President Lincoln- The Duty of a Statesman

by William Lee Miller

  Still on July 21, though, he would propose the “definitive steps” with respect to “military action.” He read to the cabinet an order which “contemplated authority to Commanders to subsist their troops in the hostile territory,” and this proposed order, according to Chase, was, after discussion, unanimously approved.

  The first item in Lincoln’s executive order specified that military commanders in nine rebel states, starting with Virginia, should “[i]n an orderly manner, seize and use any property, real or personal, which may be necessary or convenient for their several commands for supplies or for other military purposes.”

  He did specify also the limiting restraints: “While property may be destroyed for proper military objects, none shall be destroyed in wantonness or malice.”

  But the harder war, the warfare that included appropriation and destruction of enemy property that began in 1862 and would lead to wider destruction in 1863 and 1864, and to Sherman’s march across the Deep South and Sheridan’s 1864 campaign in the Shenandoah Valley, had one of its beginnings in the decisions of a determined president in the summer of 1862.

  Lincoln had already in June brought east the aggressive and ambitious General John Pope, a victor in an important battle in the West, and given him command of a newly assembled Union army. Pope issued a series of orders authorizing his army to live off the land and to punish civilians who supported guerrillas.

  McClellan was outraged by all of Pope’s orders (and implicitly by Lincoln’s as well) and insisted that for any property his army had to take, there would be receipts. He told his wife that he would issue an order that would give “directly the reverse instructions” to his army and “take the highest Christian ground.” In the order itself he would insist, with all the invidious implication of saying so, that the war “should be conducted up on the highest principles known to Christian civilization.”

  An explicitly “moral” twenty-first-century critic of Lincoln’s conduct of the war, Harry Stout of Yale, laments the disappearance, with McClellan’s departure, of those high Christian principles, and says this about Lincoln’s presumably less “Christian” decisions at this moment in 1862: “When forced to choose between principled war and victory, Lincoln chose victory.” One may suggest that this formulation is doubly perverse. In the first place it implies that Lincoln, seeking mere victory, threw over all moral restraints in the conduct of the war, which is false. Lincoln continued to observe and to help his armies to observe, even in the passions of warfare, the moral restraints of what he would call “civilized belligerents,” as we will see in Chapter 18.

  But in the second place that formulation is perverse because it discounts (as mere “victory” devoid of “principle”) Lincoln’s overriding duty, to preserve the Union—implying no moral weight whatever for that vast and sacred trust, that huge good (keeping in being the United States and hence its contribution to the world the possibility of republican government). He had to prevent huge evils (the “destruction,” the “overthrow,” of the United States and the coming into being of a new slave empire). “Victory” for Lincoln was not an amoral objective in the realm only of power but a stringent personal obligation entailing a huge historic good for the whole human family. Lincoln would be a principled warrior for a principled victory.

  It is to be remembered that McClellan’s war “conducted upon the highest principles known to Christian civilization” included among its principles a repudiation of all confiscation of property—including property in slaves. “Forcible abolition of slavery,” wrote McClellan, should not be “contemplated for a moment.” And on Lincoln’s side the new orders included the taking of property—and the freeing of that peculiar form of property, millions of human beings held in bondage. The “harder” war and emancipation were bound together.

  FACING THE ARITHMETIC

  FOR ALL HIS KINDLINESS and magnanimity, this president was proving himself capable of facing the realities of a giant war.

  The battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862 was one of the most appalling defeats of a Union army in the entire war. Ambrose Burnside sent the Army of the Potomac in a series of frontal attacks on entrenched Confederate positions on the heights behind the town that resulted in staggering Union casualties particularly as compared with Confederate casualties.*40 The president, like everyone else in the federal establishment, was of course dismayed, but one of his secretaries, William O. Stoddard, reported that at the same time Lincoln also made this bluntly realistic assessment—notable for his recognition of the arithmetic and of the toll that disease took as men dawdled in camps:

  If the same battle were to be fought over again, every day, through a week of days, with the same relative results, the army under Lee would be wiped out to its last man, the Army of the Potomac would still be a mighty host, the war would be over, the Confederacy gone, and peace would be won at a smaller cost of life than it will be if the week of lost battles must be dragged out through yet another year of camps and marches, and of deaths in hospitals rather than upon the field. No general yet found can face the arithmetic, but the end of the war will be at hand when he shall be discovered.

