Helping Mary Lincoln with Her Finances
By Daniel Stowell, Decoding the Civil War Independent Researcher.
One of the most exciting aspects of digital humanities projects is the ability to make connections among materials that would not have been possible earlier. One citizen researcher, Linda Dodge, recently brought to our attention that a telegram from Decoding the Civil War connects to a receipt held at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum and digitized through Chronicling Illinois.
The telegram from Mary Lincoln to Thomas Eckert reads:
640 P[M] March 1 [186]6
Chicago
Mr. Eckert
Asst Secy
Will please deliver this message
to A Williamson
March 1st
To A Williamson
Have answered
your letter of 27th Gen Spinner
has list that will suffice to
settle without bills. Have it
done at once. Send receipt
Mrs Lincoln
Alexander Williamson (1814-1903) became tutor to Willie and Tad Lincoln when Mary Lincoln hired him in September 1861. In March 1863, Abraham Lincoln obtained a clerk position for Williamson in the Second Auditor’s Office of the Treasury Department. Williamson remained a friend of the Lincoln family and assisted Mary Lincoln in her financial difficulties following the President’s death.
Francis E. Spinner (1802-1890) was Treasurer of the United States from 1861 to 1875. He also assisted Mary Lincoln in settling her husband’s estate and in obtaining a pension. On February 13, 1866, Mary Lincoln’s friend and New York businessman Norman S. Bentley sent Spinner a list of ten merchants to whom she was indebted; this document is also a part of Chronicling Illinois. It is possible that Williamson was assisting Spinner in settling the former First Lady’s accounts and that the following receipt was for his services in that effort.
The receipt reads:
17th March 1866 Received from General
Spinner, U.S. Treasurer the sum of Ten
dollars ($10.) on account of Mrs. M. Lincoln
Alexr Williamson
These two documents, held in institutions 1,600 miles apart, each tell a part of the story of Mary Lincoln’s efforts to settle the estate of her murdered husband and to obtain a pension to support herself and her youngest son. Now, thanks to digital projects like Decoding the Civil War and Chronicling Illinois, researchers can access both documents and others that are a part of this tragic story.
Chronicling Illinois is a digital archive project that the writer, Decoding the Civil War researcher Daniel W. Stowell, organized and implemented.
The Amnesty Telegram
105 AM 4th Chattanooga Oct 3 63
1 PM For The President If we can
maintain this position in such strength
that the Enemy are obliged to
abandon their position and the Elections
in the great states go favorably
would it not be well to
offer a general Amnesty to all
officers & soldiers in the rebellion
it would give us moral strength
and weaken them very much Rosecrans
On 1:05 a.m. of October 4, the USMT operator in Washington received this message from Major General William S. Rosecrans, the commander of the Army of the Cumberland. Unbeknownst to Rosecrans, this telegram would play a fateful role in his career.
Rosecrans, a rising star in the United States military, was possessed of a brusque and outspoken manner which did little to endear him to his fellow officers and his superiors — his enemies included Ulysses S. Grant and pretty much the entire War Department. Just three months earlier, the Secretary of War chose to mark the end of Rosecrans’s superbly executed campaign in Middle Tennessee by crowing over Grant’s victory at Vicksburg, finishing his telegram with a parting shot: “You and your noble army now have a chance to give the finishing blow to the rebellion. Will you neglect the chance?”
The events of September 1863 must have filled Stanton with a sense of grim satisfaction as Rosecrans failed to deliver the “finishing blow.” His loss at Chickamauga on September 20 was the worst defeat for the Union forces in the West. Rosecrans who, as Lincoln put it, acted “stunned like a duck hit on the head,” retreated to Chattanooga.
