CAPTAIN LINCOLN: SOLDIER IN THE BLACK HAWK WAR
Speech By MAJOR GENERAL RICHARD H. MILLS, ILMIL (RET) At Ceremony at Lincoln’s Tomb Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War 135th Anniversary of Lincoln Assassination 15 April 2000
On the 135th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, we gather here at his tomb to memorialize the huge stature of our most beloved president and recognize his leadership qualities as our commander-in-chief during the most desperate and devastating years of our Union’s civil conflict. When and where did those great qualities manifest themselves? At what moment and in what context did such traits surface?
I suggest they were first revealed in the spring and summer of
1832, when a new period in the life of Lincoln began. It was then that he obtained his first public recognition, and entered upon the course of life
1 which was to lead him to a position of prominence and great leadership.
In March of that year – at age 23 – he was an unemployed store clerk,
Mr. Offutt’s business having gone to pieces. But he took his first political step by announcing for the state legislature. In the handbill of his first political campaign platform, Lincoln said this: “I have no other
[ambition] so great as that of being truly esteemed by my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem.”
But before much campaigning could be done, news came that
Black Hawk and his braves were on the warpath, pillaging, killing settlers, and spreading terror along the Rock River. Although numerous regular army troops were in the area, the general alarm was such that
Governor John Reynolds thought reinforcements were necessary and called for volunteers from the Illinois Militia – by law being “all free male white inhabitants” between 18 and 45.
The Governor himself was astonished at the speed and patriotism with which the call was answered. Among those who enlisted at the first tap of the drum was Abraham Lincoln, and equally to his surprise and delight he was elected captain of his company. The volunteer
2 organizations of those days were conducted on purely democratic principles. The company assembled on the green, an election was suggested, and three-fourths of the men walked over to where Lincoln was standing; most of the small remainder joined themselves to one
William Kirkpatrick, a man of some substance and standing from Spring
Creek. Mr. Lincoln himself later said that no subsequent success ever gave him such unmixed pleasure as this earliest distinction.
At Beardstown, where all troops rendezvoused, Captain Lincoln’s company was attached to Colonel Samuel Thompson’s regiment, the
Fourth Illinois, on the 21st of April, and moved on the 27th, with the rest of the command under General Samuel Whitesides. It was arduous marching. No roads and no bridges, and the day’s task included a great deal of labor. When they came to the Mississippi, the provision boats had not arrived, and for three days they waited there literally without food. But on the 6th of May the riverboat William Wallace arrived.
From there they marched to the mouth of Rock River, and thence
General Whitesides proceeded with his volunteers up the river some ninety miles to Dixon, where they halted to await the arrival of General
3 Atkinson with the regular troops and provisions. There they found two battalions of fresh horsemen who had as yet seen no service and were eager for a fight.
The fresh mounted troops rode to Old Man’s Creek where a small party of Indians was discovered on the summit of a hill a mile away. The
Indians retreated, but were soon overtaken, and two or three of them killed. Black Hawk hastily gathered a handful of warriors and attacked the scattered whites. The Indians killed all they caught up with; but the volunteers had the fleeter horses, and only eleven were overtaken.
General Whitesides marched out to the scene of the disaster the next morning, but the Indians were gone. They had broken up into small parties, and for several days they massacred peaceful settlements.
The 30-day term of enlistment of the volunteers had now come to an end, and most men refused to continue in service. Captain Lincoln was not one of these homesick soldiers. He considered it his simple duty, as soon as he was mustered out of his captaincy, to reenlist on the same day, May 27, as a private soldier. Several other officers did the same, among them General Whitesides and Major John T. Stuart. The
4 company of the Fourth Regiment Illinois Mounted Volunteers, commanded by Captain Lincoln, had been mustered out at the mouth of
Fox River, May 27, 1832, by Nathaniel Buckmaster, Brigade-Master to
General Samuel Whitesides’ Illinois Volunteers. On the muster-roll of
Captain Elijah Iles’ company, Illinois Mounted Volunteers, A. Lincoln of
Sangamon County appears as a private from May 27, 1832, to June 16,
1832, when the company was mustered out of service. (It is interesting to note that Lieutenant Jefferson Davis’ company B, First United States
Infantry, was stationed not far away at Fort Crawford, Wisconsin.)
After his first enlistment and his captaincy, the war became a sort of holiday, and the tall private from New Salem enjoyed it as much as anyone. He entered with enthusiasm into the athletic sports that the soldiers relieved the boredom of camp with. He was admitted to be the strongest man in the army and, with one exception, the best wrestler.
