Lincoln had in anticipation of this day repeatedly emphasized what taking this oath would mean—to newspapermen when he was president-elect out in Springfield, to his friend Senator Orville Browning on the way to Washington, and particularly to the representatives of the so-called peace conference—the “old men’s conference”—chaired by ex-president John Tyler. This group had come to him in the Willard Hotel to implore him to yield to the “just demands” of the South so that there would not be “national bankruptcy” in which “grass shall grow in the streets of our commercial cities.” Lincoln had at first been mollifying toward this group, but when their persistence led them to ask whether his reply meant he would yield to the demands of the South, he invoked, with strong words, the oath he would take and said that the Constitution must be obeyed, “let grass grow where it may.”
Throughout his address he underlined the moral significance of the oath he would shortly take. In his very first sentence—the first words he would speak formally to the whole people—he said, “In compliance with a custom as old as the government itself, I appear before you…to take, in your presence, the oath prescribed by the Constitution.” As he turned from his preliminary reassurances to the South—the part that most offended Frederick Douglass—to his main argument, he referred again to the oath he would take: “I take the official oath today, with no mental reservations, and no purpose to construe the Constitution or laws, by any hypercritical rules.” At the end of the address he included a most dramatic reiteration of the importance of taking that oath—the contrast not only between his own previous and present situations but also between his moral situation and that of the “dissatisfied countrymen” to whom he was appealing. “You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to ‘preserve, protect, and defend’ it.” That is: You are still in a realm of calculation and choice; I will be in the different moral realm of necessity. You can act differently; I cannot. The moral claim upon me is categorical; on you, hypothetical; for me, imperative, for you, discretionary. I will take a most solemn oath—you will have no such oath. My oath will be “registered in Heaven”—you have no such heavenly registration for any purpose of yours. I cannot alter my course of action—you are not prevented from altering yours.
With the clerk holding the Bible, the chief justice, in a voice that could scarcely be heard, administered, and the tall president-elect, in a more audible voice, swore the oath prescribed by the Constitution: “I, Abraham Lincoln, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” The echo of that oath would sound across the thirty thousand citizens standing in front of the East Portico and then, as we may say, across the ages.
That tableau made quite a tidy capsule of American history: Taney, who had been the author of the Dred Scott decision, denying that black persons had any rights, administered the oath to Lincoln, who would be the author of the Emancipation Proclamation.
The event certainly had different meanings to the two participants. Taney thought that the oath he was administering to Lincoln prohibited this executive from “coercing” states to remain in the Union; Lincoln thought that the oath administered to him by Taney required him to do so.
Were there not many other oath-takers on the scene on that March day? Yes, the platform behind Lincoln was loaded with them: senators, congressmen, judges, cabinet officials, governors. The Constitution specified that all officials both of the United States and of the states “shall be bound by oath or affirmation to support this constitution.” But the president’s moral situation is nevertheless unique: in his case, the words of his oath are specified. Where these others are sworn to support the Constitution, the president swears, more fundamentally, to defend it, to preserve it, to protect it. These other officials are numerous and have particular functions within the constitutional structure; the president is a single individual; in the oath, and also in the provision that “he [the president] shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” he is given a general and a personal responsibility that goes beyond particular functions. The personal aspect is underscored by the interesting concession that the framers inserted in the very wording of the oath: “to the best of my ability.” There is a human being in this office.