Two weeks later he sent the above telegram. The President replied ten hours later, noting that he was planning on “doing something like what you suggest,” but added that an amnesty would make sense only if it did not follow a major defeat. Lincoln was worried that such an amnesty would be perceived as “a confession of weakness and fear.” In contrast to Lincoln, Stanton was furious. Not only did Rosecrans take it upon himself to advise the President on matters of policy, but he did so over the Secretary’s head. Stanton seized on the “amnesty telegram,” which he painted as defeatist, as a pretext to dismiss the general.
On October 16, Lincoln’s cabinet voted to relieve Rosecrans from command. He would wait months for another command. Appointed to head the Department of Missouri, he would finish the war riding a desk in St. Louis.
In late November 1863, Grant used Rosecrans’s plan to win a series of battles at Chattanooga. Two weeks later, on December 8, 1863, Lincoln issued his amnesty proclamation.
William S. Rosecrans. Lithograph (Boston, Mass.: J.H. Burford, 1861). The Huntington Library.
Big thanks to our volunteer Stork for this find!
When in Doubt, Eat the Cipher!
By Daniel Stowell, Decoding the Civil War Independent Researcher.
Courtesy of Seth Kaller, Inc.
When working with numerous collections, sometimes one stumbles across a little nugget that just calls out to be told. Working with the Eckert telegrams has made me familiar with the codes and ciphers used by the United States Army and Government. So, imagine how my curiosity was piqued when I saw the following story from August 1862:
“During all the spring months I alone in all the Army Corps was entrusted with the Government Cyphers. During General Pope’s retreat, I was one day sent for by Generals Pope & Banks, to put into cypher a very important dispatch to General McDowell, with whom direct communication had been cut off by the enemy.
I was obliged to reply that during the severest part of the Battle of Cedar Mountain when I was in the greatest danger of being killed or captured at any moment, I had felt it my duty to destroy the cypher which I tore up into a hundred or more very small pieces & swallowed some of them. My action was approved. I then offered to carry the orders, unwritten, myself to General McDowell, if I could find him, and take my chances.
My offer was accepted, but while the instructions were being prepared, the advance of General McDowells Corps came in sight, & I was relieved from a duty which would have put me in the greatest danger of capture or otherwise.”
This is excerpted from a twenty-five-page handwritten memoir written by Frederick d’Hauteville on his service in the American Civil War. d’Hauteville was writing about the the Battle of Cedar Mountain, fought on August 9, 1862. Brigadier General Crawford in his report on the battle specifically commended Captain d’Hauteville, “who from the first rendered me especial and important service, attended with great personal exposure.” Crawford probably wasn’t thinking of d’Hauteville’s willingness to eat the cipher when commending him, and it is impossible to tell whether the cipher which he ate was one of Stager’s telegraph ciphers, but d’Hauteville’s memories do illustrate the extent to which those entrusted with the ciphers went to protect them.
After the battle d’Hauteville discovered that a ball had pierced his blankets, strapped behind his saddle, with more than a dozen holes. Among the regiments in d’Hauteville’s division at the battle was the 2nd Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, with officers from “the leading families of the City of Boston,” many of them, like d’Hauteville, graduates of Harvard University. The regiment with fewer than 500 men suffered 173 casualties, and 16 of its 23 officers were killed, wounded, or taken prisoner. “All of them were my friends, & very dear friends,” d’Hauteville recalled, “Their loss was enormous, but they went to their deaths with sublime courage.”
Frederick Sears Grand d’Hauteville (1838-1918) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to a Swiss nobleman and American mother, who returned to the United States while pregnant. Their marital conflict led to a contentious custody battle over Frederick in 1840 in a Philadelphia court, which his mother eventually won. D’Hauteville graduated from Harvard University in 1859. He was appointed volunteer aide-de-camp to General Nathaniel Banks in December 1861, and served at the Battle of Winchester in March 1862. Commissioned captain on June 30, 1862, he served on Brigadier General Samuel W. Crawford’s staff, including action at the Battle of Cedar Mountain in August and at Antietam in September 1862.
