Flashback, July 1871: Death of David H. Todd, Lincoln’s Notorious Confederate In-Law

Less than two weeks after Mary Todd Lincoln mourned the death of her 17-year-old son Tad, the widow of Abraham Lincoln had to deal with the loss of another family member.

But the former First Lady felt far more mixed emotions upon learning of the death from tuberculosis at the end of July 1871 of David Humphreys Todd in Huntsville, AL. It wasn’t just that she was not as close to this half-brother 14 years her junior than she was with the third of her sons to die before reaching adulthood.

No, David would have reminded her of a deeply painful split that mirrored a larger division in all too many American families. Of the 14 offspring of her father, the prominent Kentucky lawyer, soldier and politician Robert Smith Todd, six had sided with the Union while the others supported the Confederacy that President Lincoln had successfully but bloodily suppressed. In this “brothers’ war,” two male Todd siblings died fighting for the South, while two of the Todd daughters (including Mary) lost their husbands during the conflict.

From the age of 14, when David had run away from home to fight in the Mexican War, he had troubled family members with his impulsiveness. Matters would not improve in adulthood, when his actions in the Civil War gave the enemies of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln grist for calumny.

Lack of combat in the Mexican War left David’s appetite for adventure and glory unsatisfied, even as he developed a propensity to drink and gamble. After journeying out to California in 1850 for the gold rush, he went down to Chile the following year to participate in its revolution as “freebooter,” or soldier for hire. The only tangible results of the latter were tattoos he had made. Later in the decade, he worked without making any particular mark for a New Orleans carriage company.

The outbreak of the Civil War put David and his siblings in a quandary. Their plantations and the aristocratic style it supported were unsustainable without slaves.

At the same time, they now had a brother-in-law—previously embraced, through marriage to Mary, as part of the family—who, while willing to permit slavery in states like Kentucky, was committed to halting its expansion into new American territories.

As Stephen Berry noted in his collective biography of the Todds, House of Abraham, these bluegrass bluebloods had, in a sense, become Abraham Lincoln’s surrogate family, filling the void left by an abusive father and a sister who died in childbirth. The fact that he seldom if ever spoke of slaveholders with the blistering rhetoric used by so many abolitionists may have owed something to knowing and cherishing some as in-laws.

That did not mean, however, that he was blind to their faults. One legend had him joking, “God Almighty is perfectly content having one ‘d’ at the end of his name. The Todds insist on having two.” Litigiousness and alcoholism ran as heavily in the family as intelligence and ambition.

As First Lady, Mary was prone to extravagance and outbursts of anger, but her husband’s opponents also engaged in guilt by association in charging her with disloyalty because of some siblings’ support of the Confederacy. The more extreme members of the press even accused her of spying, forcing her husband to appear voluntarily before Congress to deny the rumors.

Negative reports by sensationalistic Northern newspapers—particularly about David, and Mary’s attitude towards him—vexed the Confederate contingent of the family, as seen in this excerpt from a July 1861 letter by Mary’s younger half-sister Elodie:

“I see from today’s paper Mrs. Lincoln is indignant at my Bro. David’s being in the Confederate service and declares ‘that by no word or act of hers should he escape punishment for his treason against her husband’s government should he fall into their hands.’ I do not believe she ever said it and if she did and meant it she is no longer a sister of mine nor deserves to be called a woman of nobleness and truth and God grant my noble and brave-hearted brother will never fall into their hands and have to suffer death twice over, and he could do nothing which could make me prouder of him than he is doing now, fighting for his country. What would she do to me, do you suppose? I have as much to answer for.”

Rushing to the Confederate cause after Fort Sumter, Elodie’s “noble and brave-hearted brother” was assigned to General John H. Winder, commandant of Richmond’s prisons—just as the Confederacy pondered what to do with 1,400 Union prisoners taken at the Battle of Bull Run.

Winder, desiring to move captured Union soldiers away from any campaigns for the Confederate capital, wanted David to transport them to Raleigh, N.C. But before that could happen, these prisoners were ensnared in the propaganda war between North and South.

Separating truth from falsehood was difficult enough while David was alive, but it only grew more so after his death. Records often proved elusive, and the children of family members, recalling events more than half a century later, often compounded the difficulties of historians.

It may very well be that, like Mary, David was more sinner against than sinning. But it is also true that, like her, he was thrust in a situation requiring tact that he didn’t possess.