Lincoln’s popularity increased from the beginning to the end of the campaign.
On his second enlistment, Lincoln had become a member of
Captain Iles’ mounted volunteers, sometimes called the “Independent
5 Spy Battalion,” a unique unit, not under the control of any regiment or brigade, but which received orders directly from the Commander-in-
Chief. With this elite corps, Lincoln served through his second enlistment, though it was not his fortune to take part in either of the two engagements at the Wisconsin Bluffs and the Bad Axe, in which General
James D. Henry broke and destroyed forever the power of Black Hawk and the British band of Sacs and Foxes.
The Spy Battalion formed no part of General Henry’s forces when he defeated the enemy on the bluffs of the Wisconsin River on the 21st of
July. Black Hawk and his broken braves then fled for the Mississippi
River, the whole army following in close pursuit – General Atkinson in front and General Henry bringing up the rear. While Black Hawk was engaging and drawing away the force under Atkinson, General Henry struck the main trail, and brought on the battle of the Bad Axe which was an easy slaughter. Black Hawk escaped, only to be captured a few days later.
It was on the 16th of June, a month before the slaughter at Bad Axe, that the battalion to which Lincoln belonged was mustered out, at
6 Whitewater, Wisconsin. His release from his second service was signed by a young lieutenant of artillery, Robert Anderson who, 29 years later, as Major Anderson, was in command of Fort Sumter to hear the opening guns of the civil war.
When his 20 days were up under Captain Iles, the same day
Lincoln enlisted for a third time for 30 days more – in the company of
Captain Jacob Early. Although he again saw no actual fighting, he witnessed the savage results of the skirmish at Kellogg’s Grove on June
25, and helped bury five men whom the Indians scalped. On July 16,
1832, Lincoln was mustered out for the third and last time at Black
River.
The men started home the next day. Lincoln and his mess-mate,
George Harrison, had their horses stolen, so walked and rode by turns with others mustered out. Lincoln and Harrison bought a canoe at
Peoria and paddled down to Pekin, then to Havana. There, they sold their boat and again set out the old way, over the sand-ridges, for
Petersburg. The discharged volunteer arrived in New Salem only 10 days before the August election. Lincoln picked up the race for the
7 legislature, but to no avail. It was not only his first attempt at public office, but it was also to be his first defeat.
However, former Captain Lincoln never took his military campaigning seriously. The politician’s habit of glorifying the petty incidents of a candidate’s life always seemed absurd to him, and in a speech – made in 1848, ridiculing the effort on the part of General Cass’ friends to draw some political advantage from that gentleman’s respectable but obscure services on the frontier in the war with Great
Britain – he stymied any future writer from painting his own military achievements in too lively colors. He said:
Did you know, Mr. Speaker, I am a military hero?
In the days of the Black Hawk war I fought, bled,
and came away. I was not at Stillman’s defeat,
but I was about as near it as General Cass was to
Hull’s surrender; and, like him, I saw the place
very soon afterwards. It is quite certain I did not
break my sword, for I had none to break, but I
bent my musket pretty badly on one occasion. If
8 General Cass went in advance of me picking
whortleberries, I guess I surpassed him in charges
on the wild onions. If he saw any live fighting
Indians, it was more than I did, but I had a good
many bloody struggles with the mosquitoes; and
although I never fainted from loss of blood, I can
truly say I was often very hungry. If ever I should
conclude to doff whatever our Democratic friends
may suppose there is of black-cockade Federalism
about me, and thereupon they shall take me up as
their candidate for the Presidency, I protest that
they shall not make fun of me, as they have of
General Cass, by attempting to write me into a
military hero.
Captain Lincoln’s short – but revealing – military experience in that rough-hewn, frontier, untrained, volunteer-fought Black Hawk War was to be the preview of those great qualities he was to portray nearly 30 years later. In 1850, the author Herman Melville clearly had Lincoln’s
9 calibre in mind when he wrote:
In time of peril, like the needle to the lodestone,
obedience, irrespective of rank, generally flies to
him who is best fitted to command.
(Sources: Nicolay and Hay, “Abraham Lincoln, A History,” 1886; Oates,
“With Malice Toward None,” 1977; Beverage, “Abraham Lincoln 1809-
1858,” Vol. I, 1928; Sandburg, “Abraham Lincoln, The Prairie Years,”
1926.)
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