By December, 1862, d’Hauteville had returned to General Banks’ staff and traveled to New Orleans, where Banks commanded the Department of the Gulf. D’Hauteville resigned his commission on March 1, 1863. Later in 1863, he married the daughter of former New York Governor Hamilton Fish, but she died the following year. In 1872, he married Susan Watts Macomb, whose grand-father Major General Alexander Macomb was a hero of the War of 1812 and general-in-chief of the United States army from 1828 to 1841. The d’Hautevilles kept a home in Newport, Rhode Island, but they spent much of their time in his paternal family’s thirty-room chateau overlooking Lake Geneva in Switzerland.
Men Visible and Invisible
Telegram to William B Franklin. 1862, Mar. 8. (Ledger EC 3, p. 38).
Camp Williams Mar 8th 62 –
Gen WB Franklin
Washn
Jonathan Roberts says he could
not procure the two guides
he spoke to you about _
one has gone north &
the other is sick but
he recommends a man named
Myron Gregg who knows the
country well & he would
like to go himself. Gregg
is a New Yorker but
has lived here several years
E Sparrow Purdy
AAG
This seemingly routine and insignificant communication is a good example of how the communications in the Eckert ledgers can open new insights into those largely invisible corners of the Civil War. On March 8, 1862, the field operator at the headquarters of Brigadier General William B. Franklin’s division of the Army of the Potomac at Camp Williams, Va. tapped out a message to the commanding general. The message had to be sent to Washington as Franklin had traveled there the day before, summoned by George B. McClellan.
On March 7, Lincoln had informed McClellan about doubts by some in Washington of McClellan’s loyalty. There were fear and suspicions that McClellan’s plan to shift the base of operations from Washington to Urbanna, a small tobacco port in the Lower Chesapeake, was designed to leave the Capital exposed to a Confederate attack. Furious, McClellan told the President that he would call a council of war and let the generals decide on the course of action.
Thus, Franklin’s arrival in Washington. McClellan’s plan was approved by the council of war, and on March 8, Lincoln gave his formal approval. As with many of the officers from the Civil War, we know quite a bit about the recipient of the telegram, William Buell Franklin. But who were the rest whose names appear in the telegram?
The man who sent Franklin the message, his AAG or Assistant Adjutant General, was Erastus Sparrow Purdy (1838-1881). A New Yorker turned Californian and son of the Golden State’s third Lieutenant Governor, Purdy had had a rather colorful career before the war. Among other things, he was involved in the Charles P. Stone’s survey of the Sonora, which ended with an open confrontation with Mexican authorities. Later Purdy would end his career as an officer in the Egyptian army of Khedive Ismail.
But what of the subjects of the telegram, the local guides assisting the Union army? These are the ultimate invisible men of the Civil War. Like telegraph operators, they were civilians employed by the United States Army as scouts, guides, or spies. That distinction was somewhat arbitrary; guides and scouts could act like spies. And because the dealings between the army command and civilian scouts were kept off the books, there were no records kept, nor were the civilians entitled to any of the army benefits.
But who were these men? Was Jonathan Roberts the same man mentioned in the Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston’s report of about six hundred Union infantry “piloted by Jonathan Roberts” (OR, Series 1 – Volume 5, p. 950)? Perhaps. But what of Myron Gregg? This telegram is so far the only record of this other invisible man, the civilian willing to work with US Army in hostile territory. Myron Gregg, a New Yorker who had “lived here for several years,” is forgotten no more.
William B. Franklin. Hand colored lithograph. (Cincinnati, Ohio: Ehrgott, Forbiger & Co., ca. 1863). The Huntington Library
No Distinction Whatsoever
Studio portrait, unidentified African American Union Soldier, 22nd Colored Infantry Regiment
Nothing is ever simple. Complex issues are too often boiled down and reduced to a single factoid or a talking point. The real story can only be pieced together by plowing through mounds of seemingly tedious routine paperwork. In fact, historians are often the only people to appreciate the beauty of bureaucracy.