Before long, David was being accused of cruelty to Northern prisoners at Richmond’s Libby Prison. Although he was not as bad as the notorious Henry Wirz of Andersonville and at least some stories about him appear to have been exaggerated, he angered Union service personnel often: preventing spirits from being brought into the prison, for instance; telling guards in this unventilated, hot converted warehouse to shoot off any part of a body sticking out a window; and, according to Union seaman Lewis Horton, “saber[ing] a poor fellow one day because the prisoner had a small bit of lighted candle in order to see to dress his wound” and executing another for just looking out the window.

By November 1862, David featured prominently in a Harper’s Weekly story on the Confederate ties of Mary’s siblings. The magazine even claimed that Jefferson Davis had fired Mary’s half-brother for inhumane treatment of prisoners after David had been only two months on the job.

If the Confederate President did, in fact, relieve him of this command, David may have felt he was being done a favor. By early 1862, David had had enough, and began to look around to where he could be more useful. 

“Having no duty to perform in this Regt, and nothing to which I can be assigned,” he requested a transfer to New Orleans. He got his wish, at a time when Union forces were pressing hard on the city and the Mississippi, the crucial waterway bringing food, supplies and troops to the Southern cause.

By May he was appearing on the regiment rolls as a lieutenant, and in a few more months he had been promoted to captain in the Siege of Vicksburg. He was gaining a reputation as a fighter, though he would surely not have liked a description of him by a female diarist, Julia Le Grand of New Orleans, as “tall, fat and savage against the Yankees.”

After Vicksburg fell to Ulysses S. Grant in July 1863, Captain Todd was paroled. Any hopes for military glory were fading, as the North consolidated its stranglehold on the deep South and David’s health began to worsen.

It was not true, as some later historians wrote, that David had been “mortally wounded” while defending Vicksburg.

But, in an application for retirement from the army, he explained that he had “been permanently disabled in the service of the Confederate States and in the line of duty, by Phthisis Pulmonulis (i.e. tuberculosis) caused by exposure and from which I have suffered during the past two years with frequent attacks of Hemoptysis (i.e. expectoration of blood). I have been absent from my Command unable to perform duty for the past four months.”

In late 1864, David began to court a young widow, Susie Williamson, in Huntsville, AL. They married April 4, 1865—five days before the Confederate surrender at Appomattox, and 10 days before David’s brother-in-law was shot by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theater.

David was listed as a merchant in the 1870 Census, but he had very little time to succeed in the profession. He died of tuberculosis the following year. As for his half-sister: Throughout the remaining 17 years of her troubled widowhood, Mary Todd Lincoln never saw any of her surviving siblings again.

This Day in Civil War History (Port Gibson Ends, Then Begins Campaigns at Vicksburg)

May 1, 1863—Following four months of battling rain, river and mud, Union forces now stood on the same side of the Mississippi as Confederate soldiers--and at the end of a long, hard day of fighting, they had driven their foes back. Moreover, Union losses, though a rough numerical match for the  the Confederates, were proportionately far smaller. Port Gibson became the first of five battles in General Ulysses S. Grant’s successful drive to take Vicksburg, in what may have been the most imaginative and brilliantly conceived campaign of the Civil War.

Yet, even as he contemplated the pleasing prospect before him, Grant must have rued the instrument of it: General John McClernand, highest-ranking of Grant’s corps commanders. 

In an army that, then as now, was not without glory hounds, McClernand had developed a well-earned reputation for shameless scheming. Grant would have loved to have sacked him, but he couldn’t do so. Yet. For several months now, according to Shelby Foote's The Civil War: A Narrative, Grant "could see that this private war against McClernand might well turn out to be as tough, in several ways, as the public one he had been fighting for eighteen months against the rebels.”

Though I wrote about the Confederate surrender at Vicksburg in a post nearly five years ago, much remains to be explored about this crucial campaign, and I hope to do so over the next several weeks. On the Confederate side, for instance, the story of civilian suffering in caves during the siege is heartrending. On the Northern side, Grant’s victory on July 4 represented not just a triumph of arms but a win over backstabbers and rogues—not least of all McClernand.

