sorry, but I cannot imagine how the Lincoln administration – including the President – could NOT have known, and therefore, approved of the plan. To believe otherwise is to also believe that the Union military acted on its own in matters far removed from simple battlefield strategy. The formation of a plan to murder the civilian authorities of an enemy nation was, frankly, unheard of in so-called ‘civilized’ warfare and one must remember the the Union army produced the Lieber Code – G.O. 100 – which went to great pains to determine what was and what was NOT acceptable behavior in wartime.

Regarding G.O. 100, and going back to my own field of interest Confederate partisan commander John S. Mosby, there was much controversy as to whether Mosby and his command would or would not be sanctioned by that Code. Mr. Wittenberg has been kind enough when asked to opine to say that he believes that the 43rd and its commander would have been considered legitimate partisan troops under G.O. 100 and I’m more than willing to believe him. Nonetheless, obviously the forces and the civilian government of the Union at that time did believe that there were limitations to what could legitimately be done in war – and the murder of the civilian members of an enemy government does not seem to fall into that category. Yet, that is exactly what was planned in the Kirkpatrick-Dahlgren raid and I cannot imagine how anyone can believe – especially as the raid was given support by superior military commanders – that the matter was nothing more than the brainchild of Kirkpatrick and still less of the younger and less experienced Ullrich Dahlgren!

Furthermore, as Dahlgren was a frequent visitor to the White House as has been noted, he certainly could not have so greatly mistaken his host’s thoughts about such a matter so as to perform acts that would have been morally repulsive to the President! That might be true of someone who only knew Lincoln by reputation and therefore might believe that he would welcome the ‘beheading of the secessionist beast’, so to speak. However, apparently Dahlgren had a much more intimate knowledge of Lincoln and that fact leads one to believe that the President would not have been all that averse to the plan PROVIDED it was successful. If it failed – as it did – then all that had to be done was to deny any involvement and swear that the documents were Confederate forgeries designed to put the United States government in disrepute both at home and abroad. Indeed, that is EXACTLY what was purported by federal authorities!

As I posited earlier, to even propose that the Administration – never mind the President – had no part in and was, in fact, unaware of the plot, is to strain credibility. It would have meant that the Union military was carrying on the war not only absent but in fact CONTRARY to the President’s cleary understood wishes. True, there were commanders who did not act as Lincoln would have wished them, but that was on the battlefield and did not involve such far reaching strategies as the murder of the enemy’s civilian government.

V. Protopapas

But again, you are not taking into consideration DAHLGREN’s point of view. Would he – a young and rather inexperienced man wanting glory (nothing wrong there) and to be a ‘hero’ to both his father and those (like Lincoln) whom his father held in esteem – have been willing to ‘go off’ with Stanton and do something diametric to Lincoln’s moral principles? Even if the war had been ‘won’ by such a tactic, might not Lincoln have been horrified by its use and therefore no ‘glory’ been attached to the men who brought it about? I’m sure that old Abe would have accepted the end of the war, but that didn’t mean that he would embrace and glorify those who brought it about by dishonorable means!

Nor can we use the argument that the matter could have been presented as something happening inthe ‘general mayhem and anarchy’! That might have been great for the public via the press, but Lincoln would have KNOWN better. One can hardly imagine Dahlgren – never mind Kirkpatrick – entertaining a vow of silence about the matter if it resulted in an end to the war! So if we are to believe that Lincoln stood above (or outside) the entire affair, we must be willing to believe that Dahlgren would have willingly acted contrary to the very principles for which his father and his father’s hero – Lincoln – stood. I find that VERY hard to believe unless the young man was as malignant and many in the South believed him to be!