The correspondence of the War Department, a lot of which was conducted by telegraph and is now contained in the USMT ledgers, is a prime example of the extraordinary value of seemingly mundane and boring government paperwork.
A case in point: on April 17, 1864, Ulysses S. Grant, who had assumed the command of the Union armed forces a month before, suspended prisoner of war exchanges. It is very tempting to take any pronouncement by a general of Grant’s caliber for a straightforward order.
Yet April 17, 1864 was just an installment in a long and convoluted story of the prisoner exchange. Both sides of the Civil War divide believed that they were fighting a just war and professed their commitment to the norms of civilized warfare. Equitable exchange of prisoners, accomplished by a cartel or agreement between the belligerents, was one of these norms.
The cartel, codified on July 22, 1862, called for equal exchange, man for man, as matched in the rank, branch of service, and the state of health. The exchanged soldiers and officers would return to the ranks. Those men for whom no exact match could be found, were paroled; the parolees were barred from taking up arms until the formal exchange could be arranged.
The cartel ambled along, punctuated by claims of breaches of trust, retaliations and counter-retaliations, until the Union army started recruiting African American soldiers. The Confederates refused to apply the “man-for-man” exchange to black soldiers. The act of the Confederate Congress of May 1, 1863 mandated that black Union troops were to be “delivered” to the authorities of the state where they had been captured “to be dealt with according to the present or future law” of the state, which meant either death or slavery.
In response, Stanton’s War Department halted all exchanges. In early July, Grant and Nathaniel P. Banks ignored this directive to parole the entire garrisons of Vicksburg and Port Hudson. The War Department had to remind the generals that all exchanges were suspended until “the rebel authorities” demonstrated a “better understanding in relation to the cartel.”
The negotiations were resumed in December 1863, after Ethan Allen Hitchcock, the Commissioner for the Exchange of Prisoners, appointed Benjamin F. Butler as a special agent. Butler’s instructions directed him to ensure “the protection of the Government” for “colored soldiers of the United States and the officers commanding them.”
On April 9, 1864, Butler submitted a lengthy memorandum to Stanton. He acknowledged that there were many issues with the process but insisted that the United States must honor the cartel, for the sake of “the good sense of the country, the justice of the Government, or humanity toward our suffering brother soldiers in the Confederate prisons.”
Yet there was a red line. The United States could not permit to have “those black men whom we have made free, uniformed and armed, and put in our service, when captured, being treated as slaves.” If the Confederate authorities refused to exchange black soldiers “man-for-man,” the entire cartel would have to be set aside. Butler then proposed to negotiate away all outstanding problems, so that this one crucial issue “may be left standing sharply alone.”
Somewhat taken aback, Stanton referred Butler’s memorandum to Grant. Grant responded on April 17, in a letter to Butler which is often miscast as an order.
Grant agreed with Butler: “no distinction whatsoever shall be made between white and colored prisoners; the only question being where they, at the time of the capture, in the military service of the United States.”
On August 10, 1864, the Confederate commissioner agreed to a “man-to-man” exchange. When Butler inquired whether the exchange would cover black troops, there was no reply.
Bickering Generals
By Olga Tsapina, Norris Foundation Curator of American Historical Manuscripts at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
The telegraph offered a revolutionary breakthrough in communications, however, no technology could ease personal tensions or alleviate turf wars. Two telegrams spotted by hungmung, one of our valiant volunteers, offer an intriguing insight into one of such conflict.
Both telegrams were received in Washington on February 7, 1862. Both involved Henry W. Halleck (Alden), then the commander of the Department of the Missouri; George B. McClellan (Andes), the general-in-chief of Union armies; and Don Carlos Buell (Alvord), the head of the Department of the Ohio. The telegrams were part of a complicated but little known conflict over the course of action in the West.
