President Saw Victory at Hand; Confederates Escaped, Pressed War Two More Years
By Michael E. Ruane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 8, 2007
Vicksburg had just fallen to Union forces. The Confederates were trapped north of the Potomac River after their defeat at Gettysburg. And after two years of civil war and battlefield calamity, Abraham Lincoln thought he saw the glimmer of victory.
On July 7, 1863, three days after Vicksburg's surrender and four days after Gettysburg, Lincoln took out a sheet of blue-lined paper and wrote to his general in chief, urging that the fleeing rebels be destroyed. If they were, Lincoln wrote, "the rebellion will be over."
But the Confederates escaped over the flooded river seven days later, the war went on for almost two more blood-soaked years, and Lincoln's six-line, handwritten note of optimism vanished into the crumbling files of history.
Yesterday, the National Archives announced that the long-lost note, complete with a misspelled word and Lincoln's neat schoolboy signature, had been found last month in the downtown stacks by an archivist doing research for a Discovery Channel documentary.
Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein said in an interview that it was the biggest such find since the discovery in 2003 of a diary written by President Harry S. Truman.
"It's incredibly exciting," Weinstein said.
The note, on yellowed stationery and headed "War Department Washington City" was written to Gen. Henry W. Halleck. The besieged Confederate city of Vicksburg, Miss., had fallen July 4 to the forces of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, and Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia had just been defeated at Gettysburg by union forces under Gen. George G. Meade.
The war-weary Lincoln sensed the possibilities.
"Now, if Gen. Meade can complete his work so gloriously prosecuted thus far, by the litteral or substantial destruction of Lee's army," Lincoln wrote, "the rebellion will be over."
Archives officials said the text of the note was known to historians because Halleck forwarded it to Meade in a telegram that was preserved in the official war records. But the handwritten note had been lost for decades.
Weinstein pointed out that the Archives has a billion documents in its historic building downtown, and 9 billion systemwide. Asked if there could be other lost documents of note, he said, "There must be."
On May 14, archivist Trevor Plante, who specializes in 19th-century military history, was in the stacks searching for material for the upcoming documentary on Gettysburg, according to Plante and Weinstein.
Plante said that morning he chanced on a tattered folder labeled "telegrams received by Halleck." Inside, he said, he spotted the note in the dim light, recognized Lincoln's handwriting and thought, "Whoa!"
But it was not until he researched further that he discovered that while historians had quoted the telegram, no one had ever cited the original note. He said he realized: "Hey, this is even more important than I thought it was."
Plante said it is not certain exactly where Lincoln wrote the note, nor where Halleck received it, but both were in Washington. Meade, who had been in command of the Army of the Potomac only about a week, had just left Gettysburg en route to Frederick in pursuit of the enemy.
Lincoln, tormented by incompetent commanders in the first years of the war, often prodded his generals to take action. He once famously goaded Gen. George B. McClellan by asking to borrow McClellan's army since the general didn't seem to be using it.
Now Lincoln was urging Halleck to urge Meade to go after Lee.
After Halleck telegraphed the note to Meade, he continued to badger Meade to attack. Meade, whose army had been battered at Gettysburg, finally took offense and offered to resign. Halleck backed down, Plante said, but on the afternoon of the 14th, as the rebels splashed to safety, an anguished Lincoln took pen to paper and wrote to Meade:
"My dear general, I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee's escape. He was within your easy grasp, and to have closed upon him would, in connection with our other late successes, have ended the war.
"As it is, the war will be prolonged indefinitely," Lincoln wrote. "Your golden opportunity is gone, and I am distressed immeasureably because of it."
It was one of the harshest letters Lincoln wrote during the war. And he never sent it.
Instead, he wrote on the envelope: "To Gen. Meade, never sent, or signed."
Plante said that letter and the envelope, now in the Library of Congress, came to light years ago, but not during Meade's lifetime.
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