Nor is it wise to continue to create about Lincoln a sort of ‘hagiography’ that seeks to hide his less pleasant and noble characteristics. Lincoln, like every other man, had his weaknesses. He was ambitious and, as I previously noted, accepted and encouraged the type of ‘total warfare’ that Sherman and Sheridan brought to Georgia and the Shenandoah – hardly ‘civilized’ or worthy of commendation by ANY stretch of the imagination. After the war, John Mosby – who had embrace the Union and an end to all hostility – and suffered for his outspoken support of Grant and later Hayes by being driven from his home in Virginia – stated that Sheridan had waged a ‘barbaric war’ for he not only destroyed foodstuffs but the tools with which to grow food even though the war was in its last days. Sheridan, according to Mosby, burned mills for which there was no flour assuring starvation for non-combatants long after the war was over. Mosby said that according to the way Sheridan waged war, it was permissable to kill women as they could have become the mothers of soldiers and children as they could grow up to BE soldiers. That was the type of war Sheridan waged and it was blessed by both Grant AND Lincoln.

Most of all, we must keep in mind that Lincoln was very much worried about the chances for his re-election and, I believe he was willing to do just about anything to insure same for the sake of the restoration of the Union (if you want to put a better ‘face’ on the matter). The destruction of the Confederate government would have been seen as a Union ‘coup’ and would have insured the President’s re-election. Maybe he was willing to let Stanton ‘go it alone’ for the sake of appearances, but I cannot imagine that Stanton could have taken with him the entire Union military establishment or at least that critical part of it that authorized and supported the Dahlgren-Kirpatrick raid.

V. P.

Several things here: firstly, Mosby is an especially interesting commentator since his ‘brand’ of warfare was itself considered ‘beyond the pale’ (although he did conform to the Lieber Code for partisan warfare). Mosby was accused by Sheridan and Grant of being a thief and an outlaw, a ‘barbarian’ who didn’t ‘abide by the rules’. Indeed, the latter ordered him and his men hanged without trial and that sentence remained for Mosby even after the Custer matter ended the indiscriminate hanging of his men.

Northern newspapers accounts of Mosby tell of him butchering prisoners by hanging, burning, shooting and chopping them up with his ‘huge saber’. Of course, they also made him over 6 foot tall, dark and hairy. The truth is that Mosby was about 5′ 1″ or 2″ tall and never weighed any more than 128 pounds at his ‘fighting best’. He also had dark blonde or ‘sandy’ hair and aside from a short period in late 1862, early 1863 and then at the end of the war was clean shaven, so one can see that the papers were not all that accurate!

Furthermore, Mosby’s treatment of his prisoners was such that many of his best friends after the war were Union officers whom he had captured and the retaliation he felt obligated to perform on men from Custer and Powell’s commands after the hanging and shooting of his men at Front Royal was so distasteful to him that many years later when the matter was raised, he became incensed and said that he certain did NOT ‘enjoy’ doing it anymore than a man would ‘enjoy’ whipping a child when that became necessary. Mosby had three men hanged and three shot – the fourth had been allowed to escape – but all three of those shot lived . The eye-witness accounts of the matter point out that none of Mosby’s men wanted to take part in the executions and Mosby himself – unlike Custer who stayed to watch – went in the opposite direction from the place where the men were to be left as an example of what would happen if the hangings continued. Mosby’s letter to Sheridan requested an end to such barbarism and, in fact, no more of his men were hanged although doubtless, had he fallen into Sheridan’s or Grant’s hands, his fate would have been sealed.

On the other hand, Sheridan’s men and others who were found in the Valley burning homes were executed out of hand; they were given no quarter as they were not considered soldiers, but renegades deserving of death. In this matter, Mosby was quite without regret as he considered war on ANY civilian on EITHER side of the conflict to be barbaric. Mosby protected all of the civilians in ‘his’ Confederacy (as it was called) no matter which side and there was no surer way for one of his men to be summarily returned to the regular army (or summarily shot) than to do something to a civilian. One young man as a ‘joke’ turned over the milk pails of a Quaker (Unionist) farmer and Mosby sent him packing. He said he was ‘morally unfit’ to serve with his command.