Lincoln urged speedy occupation of the heavily Unionist Tennessee, but McClellan and his old friend Buell wanted instead to target Nashville. The heads of two Western departments, Halleck and Buell, could not get along. When Buell came up with a plan to launch a dual advance on the Tennessee and the Cumberland rivers, Halleck dismissed the plan as “madness” on the grounds that the Union troops in the West were too scattered to provide for any sort of sustained campaign.
Things got even more complicated in late January 1862. McClellan, perhaps hoping to score some political points, proposed to shift the fighting to Kentucky and then move on to East Tennessee. Upon his request, the Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton sent his Assistant Secretary Thomas A. Scott to explore the logistics of transferring some 60,000 troops from McClellan’s command to Buell’s headquarters in Louisville.
On January 29, McClellan fired off a telegram to Halleck warning him of the impending Confederate expedition into Kentucky. The next day, Halleck ordered Ulysses S. Grant to start immediately for Fort Henry.
At the same time Buell decided to go to East Tennessee after all. When Halleck, who was getting cold feet about the operation, asked Buell either to transfer some of his troops or to stage a diversion, Buell was less than enthusiastic, even after McClellan urged his friend to help Halleck by switching the line of attack from East Tennessee to Bowling Green, Ky.
In the second telegram, Buell telegraphed McClellan complaining about Halleck’s move which, although “right in its strategic bearing” had been commenced without “appreciation, preparation, or concert.” Now that it had “become of vast magnitude,” Buell noted that he was indeed contemplating “a change of the line to support” but warned that this sudden change of direction was “hazardous.”
The telegram appears in on pp. 587-588 of vol. 7 of the 1st Series of the Official Records. It is clear that the publication differs from the ledger record. For example, the phrase “without appreciation, preparation, or concert,” was edited to read “without appreciation – preparative or concert.”
Moreover, the publication does not include the telegram that, as the ledger shows, immediately preceded it. The telegram at the top of the page was published some sixteen years later; it appears on p. 206 of vol. 52 (part I). It was also printed with errors: it seems to indicate that the telegram was sent from Washington, D.C. and addressed to an “L. Thomas.” As seen in the ledger, the telegram was in fact addressed to General George Thomas and sent from Buell’s headquarters in Louisville. Because the telegrams were printed out of sequence and with serious errors, the connection between them has long been overlooked.
As the ledger shows, Buell was indeed contemplating the transfer of some Ohio and Indiana regiments. Also, the published version of the telegram from Buell to McClellan features a time-stamp that seems to show it took almost 12 hours to transmit it: the message sent at midnight of February 6 was received at 11:30 a.m. of February 7. The ledger, however, shows no time stamp on this or the preceding telegram. In fact, there were only two more telegrams that similarly lacked the time stamp. All four were received on February 7 and all followed a confidential report from Thomas A. Scott, the Assistant Secretary of War to his boss Edwin M. Stanton.
That report, which also does not appear in OR, describes Scott’s effort to facilitate the confusing and bitter communications between Halleck’s and Buell’s departments. It appears that our telegrams were attached to the report. The ledger shows that the telegrams were received along with the report by a USMT operator in Washington at 1:30 a.m. rather than 11:30 a.m. of February 7.
Generals bickering on the battlefield is nothing new. What is interesting is to see how that bickering has been captured and then reinterpreted over time. These messages offer a confirmation of the primary importance of our job here at Decoding the Civil War.
Ledger 7, Received
The cover of the above ledger is not all that exciting to look at. But within that cover is the first of the hard earned rewards from the Ledger Challenge. This is the cover of Ledger 7, the first ledger we received with consensus data from the 20 finished during those exciting two weeks. The consensus text has been reviewed and published in the Huntington Digital Library. Coming in at 400 pages, with some 460 telegrams, it took us a while to go through it. The contents of the ledger are varied, covering the period from late May to early July 1863, and include various (sometimes conflicting) reports from Vicksburg, potential traitors in Indiana, and the start of Gettysburg.
