On January 23, 1863, General Ambrose Burnside, commander of the Army of the Potomac, asked to see President Lincoln alone, after midnight. He brought a draft order. Its first item dismissed one of his own generals, Joseph Hooker, from the service “as a man unfit to hold an important commission during a crisis like the present.” Hooker, it said, had criticized his superiors unjustly and tried to spread distrust of them among other officers.
Burnside told Lincoln that if the orders weren’t accepted, he would resign. Lincoln thought it over. He relieved Burnside instead. On January 26 he put Hooker in command of the army.
He also handed Hooker a letter. “I have placed you at the head of the Army of the Potomac,” it began. “And yet I think it best for you to know that there are some things in regard to which, I am not quite satisfied with you.”
Lincoln listed the good first. Hooker was “a brave and a skilful soldier.” He didn’t mix politics with his profession. He had confidence in himself, “a valuable, if not an indispensable quality.” Then the bad. Under Burnside, Hooker had “taken counsel of your ambition, and thwarted him as much as you could.” And Lincoln had heard, “in such way as to believe it,” that Hooker had recently said both the army and the government needed a dictator.
“Of course it was not for this, but in spite of it, that I have given you the command,” Lincoln wrote. “Only those generals who gain successes, can set up dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship.” He closed: “Beware of rashness, but with energy, and sleepless vigilance, go forward, and give us victories.”
Hooker treasured the letter. The journalist Noah Brooks recalled Hooker showing it to him and calling it “just such a letter as a father might write to his son.”
In early May, at Chancellorsville, Hooker had about 90,000 men around the crossroads against Robert E. Lee’s divided 48,000, by the National Park Service’s count. He fought on the defensive and pulled back, and the army retreated across the Rappahannock. Union losses in killed, wounded and missing came to 17,287; Confederate, 12,821. The Park Service’s history of the battlefield says the Union commander “had lost his nerve.” Before Gettysburg that July, Lincoln had replaced him with George Meade.
That same July, Vicksburg surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant. Lincoln wrote to him on July 13. “I do not remember that you and I ever met personally,” the letter began. Lincoln had doubted Grant’s moves during the campaign. “I now wish to make the personal acknowledgment that you were right, and I was wrong.”