At the second meeting between Mosby and Union officers after Appomattox, he was told that if he did not surrender his command AND himself (he was denied the parole offered to all other Confederate officers and so his fate was very uncertain) the Union army would reduce ‘Mosby’s Confederacy’ to ashes. The Gray Ghost was stunned! He had arranged for a cease fire and an end to hostilities until he could determine what to do as he had no experience in such matters, so the partisans were not attacking Union forces and he had already told General Chapman that he was permitting those who wished to in his command to surrender and seek parole. Upon hearing this dire threat, all that the astonished Mosby could say was that he could ‘not prevent’ the action and immediately after, disbanded the 43rd Battalion and went into hiding for some months until he was eventually able to secure a parole. But the threat to destroy what were certainly innocent civilians (Mosby’s men having removed themselves to the Blue Ridge Mountains and the war being for all intents and purposes over) in order to force Mosby’s surrender was just another example of the type of ‘total war’ that seriously removed any ‘moral high ground’ from the Union cause.

As for Lincoln, interestingly enough, Judge Andrew Napolitano, a civil liberties jurist, is quite adamant that Lincoln was wrong to prosecute the war. He said that the President should have permitted secession because the well known internecine fighting which took place among the southern states even BEFORE secession would soon have brought all or most of them back into the Union for economic reasons if for no other. Indeed, Virginia NEVER would have seceded had not the federal government made it clear that it intended to send troops across that state to attack the Carolinas. Napolitano said – and I wholeheartedly agree – that it was this threat of assault on these none-too- confederated states that actually UNIFIED them and caused them to fight for some four bloody years until they were overcome by the overwhelming strength and wealth of their foe. However, that did not END the conflict at least in men’s hearts which – as you noted among your friends – is still quite active more than a century and a half later!

As for bombing: someone pointed out that there was a considerable number of Germans who were against Hitler as his methods became known. These people might have supported the allies – until the bombing of Dresden which was a moral atrocity. The point then was, as long as NO side had any moral superiority, heck, why not fight for the Fatherland? Such attacks often stiffen resistance and lengthen conflicts.

In the Mexican War, General Scott did not permit his men to rob and oppress the locals. Indeed, he often fed them and gave them medical assistance. So kindly did he treat the indigenous population, that there was very little guerrilla activity against American troops because the local Mexican people saw them in a positive light even though they were fighting against Mexico. Had Scott ill treated the locals, his supply lines and communications would have received the same attentions from guerrillas that happened to the Army of the Potomac in Northern Virginia from the likes of Mosby, McNeill and White.

V. P.

Oh, and by the way, I was born and brought up in New York City and adjacent Long Island where I still live, so I have no sectionalist leanings that influence my point of view. Just a note.

Sorry, my fault.

But actually, my post wasn’t about Mosby per se, but about THE TYPE OF WARFARE being waged as the war went on. I used Mosby‘s example because I know the story. To me, what was being done – doubtless in this case with Lincoln’s approval – was such that I find it hard that anyone would have a problem believing that Lincoln would have approved of the plan being considered here. It is not direct evidence, surely, but it is corroborating evidence that the older concepts of the waging of war -especially against civilians – as I presented in Scott’s behavior towards civilians in Mexico, had long since gone by the boards.

Furthermore, I don’t believe that any truly objective conclusion can be drawn if Lincoln is ‘elevated’ to the status of martyr for the Republic. He must be seen and viewed as a human being, an ambitious politician in the context of his life at the time, not a civil icon and secular saint.

I believe also that the ‘Mosby stories’ clearly demonstrate that there was a schizophrenic understanding of the nature of warfare in the North. The ‘depredations’ of Confederate ‘guerrillas’ like Mosby were condemned while the same types of action (and worse) by both Northern guerrillas (and, yes, they had some) and regular troops were considered perfectly acceptable methods of winning the war. This attitude certainly must bear on any attempts to determine if the military and civilian leadership of the time would have not only accepted but supported an attempt to murder the Confederate government and burn its capitol.

The facts we DO know are simply this: there WAS a plan and those in charge were given assistance by the military in the attempt to carry it out. We also know that the Union military used tactics that have come to be known as the waging of ‘total’ war – of which this plan can be certainly considered a reasonable part. We know that Lincoln expressed acceptance of the damage being inflicted on Southern civilians and, like Sherman, told Southerners that what was happening to them was the result of their pride and stubborn refusal to surrender and submit. We know that Lincoln was a very real participant in the planning and execution of the war. We know that Ulrich Dahlgren was a frequent visitor to the White House and that his father was intimate with the President – facts which must lead us to believe that the young man knew well enough what Lincoln would – and would not – accept in the way of tactics and strategy.

