Lincoln letter on Gettysburg found at U.S. archives

By David Alexander

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An optimistic two-sentence note that Abraham Lincoln penned to his top general after the Civil War's decisive battle was unveiled on Thursday at the National Archives where it was undetected for nearly 70 years.

The note from Lincoln to Maj. Gen. Henry Halleck was written on July 7, 1863, four days after the defeat of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and three days after the city of Vicksburg on the Mississippi River fell to Union forces.

A misspelling showed the rudimentary education of the 16th U.S. president, who was largely self-taught.

The brief missive to Halleck, the commanding general of the Union Army, remarked on the two major victories after a series of crushing Union losses in the four-year war fought to prevent the then-fledgling union from splitting apart.

Lincoln had repeatedly replaced his generals for failing to be aggressive enough.

Gen. George Meade, who led Union forces at Gettysburg, had taken control of Lincoln's Army of the Potomac just a week before the battle, which came to be seen as the turning point of the Civil War.

The note was found three weeks ago at the archives among documents long open to researchers and was known to have existed because Halleck cited it in a telegram, said archivist Trevor Plante, the Civil War specialist who found it.

The discovery cleared up the mystery of whether Halleck had summarized or interpreted Lincoln's message, Plante said. He quoted Lincoln's message exactly.

"We have certain information that Vicksburg surrendered to General Grant on the 4th of July. Now, if Gen. Meade can complete his work so gloriously prosecuted thus far, by the literal or substantial destruction of Lee's army, the rebellion will be over," the note says.

The document, signed "Yours truly, A. Lincoln," was written on War Department letterhead. Plante said in other writing Lincoln sometimes misspelled the word "literal" and sometimes spelled it correctly.

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Plante found the document while collecting information for a documentary on Gettysburg being produced by the Discovery Channel.

"I was looking for something else and frankly where I found it was in an obscure place," he said.

The letter was in a collection known as the Generals' Papers, a hodgepodge of documents. The papers were transferred to the National Archives from the War Department in 1938. Before 1938 they had been held in a government garage.

"I was going through and just seeing kind of every day stuff and then turned the page and there was the Lincoln document," Plante said.