At the outset of hostilities between North and South, McClernand had been a Democratic supporter of Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas, not to mention a longtime congressman. Despite the difference in political affiliation, he also had a number of political, legal and personal associations dating back years with President Abraham Lincoln. Not at all hesitant about exploiting these ties, McClernand was one of the most prominent examples of “political generals,” or Northern politicians appointed to lead armies in the field.

Lincoln, needing a broad-based political and ethnic coalition to maintain support for the war, found such appointments useful in, say, military administration, but their leadership in the field was often suspect. McClernand wasn’t the worst of the lot in the latter regard, but his record also wasn’t especially distinguished. More important, his ceaseless intriguing upset morale among Grant’s high command.

It started with jurisdictional issues. In 1862, Grant headed the Department of the Tennessee; McClernand, the Department of the Mississippi. For several months after his near-disaster at Shiloh, Grant had been effectively sidelined by Lincoln’s chief military adviser (and eventual Chief of Staff), General Henry Halleck. McClernand acted under the assumption that Grant was his subordinate.

In January 1863, General William T. Sherman and Admiral David Porter had expressed their dissatisfaction with McClernand and urged Grant to take command within the department himself. They had made it clear, according to Grant’s Personal Memoirs, that “both the army and navy were so distrustful of McClernand’s fitness to command that, while they would do all they could to insure success, this distrust was an element of weakness.”

Grant was in a delicate situation. It wasn’t only that he knew all the people McClernand could call on, but that McClernand was outranked only by Grant in this theater of the war. That meant maximum awkwardness if he asked Sherman to issue orders to McClernand. The only thing to be done was to assume personal command himself.

McClernand did not take it well. “His correspondence with me on the subject was more in the nature of a reprimand than a protest,” Grant recalled. “It was highly insubordinate, but I overlooked it, as I believed, for the good of the service.”

As all this was happening, Grant was also casting about for a means to take Vicksburg. If the North could seize it, they would, in effect, cut the Confederacy in two. Yet taking the citadel, located on a high bluff, was not proving to be easy. The general had decided, during the winter months and early spring, to try a series of probes, assaults, misdirection, and raids out of nowhere, all designed to confuse the Confederates.

At this juncture, rumors began to circulate about Grant’s drinking habits. Lincoln stayed consistently on the general's side, but as he noted ruefully, sometimes he seemed like the only person to do so. The talk grew loud enough that Secretary of War Edwin Stanton sent Charles A. Dana, a former editor of The New York Tribune, now the eyes and ears of the administration, down to Grant’s headquarters—ostensibly to inspect the pay service, but in actuality to verify the truth about Grant’s drinking, swearing, and other aspects of his character.

Dana spoke to the general and his staff and observed much. In long, enciphered telegrams extending into late April, he came down on the side of Grant and against McClernand. Thus assured, Stanton gave Grant permission to proceed with his campaign.

By the end of April, after Admiral Porter had managed to run his ships past the Confederate batteries at Vicksburg, Grant had managed to get his troops on the other side of the Mississippi. Over the next several weeks, he managed to put the rebels at more and more of a disadvantage. He noted in May that, in one engagement, McClernand had missed the chance to fall upon and annihilate a Confederate unit.

The end for McClernand came in mid-June. He made the mistake of issuing congratulations about his corps in a way that slighted other troops. Sherman and General James McPherson complained to Grant, who had had no knowledge of it beforehand. Indeed, McClernand's message to the press was "in violation of War Department orders, and of mine," the commander noted in his memoir. He promptly relieved his meddlesome subordinate from his command, depriving him of the chance to participate in the great victory only weeks away. That turned out to be his best chance at glory, as he had to leave military service after coming down with fever in his next assignment.

This Day in Civil War History (Grant Takes Vicksburg)

July 4, 1863—Much to Southern chagrin, Union forces got to celebrate the Fourth of July in Vicksburg, the key to the Mississippi River, when Confederate forces under John C. Pemberton surrendered the citadel after a 47-day siege by Union General Ulysses S. Grant.

In the East on the same day, General Robert E. Lee saw the South’s dream of independence slipping away as he assessed the awful results of Pickett’s Charge from 24 hours before. In the West, his future opponent, Grant, reaped the rewards of a masterful campaign of maneuver, feints, improvisation and perseverance. The two events, happening virtually simultaneously, not only almost neatly divided the war in half chronologically, but also psychologically, with Confederate hopes never rising so high again.