Given the above, I don’t see how anyone can make a case for Lincoln’s ignorance and/or lack of involvement in the matter other than for reasons of protecting the man’s ‘legend’.

V. P.

John,

Actually, Prof. David Long of East Carolina University asked me to help him lead one in the fall, but I have a wedding to go to that weekend and had to decline.

I do think that it would it would make for a great program.

Eric

I hesitate to engage in a discussion which unavoidably involves one person’s hardened opinion of Lincoln against another’s. I concede completely that in the lack of any proof we will never know one way or another, and on that blank canvas anyone can paint anything they want.

However, my reading of human nature is that people tend to act in the same patterns over and over, and I simply see no pattern in Lincoln’s behavior which would support such a wild, risky, and blood-thirsty scheme as that of Dalgren’s. Policy toward civiliams–if that is how to term the actions of hundreds of different commanders in thousands of places in enemy territory–is an entirely different matter from the authorized capture and murder of a rebellious territory’s leaders. And let’s turn it around. I have been utterly unconvinced by the efforts of many to tie Jefferson Davis and the Confederate government to Lincoln’s assassination and for the same reason: I see nothing in Davis’ behavior that would be consistent with such a scheme. I am also skeptical for a more general reason. My reading of history is that conspiracies are hard to keep secret forever, and to believe that a conspiracy existed without any hard collaborating evidence is to disregard the very human motivation of, well, disclosing one’s secret knowledge.

As for V.P.’s citing of Lincoln’s Constitutional excesses–and there were many–no one seems to recall that the Confederate government did exactly the same thing to its people, and often did it sooner and in more drastic ways. And again, such policies have a whole different moral character than that authorized capture and murder of a rebellious territory’s leaders.

Another factor to be considered is how astute a politician Lincoln was. Time and again he navigated between a complex set of conflicting political viewpoints and kept together a coalition that would have broken down quickly under a less talented leader. He was understandably cautious and the opposite of rash, and Dalgren’s scheme was nothing if not that.

Let’s look at a couple of specifics concerning Lincoln’s behavior. Eric mentions the story of Lincoln suggesting that he hoped that Davis would just disappear (i.e., emigrate) after he fled Richmond. He realized that making Davis a martyr by imprisoning or killing him would do little to further his view of reconstruction. If memory serves, that story comes from Grant’s Memoirs and involves Lincoln telling a tale about a preacher who did not drink but who stated that he would not mind if some whiskey was added to his lemonade “unbeknownst to him.” Such a parable rings true, as it just the sort of way Lincoln made his points as documented by hundreds of those who heard him. Grant saw in that story, which Lincoln during his visit to Petersburg in April 1865, clear direction that he was not to devote undue resources to running down Jeff Davis and capturing him. Consider, too, the case of Clement Vallandingham, the prominent northern Copperhead. Ambrose Burnside, in his usual dunderheaded sort of way, arrested him for treason while he was in command of the Department of the Ohio. Lincoln had him quietly taken to the picket line in Tennessee and sent to the south, a gentle and politically adept response.

If I am relatively confident about Lincoln’s behavior, I am not so about Stanton. In early 1864 he was going through a bad stretch. Benjamin Butler had been sounded out about taking his job because Lincoln needed Butler’s support in the upcoming election. (The vice presidency was also mentioned.) He was in the midst of weird purging of leadership at all levels, pushing Meade to shed corps commanders, interfering with—of all things to be paying attention to—the management of West Point, conspiring with the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War to undermine Meade and the top leaders of the Army of the Potomac. Still, there is a difference between these internal political maneuvers and approving Dalgren’s plan. Picking up again on patterns of behavior, I am unable to recall any mention of Stanton considering any scheme as remotely wild as Dalgren’s. But he was capable of erratic and absurdly aggressive behavior, and it seems much more plausible that he would have given at least implicit approval to the plan and that he would not have told Lincoln who, he would suspect, would have been appalled. It also seems impossible to me that Meade or anyone in the high command of the Army of the Potomac knew. They would have been completely horrified by such behavior and would have protested. Though they were under siege by the Joint Committee’s shenanigans that did not stop their protests about supporting Butler’s ridiculous scheme to take Richmond that required a demonstration from them (the disaster of Morton’s Ford was the result).

