The record shows that the brief meeting ended with Lincoln approving two of Kilpatrick’s proposed objectives: freeing the prisoners on Belle Isle and at Libby, and severing Confederate communications. Lincoln further proposed that Kilpatrick distribute the president’s recent amnesty proclamation aimed at persuading secessionists to return to the Union fold. They also probably discussed how near Kilpatrick and his troopers came to Richmond during the Chancellorsville campaign raid. That experience was, evidently, Kilpatrick’s ticket of admission to the White House.

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Perhaps, too, Lincoln repeated for the cavalryman a remark he had made at the time of Chancellorsville, to the effect that the Confederate capital was so lightly defended that Kilpatrick’s Federal cavalry ‘could have safely gone in and burnt every thing & brought us Jeff Davis.’⁴ Certainly the thought of Davis’ capture was fresh in the president’s mind–after all, he approved it as a stated objective of Butler’s recently aborted Richmond raid. (It may be noted here that by the generally accepted rules of civilized warfare of the 1860s, the capture of the opposing head of state and his chief advisers was a legitimate wartime objective and no doubt was discussed as openly in Richmond as it was in Washington. Assassination of civilian leaders, on the other hand, was regarded as beyond the pale.) Whatever their discussion may have included, when Lincoln sent Kilpatrick on to Secretary of War Stanton to work out the detailed planning for the raid, Jefferson Davis was not listed in any respect as a stated objective.

As will be seen, there is good reason to believe that Kilpatrick’s planning meeting in Stanton’s office at the War Department was pivotal in regard to the case of the Dahlgren papers. For now, suffice it to say that the sole surviving account of the meeting is Kilpatrick’s, dated February 16, and consists of his plan for the raid as submitted, at Stanton’s request, to the army’s cavalry command.

There were only three stated objectives for the raid: free the prisoners in Richmond’s military prisons, destroy Rebel communications, and distribute the president’s amnesty proclamation behind Confederate lines.⁵

Next, plans for the Richmond raid needed to be incorporated into the Army of the Potomac’s operations system. General Meade had reservations about the scheme but, learning that it was already approved by Lincoln and Stanton, dutifully went about putting it into practice. (Maj. Gen. Alfred Pleasonton, head of the Cavalry Corps, went on record as opposed to the plan.) Meade’s directive to Kilpatrick for the operation included the extraordinary disclaimer that ‘no detailed instructions are given you, since the plan of your operations has been proposed by yourself, with the sanction of the President and the Secretary of War….’ Meade, in short, would issue all the necessary enabling orders, but he did not know, and did not try to find out, anything more about Kilpatrick’s plan than Kilpatrick was willing to reveal. It would be an Army of the Potomac plan in name only. ‘The undertaking is a desperate one,’ Meade confided to his wife, ‘but the anxiety and distress of the public and of the authorities at Washington is so great that it seems to demand running great risks for the chances of success.’⁶

By now the undertaking had its second major player, Colonel Ulric Dahlgren. He appeared unannounced at Kilpatrick’s headquarters one day, said he had heard there was going to be a big cavalry raid, and told the general that he wanted to be in on it. That his offer was accepted and he was given the most responsible job in the operation after Kilpatrick’s is as curious as anything else in the whole tangled undertaking.

Dahlgren was twenty-one, tall, fair-haired, and dashing, with an abiding taste for adventure untempered by even a modicum of common sense. Dahlgren’s father, Rear Adm. John A. Dahlgren, was an expert in naval ordnance, commander of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron, and a close friend of the president’s. Lincoln, in fact, had gotten young Ulric a commission when he decided to give up his college studies and go to war in 1862. Since then he had served in a series of staff positions for army commanders Ambrose Burnside, Joseph Hooker, and Meade, dashing recklessly into action whenever the opportunity offered itself.

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