For most presidents most of the time, taking the oath, although no doubt a solemn moment, is rather remote in its application. But in Lincoln’s case taking that solemn oath had existential immediacy. The constitutional union he was swearing to preserve (to the best of his ability) was at that very moment in desperate need of preservation.*5
Before three months passed, there would come another exchange between the ceremonial pair, Taney and Lincoln, featuring both the oath and that “take care” clause. The chief justice would challenge the president’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus in Maryland, as it teetered on the brink of secession, turning that phrase back against this new president. One who has sworn to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” Taney wrote, should not himself violate those laws. The new president would respond, not right away and not directly—actually he would ignore Taney’s order—but in a passage in the message he would send to the July 4 special session of Congress. He would answer Taney, without naming him, with this oft-quoted counterchallenge: “Are all the laws but one to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?”*6
He said more. He made a significant reference to his oath—a more potent reference as he first wrote it than in the official version he sent over to Congress and deposited in the collections we can read today. He first wrote this key passage—a novice president responding to the direct challenge of a venerable chief justice—in the first person. But then he appears to have been sobered by the formality of the occasion. He was writing his first formal message as president of the United States (the inaugural he had written as a private citizen) and he was addressing, as the Constitution says he may do, a special session of Congress that he had summoned, as the Constitution says he may also do. He would not be speaking his words himself; they would be read to the assembled congressmen by a clerk. He therefore hid his original first-person passages behind the curtain of the third person and the passive voice. One reads that “the Executive” does this and “the Executive” and sometimes “the present incumbent” does that. The sentence about the oath was recast in the form of a question and now read: “Would not the official oath be broken [not saying by whom] if the government was overthrown, when it was believed [not saying who did the believing] that disregarding the single law would tend to preserve it?” But the sentence had been much stronger as he had originally composed it, not as a question but as an assertion, and in the first person. In that form it epitomized the plenary Lincolnian justification for a long string of actions he was going to take in the years to come:
I should consider my official oath broken, if I should allow the government to be overthrown, when I might think the disregarding of a single law would tend to preserve it.†7
The distinguished twentieth-century constitutional lawyer Edward Corwin writes that this reference by Lincoln to the oath is the “outstanding precedent…for treating the oath as a source of power” and that Lincoln “permanently recruited power for the presidency…recruited it, that is, from the presidential oath.” But is it not a rather curious foreshortening of the meaning of an oath to treat it as a “source of power”? Is not Corwin’s choice of the word “recruited” rather odd in this connection? An oath is not a distribution of power but a solemn engagement of the self. If there is any “recruiting,” then the moral agent is recruited, and seriously engaged, to conduct himself in a specified way.*8
HE HAS SO FAR DONE HIS DUTY
IN THE EXCRUCIATING SIX WEEKS that followed, Lincoln made history-defining decisions in fulfillment of his oath. He wrote out a summary in his mess
age to the special session of Congress that he called for July 4. The last long paragraph bristles with the accents of duty and of moral necessity:
It was with deepest regret that the Executive found the duty of employing the war power, in defense of the government, forced upon him. He could but perform this duty, or surrender the existence of the government.
A victory by the rebels would not be merely some graceful severing of ties. It would be the “surrender [of] the existence of the government.” That was what he had a sworn duty to oppose.
Lincoln as an emerging politician had shown himself to be, in most circumstances, one who compromised, sought limited ends, and adapted to differing claims, differing possibilities. He did not continually invoke absolute moral claims or his own stern duty, as many moral reformers and abolitionists would do, without regard to consequences. But he was also one who recognized a point at which compromise was no longer morally permissible; he had shown already in the previous winter that he could draw the line, and he held to it with “a chain of steel.” He resisted any compromise that gave new territory to slavery, and he would not mute the moral condemnation of slavery. This moment required him to say that “no compromise, by public servants could, in this case, be a cure,” because it would be a precedent that destroyed the essence of popular government. “As a private citizen,” Lincoln asserted, “the Executive could not have consented that these institutions shall perish; much less could he, in betrayal of so vast, and so sacred a trust, as these free people had confided to him.”
These free people had confided in him a trust that was “vast”—a word Lincoln used often to indicate the reach that his moral imagination discerned. At the end of his first annual message to Congress, in December 1861, he would write, “The struggle of today is not altogether for today—it is for a vast future also.” The decisions now taken have an immense extension in time. And at the particularly personal end of his first message as president, he used that word to indicate the magnitude of the trust the American people had given him, as president at this moment. It was also “so sacred” a trust. Lincoln’s use of religious and semireligious terms was chaste and sparing but also powerful when he did it. In this case he deepened, made more serious, surrounded with an aura, the “sacred” trust the people had placed in him.
In the draft for his inaugural address he had written in the last paragraph, in a sentence that he cut, “You can forbear the assault upon [the government]; I can not shrink from the defense of it.” Now in this climactic personal statement about those tremendous decisions of the first months of his presidency, he used similar words. “He felt he had no moral right to shrink,” he wrote, “nor even to count the chances of his own life, in what might follow.” Scholars have noted that Lincoln had a distinct inclination to make rhetorical references to his own death—an inclination that for us, knowing what would come, takes on poignancy. “In full view of his great responsibility, he has, so far, done what he has deemed his duty,” he said to Congress. “You will now, according to your own judgment, perform yours.”
In the four years that followed, Lincoln often distinguished what he did as an oath-bound president from what he might have done in his personal capacity. Doing so no doubt expressed his genuine sense of constitutional rectitude. At the same time, Lincoln being Lincoln, his making of that distinction could serve a political purpose. In the fall of 1861, when he had to outrage many opponents of slavery by rescinding the military emancipation proclaimed by General John C. Frémont, he wrote a letter—to Orville Browning on September 22, 1861—explaining his action, noting not only that he believed Congress could pass such an emancipation law but that he might himself vote for it if he were in Congress, thus keeping clear his personal opposition to slavery. But then he insisted that a president sworn to uphold the Constitution could not just take over “the permanent legislative functions of the government” by an act like Frémont’s.