So I guess, Eric, that I come down on your view of Dalgren as secretive, vainglorious Cowboy. This whole adventure evinces nothing so much as testosterone-poisoned actions of man in his twenties.

Dahlgren certainly did not act alone, and I did not mean to imply that he did. Obviously he had help, and clearly the authority to select 500 of the best cavalrymen came from Washington and not from the high command of the Army of the Potomac. I simply find it hard to believe that an order to kill Davis and his cabinet plus burn Richmond came from Lincoln. The actual Dahlgren papers emphasize that a primary purpose of the raid was to free US prisioners on Belle Isle, and that purpose alone would have probably given him the authority to put the expedition together. Meade’s investigation did not find any evidence of specific orders from above (the orders were all in Dahlgren’s handwriting, with nothing to suggest who higher up the command chain might have formulated them). Meade, however, confided to his wife that “Kilpatrick’s reputation, and collateral evidence in my possession, rather go against” the theory that Dahlgren acted on his own. Kilpatrick claimed he had seen the papers but that they had been altered to include the assasination order, but he probably knew more than he said.

Like Eric, I believe the papers genuine, but we cannot know the extent to which the orders reflected discussions in Washington and who participated in those discussions. When the orders were seized after the war, Stanton made sure that the originals were destroyed and he could have been protecting his reputation and that of his boss. Or he could have simply been acting to protect himself or one of his subordinates. We will probably never know.

Constitutional debates and detours in Mosby discussions are interesting, but have limited relevance to this question. While, again, I concede that anything is possible, it does seem incumbent on those who insist that Lincoln was involved do what I have done and search for any specific incident in Lincoln’s life that would suggest that he was likely to have approved such a risky and bloody scheme. To the contrary, the more I think about it, the more I can come up with incidents that support the idea he would not have even implicitly supported such a raid. Still, as the saying goes, absence of evidence cannot be taken as evidence of absence. I have found nothing in Lincoln’s behavior to support the idea he would do something this risky, but stand ready to be corrected.

Thought I would add to my reply since it wasn’t spam blocked earlier. I was looking at the Amazon reviews for Schultz’s lackluster THE DAHLGREN AFFAIR that I read some six years ago. The first review more or less also reviews Vanderbilt English professor Hershel Gower’s CHARLES DAHLGREN OF NATCHEZ, the story of Ulric’s uncle who moved south long before the war for business reasons, married, became part of the South and fought accordingly as a Brig. Genl. over Mississippi troops. The reviewer, Jennifer Southern, implies that Gower’s work shows that “no one was surprised that he (Ulric) would have concocted and tried to pull off the killing of Davis and the burning of Richmond.” She also states that this book discusses Ulric’s prewar visits to Natchez and his “arrogance” as she descibes it. I ordered a Amazon merchants copy of CHARLES DAHLGREN to delve into this some more. Incidentally, Ulric’s other uncle spent the war in England, spying on Confederate purchases of arms and munitions. Quite a family.