The length of the two engagements—the first, a three-day epic, with fearful casualties on both sides and the outcome in doubt until the end; the second, the culmination of a nearly nine-month campaign, with losses decidedly more on one side than the other—might account for the preponderance of attention given Gettysburg over its Western counterpart. But a strong case can be—and, increasingly, has been—made, that Vicksburg was the more important of the two, both for its immediate impact and its influence on future operations.

It was Grant’s misfortune to have his Civil War service as general almost neatly bracketed between two spectacularly bloody operations: Shiloh in 1862 and the drive toward Richmond in 1864. Yet his reputation as a butcher with his men’s lives was vastly inflated and actually compares favorably with Lee’s.

The Restless Intelligence of Grant

What was the primary characteristic of Grant’s military leadership? One phrase, I think, sums it up: restless intelligence.

Ulysses S. Grant: Soldier & President, a 1997 biography by Geoffrey Perret, is blissfully contrarian, even excusing much of Grant’s inglorious Presidency. But it illuminates Grant’s personality and military victories with unusual insight.

Perret points out that Grant craved movement above all else. Deprived of an outlet for his energy, he became morose and turned to alcohol—as happened in 1854, when ennui on a Western outpost led to binge drinking, and in 1862, when he was unfairly sidelined by his nemesis,

General Henry Halleck, for his close call at Shiloh. In both instances, Grant was without his beloved wife Julia to curb his loneliness.

The fortunes of Grant—and the U.S.—improved markedly in the second half of 1862 when Halleck was called East to be commander in chief (and, later, chief of staff). Minus his tormentor (who now had a job he was better suited for than commanding in the field—administration), Grant quickly calculated that the linchpin of the Confederacy was Vicksburg, a fortress on a 250-foot-high bluff that was as strategically important to the Confederate as West Point was to the Continental Army in the American Revolution.

In this campaign, he would develop, almost on the fly, his evolving practice of the wide envelopment, the most mobile form of offensive action, involving attacks upon an enemy’s flanks. When executed properly, it worked like a dream, as later happened when General Norman Schwarzkopf used it to crumple it Saddam Hussein’s forces in the first Persian Gulf War; when not coordinated well, it could be disastrous.

As long as the Confederate possessed this stronghold, they could pour fire from their artillery batteries on Union ships while continuing to move soldiers and supplies unmolested from Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana and the Mississippi Yazoo Delta region to points east.

Grant’s recognition of Vicksburg’s importance harked back to the thinking of his old Mexican War superior, General Winfield Scott, who at the start of the war had been nudged to the sidelines because of his advanced age—and had been forced to watch as his brilliant conception for squeezing the life out of the Confederacy through simultaneously pressed Eastern and Western military operations and a military blockade (nicknamed the “Anaconda plan” by a stupidly sarcastic press) had fallen by the wayside.

Grant and the Military Art of “Audibling”

In a conversation with P.J. O’Rourke in The Atlantic, Colin Powell employed the football term “audibling” to describe the process of trial and error in war. “You know, no plan—no military plan—survives first contact with a real enemy,” he noted. Adjustments have to be made when the facts on the ground don’t match your pristine conception.

Few generals were better at “audibling” than Grant. Nearly every time he encountered the enemy at Vicksburg, he ran up against a fresh difficulty, calling forth unconventional thinking and involving enough risk to end his own career—and, perhaps, any Northern hope of bringing the bloody, drawn-out war to a successful close:

1) At the start of the campaign, he confronted a foe with almost as many troops as he possessed—an unfavorable force ratio for any commander launching an offensive.

2) Two initial attempts to take Vicksburg by bypassing to the south failed. One creative idea—canal building—didn’t work when the levees gave way and the North discovered it lacked the requisite engineering equipment.

3) Two crossings of the Yazoo Delta to the North were blocked when the Confederates clogged the waterways with cut trees.

4) Grant broached the idea of a naval force moving under the bluffs of Vicksburg with

Admiral David Porter, over whom he had no authority. Fortunately, Porter loved the idea. But it meant his six ironclads would be evading the Confederate batteries, which had been known to wreak awful damage on other ironclads. Moreover, by necessity, Porter’s boats could make no return trip—while they could achieve a 10-knot speed with the help of favorable currents, they could only manage two knots going in the other direction. The upshot was that on April 16, under cover of darkness, with his ships loaded with cotton bales to absorb enemy fire and with anything potentially flammable jettisoned, Porter ran the Confederate batteries. A week later, a flotilla of Union steamers pulled the same trick. Porter could now ferry Grant east across the Mississippi, in the greatest amphibious operation in American history up to that time.