  Lincoln himself was able to “face the arithmetic” in the stern calculations of a major war. He was able to make decisions, even going against the grain of advice, as he did on his first day in office and throughout the demanding period up to the fall of Sumter, and then in the radically altered context after the fall of Sumter, giving shape to the clarified public will, doing what needed to be done to save the capital city and build the armed services. He would begin to show his resilience after the stunning, altogether unexpected debacle at Bull Run. Lincoln would come to have, in his own way, the steadfast strength of will to direct collective action. He could discern the contours of a situation; there are paragraphs in his letters to generals that show a most extraordinary grasp of detail. At the same time he could relate political to military requirements, and both to moral purpose; he could bring others to his will by persuasion perhaps more than some great statesmen but by command as well. And he could persist, remaining steadfast in pursuit of his purpose, as he would have the most wrenching occasions to demonstrate.

  MAJOR KEY AND THE PURPOSE OF THE WAR

  THAT THE TENDERHEARTED Lincoln was capable of making hard decisions could be seen not only in the large matters but in lesser matters involving one person only: for example, the case of Major John Key. Among the many individual cases that came to Lincoln’s attention, this one was unusual in that it arose from Lincoln’s own initiative and in that it set Lincoln’s sympathy for the bereaved directly against high policy.

  Lincoln learned, in late September 1862, that Major John J. Key, the brother of an important aide to McClellan, when asked by a fellow officer the baffling question of why the Army of the Potomac had not pursued and destroyed the rebel army after Antietam, had replied: “That is not the game. The object is that neither army shall get much advantage of the other; that both shall be kept in the field till they are exhausted, when we will make a compromise and save slavery.”*41

  Lincoln called in and cross-examined Major Key and also Major Levi Turner, to whom the comments had been made. Receiving confirmation, he dismissed Key from the Union army: “In my view it is wholly inadmissible for any gentleman holding a military commission from the United States to utter such sentiments.”

  Key had friends. General Halleck supported him. Major Turner insisted he had never heard Key say anything disloyal. Key himself protested that he was altogether loyal to the Union. And then came an event that might have been expected to clinch his reinstatement with a tenderhearted president: on November 11, 1862, in the battle near Perryville, Kentucky, Major Key’s eighteen-year-old son, James (or Joseph) Key, of the 50th Ohio Volunteers, was wounded, then died of his wounds. So Major Key was now a bereaved parent, the father of a soldier who had died fighting for the Union. Major Key now asked Lincoln for reinstatement.

  Lincoln wrote this response on Novembe
r 24, 1862:

  A bundle of letters including one from yourself, was…handed me by Gen. Halleck…I sincerely sympathise with you in the death of your brave and noble son.

  In regard to my dismissal of yourself…, it seems to me you misunderstand me. I did not charge…you with disloyalty. I had been brought to fear that there was a class of officers in the army…, who were playing a game to not beat the enemy when they could, on some peculiar notion as to the proper way of saving the Union; and when you were proved to me, in your own presence, to have avowed yourself in favor of that “game,” and did not attempt to controvert the proof, I dismissed you as an example and a warning…

  I bear you no ill will; and I regret that I could not have the example without wounding you personally. But can I now, in view of the public interest, restore you to the service, by which the army would understand that I…approve that game myself? If there was any doubt of your having made the avowal, the case would be different. But when it was proved to me, in your presence, you did not deny…it, but confirmed it in my mind, by attempting to sustain the position by argument.

  I am really sorry for the pain the case gives you, but I do not see how, consistently with duty, I can change it. Yours, &c.

  A. LINCOLN

  When Lincoln told John Hay about his dismissal of McClellan, he followed immediately with a reference to the Key case: “I dismissed Major Key for his silly treasonable talk because I feared it was staff talk and I wanted an example”—staff talk in the circles around McClellan about holding back so as to save slavery.

  THE GENEROSITY OF A STATESMAN

  SO PERHAPS THE QUESTION about the original kindly Lincoln would now reverse itself.

  Might it then be that the Illinois politician who taught himself to make the mammoth decisions he made, who broadened the war, faced the arithmetic of army deaths, and gathered his strength to fire silly-talking majors and dismiss generals, would no longer be the generous man he had been? The answer to that question came very soon and kept coming. The golden thread of magnanimity and generosity that would wind its way through his presidency had already been apparent in his choice of the three strongest candidates opposing him for the Republican nomination—four if you count Cameron—for the most important positions in his cabinet. To be sure, there were political considerations in doing so; he needed Seward and Chase in particular, and Bates too, to help consolidate behind the administration the diverse elements of the still-new Republican Party. All presidents have considerations of these kinds, but, still, other presidents have not appointed all of their top defeated rivals to the top cabinet posts.