Valerie,

You have provided some solid insight into Lincoln as a “political animal” in trying to, as I think you see it, remove the halo that surrounds him. Let me take that view of him as a master practitioner of realpolitik to argue that such a trait is the very reason he would not have authorized such a raid, all ethical and moral consideratons aside:
1. If the raid did result in the deaths of Davis and his cabinet, they would be greater Southern martyrs than Jackson ever was, assuming their deaths were seen as deliberate slayings and not an accident of war. I think many in the South would have approached the war with a new resolve and vigor.
2. Considering that Alexander Stephens spent very little time in Richmond during the war and didn’t even have an official residence there, he would most likely have escaped unharmed ( although I don’t know precisely where he was during the raid) and would thus work to restore some form of civilian Southern government, either in Richmond or in an untouched city further South, perhaps Raleigh or Columbia.
3. The Southern military would still be intact on land and sea, having received a fresh motivation to continue fighting. They would suffer from the loss of the War Department hierarcy in Richmond, if that Department was physically destroyed, and also from whatever key industries in Richmond that had been damaged or destroyed. The fighting forces themselves though would have remained intact.
4. Lincoln might well have perceived that if he were seen as the culprit in the death of the Southern civilian leadership, the North would have surrendered the moral high ground they had occupied with much of Europe, especially Britian. Might not the long-sought recognition of the South have taken place?
All arguments about his character aside, for these very practicial considerations that would surround such a high risk gamble, I think that Lincoln would have refrained from authorizing the worst case scenario of the Dahlgren Raid. All things considered, I think the aftermath of a successful Dahlgren Raid would have played out in a way that would backfired on the Union cause with ultimate results quite differently thatnthose sought.

Not so fast! You are giving to Lincoln and his military, insights that they might not have had at that time. Hindsight is always 20-20!

Davis (and Benjamin) were the driving forces of the Confederate Government and therefore Stephens whereabouts is immaterial. The mere fact that he WASN’T in Richmond speaks volumes to his leadership status. True, there would have been howls of anger at their deaths, but consider: Lee was NOT General-in-Chief, but General of the Army of Northern Virginia alone. Only later in the war was he placed in that position and it was without any importance by that time anyway. Throughout the South there were other generals, often at each other’s throats as can be seen by many mistakes and missed opportunities on the part of the Confederate military. Who would have stepped into the breech here? Lee was not everyone’s fair haired boy and not every general in every Confederate force would have accepted his leadership even had he stepped forward to offer it (see below). With a divided military leadership, the Union military would have had a field day among its distracted foe!

Furthermore, the Confederacy itself was divided and that’s why I agree with Judge Napolitano that if Lincoln had just ‘sat tight’ and awaited the results of the efforts to create a true ‘nation’ of eleven (or rather TEN) when you remove Virginia!) disparate states, it is quite probable that no war would have been fought. The death or capture of Davis and Benjamin would have resulted in CHAOS in the Confederacy. Hated as Davis was by many other Southern leaders – military AND civilian – he was the ‘spearhead’ of the Confederacy. His absence would have meant confusion, distraction, disillusion and most probably an end certainly to a concerted military effort to preserve secession. Sure, some would have fought on, but on the whole, most states, with Davis gone and the capital burned, would have begun to look at how they could ‘cut their losses’ and stop the whole thing. I certainly think that that would have been a very real point of view in the North at the time and given the ‘iffy’ nature of the coming election and the slow grind (and butcher’s bill) of the war, it would have been a smart move to at least TRY it. What had they to lose at this point? The South couldn’t hate the North that much more than it already did.

In fact, to many Southerners, the death of Davis might have been seen as a godsend allowing them to lay down their arms with some honor while pointing (however ineffectually) to the moral depredations of the North as a sort of emotional sop. The military could have declared that without a civilian government in place and active, they had no reason to go on fighting (remember, America’s military was predicated on CIVILIAN leadership; the nation had never been a military state!) and so could have laid down their arms without yielding up any of their precious honor. Lee would NEVER have ‘stepped in’ as a military dictator. If you think Dahlgren’s plan was contrary to LINCOLN’s morality, Lee as de facto leader of the Confederacy was even more contrary to HIS morality. Without a working civilian government, Robert E. Lee might well have chosen to end at least his and his troop’s participation in a war for which he had no great liking in the first place.

V.P.

Yes, Valerie, I agree that Alexander Stephens was hardly someone to excite most people but he would have been the leader and people instinctively rally behind a vice president at the time a chief executive is slain, as many of us witnessed in 1963 (I am fifty, so I have a child’s memory of the death of Kennedy).

