Ranking
#149 on the list of 150 Most Teachable Lincoln Documents
Annotated Transcript
Context. President Lincoln wrote this careful note to French writer Agenor-Etienne de Gasparin after receiving multiple letters from him as well as a copy of his translated work on the American Civil War. Gasparin, a former government official who had been living in exile in Switzerland for a number of years, had written two pro-Union books in 1861 and 1862 and had become something of a regular correspondent with members of the Lincoln Administration. Secretary of State Seward informed Lincoln a few days earlier that he considered Count Gasparin to be “very, very sensible,” which may help explain why Lincoln took so much care in crafting his response. (By Matthew Pinsker)
On This Date
HD Daily Report, August 4, 1862
The Lincoln Log, August 4, 1862
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Other Primary Sources
William Seward to Abraham Lincoln, August 1, 1862
How Historians Interpret
“To a sympathetic Frenchman, Lincoln explained that the draft was necessary because in America ‘every soldier is a man of character and must be treated with more consideration than is customary in Europe.’ Therefore, ‘our great army for slighter causes than could have prevailed there has dwindled rapidly, bringing the necessity for a new call, earlier than was anticipated.’ While predicting that the government ‘shall easily obtain the new levy,’ he warned that a draft might be resorted to. Strangely enough, he said, ‘the Government is now pressed to this course by a popular demand,’ for thousands of men ‘who wish not to personally enter the service are nevertheless anxious to pay and send substitutes, provided they can have assurance that unwilling persons similarly situated will be compelled to do like wise.’ Moreover, ‘volunteers mostly choose to enter newly forming regiments, while drafted men can be sent to fill up the old ones, wherein, man for man, they are quite doubly as valuable.'”
–Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2 volumes, originally published by Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) Unedited Manuscript by Chapter, Lincoln Studies Center, Volume 2, Chapter 26 (PDF), 2914-2915.
“He was a keen student, and with the early aid of Major General George B. McClellan and other officers, Lincoln became fully at home with his generals’ military conceptions. To the question as to why ‘the North with her great armies’ so often faced the South in battle ‘with inferiority of numbers,’ the president perceptively explained that ‘the enemy hold the interior, and we the exterior lines.’ Along with understanding lines of operations he came fully to grasp the logistics of field armies and the significance of entrenchments and learned to attach great importance to the turning movement or to any chance ‘to get in the enemy’s rear,’ or to ‘intercept the enemy’s retreat.'”
–Herman Hattaway, “Lincoln’s Presidential Example in Dealing with the Military,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 7, no. 1 (1985), 18-29.
“Lincoln wrestled now with a problem inherent in the Union’s inevitable dependency on volunteers. Asked about the challenge by a French observer, he replied ‘With us every soldier is a man of character and must be treated with more consideration than is customary in Europe.’ He ignored that at his peril. The independent American spirit explained in part why the army dwindled as it did, for men who would volunteer wanted, naturally, to go to the front in new regiments composed of their friends an neighbors, rather than be sent into existing regiments to plug holes That was why, the same day Lincoln answered the Frenchman, he also authorized Stanton to go ahead with a draft of up to three hundred thousand men to complete any unfilled state quotas out of the July call.”
William C. Davis, Lincoln’s Men: How President Lincoln Became Father to an Army and a Nation (New York: The Free Press, 1999).
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