A PRETTY MESS YOU’VE GOT ME INTO
LINCOLN WAS FILLING a role that demanded all his powers, serving ends in which he deeply believed, accomplishing something worthy of the world’s esteem, as he had said at age twenty-three was his ambition. But he certainly did not treat this high position as any personal triumph. He did not glory in it, swagger, or insist on preferment, let alone domination. He would treat his formal eminence instead with that humor that was often the carrier of his wisdom.
John Hay told this story:
At a dark period of the war a gentleman of some local prominence came to Washington, so as to obtain the assistance of Lincoln for some purpose. He brought a good deal of evidence to prove that he was the man who originated his nomination and therefore his holding the high office. This man of prominence came up to Lincoln in the “vestibule” of the White House and walked with him over to the War Department, talking to him steadily. When Lincoln went into the War Department the man waited patiently for him; and when Lincoln emerged, he walked back to the White House with him, citing further facts and arguments about his role in getting Lincoln the office.
At the door the President turned, and, “with that smile which was half sadness and half fun,” he said: “So you think you made me President?”
“Yes, Mr. President, under Providence, I think I did.”
“Well,” said Lincoln, opening the door and going in, “it’s a pretty mess you’ve got me into. But I forgive you.”
CHAPTER TWO
Act Well Your Part, There All the Honor Lies
DISTINGUISHED PRESIDENTS—ON THE WHOLE
ABRAHAM LINCOLN WAS the sixteenth man to take the oath prescribed in the Constitution for the president of the United States. He had said in his inaugural that the fifteen men who had “in succession administered the executive branch” before this day had been “greatly distinguished” and had done their work “generally with great success.” In his draft he had written “on the whole with great success,” but he changed the wording slightly perhaps because “on the whole” might hint at faintness of praise.
Had they in fact been greatly distinguished? The first six presidents, counting that “first son of the Republic” John Quincy Adams among them, had been great men, pitched up to greatness by the events of the Revolution and the Founding. They represented an astonishing cluster of great men in one or two generations who, even after more than two centuries of national life, still compose a significant cadre of the nation’s most luminous persons. But their greatness had not necessarily been concentrated in their presidencies.
Then there had come the large figure of Andrew Jackson. Lincoln had made his first political choice to join the party that was opposed to President Jackson. But now in his new role he did endorse, selectively, Jackson’s Union-supporting backbone and executive force. Out in Springfield he had asked his law partner, William Herndon, for only three works to refer to as he wrote his inaugural address, and one of those had been President Jackson’s strong defense of national integrity during the nullification crisis of 1832. In a stark moment of these first days he would refer to Jackson, along with Washington, as a model of presidential steadfastness. “There is no Washington in that—no Jackson in that,” he would say to the delegation from Baltimore that would “have me break my oath and surrender the government.”
Had the eight presidents since Jackson been “greatly distinguished”? Had they been “on the whole” successful? None had served more than one term—four of them less than one term, the two Whig generals Harrison and Taylor dying in office and their two accidental successors not being nominated when the term was up. President Polk, whom some would name as the best of the group, had been attacked with particular vigor by Congressman Lincoln for his role in initiating and trying to justify the Mexican War.
Five of these eight, as it happened, were still alive as the sixteenth took his oath; none of the five had supported his election. In addition to Presidents Buchanan, sitting behind him at his inauguration, and Pierce, in grumpy retirement in New Hampshire, there was Mill
ard Fillmore, the nation’s second accidental president, who after failing election on the nativist American Party line in 1856 had faded back into suitable obscurity in Buffalo. There was President John Tyler, the first vice president to succeed to the office, whom John Quincy Adams referred to disdainfully as “His Accidency.” Tyler had just chaired that “old men’s” peace conference that had met with President-elect Lincoln in the Willard Hotel, and he would now return to Virginia to support the rebellion. (His son, president of the College of William and Mary, would make a whole career of attacking Lincoln.) And there was President Martin Van Buren, the “little magician” from Kinderhook who, having been the Free-Soil candidate in 1848, had taken his magic back to Kinderhook. Lincoln had done his first full-fledged campaigning in a presidential election arguing against Van Buren—or, as Lincoln’s fellow Whigs called him in 1840, blaming him for the Panic of 1837, “Martin Van Ruin.” Lincoln had then campaigned against him again when Van Buren turned up in a quite different guise in 1848, as the rather surprising candidate of the Free-Soil Party; Lincoln tried to keep antislavery Whigs in line against the newly put-together Free-Soilers. Van Buren in the election just past had supported the “fusion” in New York, the effort by the other parties to combine to stop Lincoln and throw the election into the House. But before many months of civil war would pass, Van Buren would in his last days swing around to support President Lincoln.
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