Furthermore, what was more important in 1865 in giving rise to the perception that the war was over–the fall of Richmond or the surrender of the Army of Northern Viriginia? I know they were both linked and in close proximity to one another but it was Lee’s surrender that cut to the quick those who still held hopes of an independent Confederate States, even though other forces such as those of Johnston and Kirby Smith were still in the field. With a successful Dahlgren Raid, you would still have had Lee’s army intact, the civilian leadership killed but Stephens alive; Richmond would have been occupied, burned but then most likely quickly abandoned by the raiders as they had accomplished their purpose and were not in sufficient number to hold it against an aroused Confederate military. Viewed in this light, I still don’t think the Dahlgren Raid would have acheived the decisive result of collapsing the Confederate cause and ending the war.
Eric and everyone else, I have enjoyed this discussion immensely. Often, speculative history is something I don’t delve into too much but it has really helped me consider the questions surrounding Dahlgren from a number of different angles.

I confess to be an admirer of Lincoln, and I have grown to admire him more as I have learned more about him. But I like to think I know him warts and all, and I never said that Lincoln could not have been involved. He might have been, and as you say, his lawerly mind could well have had construed a justification for approving Dahlgren’s plan. I completely concede that as I have written in other posts.

My skepticism about Lincoln’s involvement reflects my experience that one can almost always perceive a repeating pattern of behavior in people’s lives. If you study a famous person’s life long enough, events and statements begin to point to a consistency in the character for that individual. There can be growth born of experience and age, but the behavior, the mindset, stays remarkably constant in most people.

Lincoln could be ruthless in his pursuit of political goals and terribly ambitious at times, and he had the sort of wide-ranging intelligence that could fathom all manner of means for winning the war. He was capable of duplicity when it served his purpose.

But nothing I or, apparently, anyone else, can recall anything about Lincoln that suggests he exhibited at any time the sort of personal vindictiveness and risky “go-for-broke” mindset that would have been involved in approving Dahlgren’s raid. In fact, as I have pondered this question over the last two days, examples keep coming to mind that point to the opposite, to the caution, the self-control, the masterly ability to analyze situations and see them as they are and not as one would wish them to be. It could have happened, but Lincoln approving Dahlgren’s raid would have been most out of character. All I am saying—and limited conclusion it is—is that in the absence of any hard evidence, one should give the benefit of the doubt to that which reflects the pattern of behavior, and not the exception.

About the idea that to believe Lincoln could not have known is to believe he was the pawns of the other people, the President was shrewd enough to let other people think he agreed with them and that they had influence. But, as we all know, pawn he was not. However, Stanton was skilled at playing all sorts of double games simultaneously and had played them for years in Washington. Look at his Janus-faced behavior as attorney general in the last months of the Buchanan administration. Look at his history of erratic behavior. Look at his befriending McClellan while working hard to get him dismissed. Look at what other matters he kept from Lincoln. Look at the vendettas he pursued against all sorts of people. For all his talents, he was a hater, one who had to manufacture enemies where none existed. My guess—and guess it must remain—is that he made the raid happen and that Lincoln did not learn anything about Dahlgren’s plans beyond freeing prisoners.

There is nothing further I can add to my comments. All I can say is I disagree with your point of view in more ways than I can count, and I will just leave it at that.

Think I am all out of anything to contribute at this point as well. I will await the arrival of the CHARLES DAHLGREN biography I ordered and pass along anything relevant to our discussion on the raid.

Eric,

It may not be of much use, but I came across a passage in Fletcher Pratt’s Stanton, Lincoln’s Secretary of War, Norton, 1953 that discusses Stanton’s heavy involvement in the prison-of-war issue in late 1863 and early 1864. See pp. 336-339. Unfortunately, it is nowhere attributed, but may reflect material from Stanton’s own correspondence (a major source for Pratt) and the OR. If true, and I there are so many particulars here to make it credible, then it is obvious that Stanton had a very good idea of what was happening at Libby Prison and other confinement sites in Richmond.

I picked this book up years ago in DC and only now got around to reading it. Time for a new biography of old Edwin!

Hope this helps.

Bill