5) Deep in enemy territory, Grant dispatched one of his units—

Colonel Benjamin Grierson’s 1,700 cavalrymen—for a diversionary raid on the Confederate rear. The South was so nonplussed by this that they lost sight of what Grant was pulling off under their noses.

6) In his campaign, Grant was not only hampered by a strong Confederate position but by one of his generals,

John McClernand, who, after wanting the command for himself, subsequently proved a hindrance in cooperating with Grant’s subordinates. Eventually, Grant had to sack him.

7) On May 10, Grant decided to violate one of the most sacred laws of war by cutting himself off from his supply line. Even the faithful

William Tecumseh Sherman was certain this was potentially catastrophic. But Grant’s order that his men live off the land proved inspired—his men found more than enough provisions in the countryside and they had gained precious days to attack and dilute the enemy’s forces before reinforcements could arrive. The example of this element of the campaign was one that Sherman would employ, to even more devastating and famous effect, in his “March to the Sea” the following year from Atlanta to Savannah.

8) As his army overwhelmed Pemberton’s at Champion Hill, Grant received a letter from Halleck, tormenting him again, with an order to link up with General Nathaniel Banks in an operation against Port Hudson, then go back with their combined forces to Vicksburg. Grant told the officer that, with fighting already begun, it was too late. When the Banks staffer insisted that he needed to obey the order, Grant blithely ignored the comment, jumped on his horse and rode away.

9) Two more attempts to roll up the Confederates following Champion Hill failed. Now Grant decided that the time for conventional warfare was over, and he would wait the foe out. With 70,000 men, he had all the time in the world, but his enemy, with 30,000, didn’t.

I’m surprised that the resulting siege of Vicksburg isn’t written about more, at least because of the privations endured on the Southern side. The garrison, with short rations for only a month, now faced daily bombardment and cannonade, day and night, from Porter. To escape the shelling, the citizens of Vicksburg dug caves in the clay hills, living there 24 hours a day, with children even being born in them. They began to grow hungry. Outside, Grant began to mine under the Confederate works, planning to blow them up and wreak more havoc.

At last, Pemberton could endure no more. On the morning of July 3, while Lee and Longstreet were readying final preparations for Pickett’s Charge, Pemberton raised the white flag, then met with Grant in the afternoon to negotiate terms. He held out for better terms—no doubt, the Union commander surmised, in an attempt to avoid surrendering on the Fourth of July—but could not postpone the inevitable.

Vicksburg and a New Birth of Freedom

In his

Personal Memoirs—pretty widely held to be the greatest autobiography by an American President—Grant recalled the friendly bantering between common soldiers on both sides during the campaign. “Well, Yank, when are you coming into town?” went the invariable Confederate question. One of the Yankee replies—jocular and boastful but highly prophetic—was, “We propose to celebrate the Fourth there.”

On Independence Day the Confederates marched out of their Vicksburg garrison and stacked arms. The whole Union Army watched the event without cheering. They and their commander knew the importance of their achievement—severing the artery of the Confederacy, capturing 37,000 prisoners (not to mention the 10,000 of the foe killed and wounded), and ensuring the survival of the Union while they extended liberty to the slave.

Yes, the surrender of Vicksburg related to freedom in more ways than simply occurring on the Fourth of July. A crucial point in the campaign occurred on April 29, when Union forces were ferried across the Mississippi by Porter. They were planning to march to Rodney, about nine miles away, when an escaped slave came into Grant’s headquarters. A good landing, he informed them, could be made at Bruinsburg that would lead them directly to Port Hudson, where he could attack the enemy.

The intelligence proved correct—and was typical of the kind of services provided by escaped slaves in the war. It was undoubtedly just one of the many instances that further convinced Grant of the certainty of his cause. In 1878, he noted: "As soon as slavery fired upon the flag it was felt, we all felt, even those who did not object to slaves, that slavery must be destroyed. We felt that it was a stain to the Union that men should be bought and sold like cattle."

Now, with Grant’s help—and that escaped slave’s—that “stain to the Union” would be removed.