Our volunteers worked hard on all 20 ledgers. We want to say, again, thank you for that effort. Ledger 7 shows that the effort is bearing fruit. We are already hard at work on the next ledger, and the others are going through the consensus processing now.
As we publish these ledgers, we will link to them on the Results page of the Decoding the Civil War site.
Wooooo Hoooooo!
As a follow-up to Mario’s post on Monday, I just wanted to share that we have officially passed 100,000 classifications for the project! Well done transcribers! The end (of phase 1) may not quite be nigh, but it is in sight.
Challenge Demolished
Decoding the Civil War has just finished its two-week transcription challenge. Our original goal was simple: complete 10 ledgers. Well, we reached that goal in the first six days. Deciding to ask our volunteers for a little more, we added 10 more ledgers. The challenge became 20 ledgers in two weeks. We can happily say that we have met that goal as well.
That is correct—all of our wonderful volunteers have completed an incredible 20 ledgers! The ledgers are:
mssEC_01; mssEC_02; mssEC_04; mssEC_05; mssEC_06; mssEC_07; mssEC_08; mssEC_09; mssEC_10; mssEC_11; mssEC_12; mssEC_15; mssEC_17; mssEC_20; mssEC_21; mssEC_22; mssEC_25; mssEC_33; mssEC_34; mssEC_35.
That is a total of 9,998 classifications, an average of 714 transcriptions a day, far exceeding our goal of 425 classifications per day! We also added 727 volunteers. Welcome to all of you! You and our veteran volunteers have helped make this a very successful challenge.
The researchers now have their hands full reviewing the consensus data and getting it transferred into the Huntington Digital Library. Keep checking our Results page to see new ledgers added.
So it is time to strike up the band, and order extra rations to all our volunteers! We have 30962 classifications left. That is still quite a bit, but remember that we have completed almost 10,000 in the last two weeks, and 87,150 classifications since the project started last June.
We ask you to keep your enthusiasm up and those fingers flying. Let’s try to finish them by June 30th!
Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah!
With a Brave Army and a Just Cause
By Olga Tsapina, Norris Foundation Curator of American Historical Manuscripts at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
Executive Mansion
Washington, April 30, 1864
Lieutenant General Grant.
Not expecting to see you again
before the Spring Campaign opens, I wish to express,
in this way, my entire satisfaction with what you have
done up to this time, so far as I understand it. The
particulars of your plans I neither know, or seek to
know. You are vigilant and self-reliant; and, pleas=
ed with this, I wish not to obtrude any constraints
or restraints upon you. While I am very anxious that
any great disaster, or the capture of our men in great
numbers, shall be avoided, I know these points
are less likely to escape your attention than they would
be mine. If there is anything wanting which is with=
in my power to give, do not fail to let me know it.
And now with a brave Army, and a just cause, may
God sustain you.
Yours very truly
A. Lincoln
The Civil War, born of a grave constitutional crisis over slavery, tested many provisions of the Constitution that hitherto had remained mere abstractions. One of these was Article II Section 2 which proclaimed the President “Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States.”
The extent of these powers was unclear and was subject of fierce debates, most famously those over the constitutionality of suspension of the writ of habeas corpus or emancipate the enemy slaves by means of a presidential proclamation. It was also unclear to what extent commander-in-chief should be involved in the actual business of commanding the army and navy.
On April 30, 1864, as Ulysses S. Grant was preparing to embark on what would become the bloodiest campaign of the war, the President wrote the above letter to the newly appointed Lieutenant General–a title that only George Washington had borne before.
Lincoln, acutely aware of his lack of military experience, generally refrained from giving orders. He left the planning, and the follow through, of the campaign in Grant’s hands, much as he had done with other generals. And many times had Lincoln been disappointed and frustrated by their performance. This time, however, he had found the correct general. Grant devised a campaign in the Spring of 1864 that would lead to the final collapse of the Confederacy a year later.
Decoding the Civil War 