  Even in the immediate crushing pressure of the Sumter crisis, little indications of this great quality of this president had appeared. Four days into his presidency, in the midst of the crunch of decisions about Fort Sumter, President Lincoln took time to write a careful letter of explanation to a perhaps disappointed candidate for a cabinet position. He put into insistent words what would not guide him in his administration. Caleb Smith was named secretary of the interior almost certainly because he came from Indiana and thereby provided a needed geographical spread, and also perhaps because he had made a well-timed seconding speech for Lincoln in Chicago. But another Hoosier might have received that appointment, the rising Republican congressman Schuyler Colfax. Significantly Lincoln, soon after taking office in 1861, went out of his way to write to Colfax to explain why he had appointed Caleb Smith and to insist that Colfax’s own support for Douglas for the Illinois Senate seat in 1858 had nothing to do with the matter (“Indeed, I should have decided as I did, easier than I did, had that matter never existed”). He concluded with the characteristic Lincolnian plea: “I now have to beg that you will not do me the injustice to suppose, for a moment, that I remembered anything against you in malice.”

  QUARREL NOT AT ALL

  PRESIDENT LINCOLN’S charity and nonvindictiveness were explicit and reasoned. Although something in the given nature of a boy who told his classmates not to put hot coals on the backs of turtles no doubt made its contribution, this quality was a reflection not merely of an original disposition but of thought.

  Both in public speeches and in private letters, both in informal comment and in formal orders, he made explicit reference to avoiding malice and to not seeking revenge and to not planting thorns often enough to indicate that it was a developed and settled conviction.

  Among the many instances of Lincoln’s explicit rejection of political resentments was his prudent response, recorded in Hay’s diary, to the glee of Welles and Fox at the defeat of two men they regarded as enemies of the Navy Department. “You have more of that feeling of personal resentment than I,” Hay quotes Lincoln as saying. “Perhaps I have too little of it, but I never thought it paid. A man has not the time to spend half his life in quarrels. If a man ceases to attack me, I never remember the past against him.”

  The full text of a letter of Lincoln’s about avoiding quarrels was not discovered until 1947, when his papers were opened, although Nicolay and Hay had published part of it. In his diary for October 23, 1863, John Hay attached a copy of this letter, together with the remark that it contained “rather the mildest cussing on record.” The person so mildly cussed was James Madison Cutts, who had connections both to Stephen Douglas and to Dolley Madison. “The poor devil seems heartbroken,” wrote Hay. “He can scarcely stare one in the face.”

  Cutts’s connections, and his sins, were as follows. Douglas’s first wife died in 1853, and in 1856 he married a grandniece of Dolley Madison named Adele Cutts. She had a brother named James Madison Cutts, who served as Douglas’s secretary through the 1860 campaign (thus campaigning, obviously, against Lincoln). When war came, Cutts enlisted at first as a private but then presented Lincoln a letter of recommendation from Douglas, and in May 1861 the president appointed him a captain. On the staff of General Burnside, he came to be charged with two rather disparate offenses: he was caught in a hotel hallway standing on a suitcase peering over the transom at a woman dressing (offense number one) and (offense two) he fiercely attacked Burnside, his commanding officer, in letters that he sent to the president, and quarreled with his fellow officers. This rather oddly assorted pair of offenses led a court-martial to find him guilty of conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman and to dismiss him from the army.

  The case came to the commander in chief. The transom offense evoked from Lincoln not just one but two puns—that Cutts might be elevated to the “peerage” and that his title might be “Count Piper” (pronounced “Peeper” Lincoln’s pun and allusion were probably suggested by the name of the Swedish minister Edward Count Piper). Lincoln upheld the findings of the court-martial but reduced the penalty to a reprimand, and wrote to young Cutts this letter:

  Executive Mansion

  Washington Oct 26, 1863

  Capt. James M. Cutts,

  Although what I am now to say is to be, in form, a reprimand, it is not intended to add a pang to what you have already suffered on the subject to which it relates.

  Part of the point of a reprimand is to add such a pang, but apparently not at the hands of Abraham Lincoln.

  You have too much of life yet before you, and have shown too much of promise as an officer, for your future to be lightly surrendered.

  The transom-peeping offense the no-pang president sets aside without much fuss.

  You are convicted of two offenses. One of them, not of great enormity, and yet greatly to be avoided, I feel sure you are in no danger of repeating.

  Cutts’s contentious behavior, his attacks on and quarrels with his fellow officers and even his commanding general, on the other hand, provoked Lincoln to interesting moral instruction.

  The other [offense] you are not so well assured against. The advice of a father to his son, “Beware of entrance to a quarrel, but being in, bear it that the opposed may beware of thee” is good, but not the best.

  That was Lincoln’s equivalent of “Ye have heard of old time.” Now comes
the “But I say unto you.”

  Quarrel not at all. No man resolved to make the most of himself, can spare time for personal contention. Still less can he afford to take all the consequences, including the vitiating of his temper and the loss of self-control.

  Maintaining self-control was of central importance to Lincoln; it was one of the reasons he did not drink. Now comes the further specific injunction:

  Yield larger things to which you can show no more than equal right; and yield lesser ones, though clearly your own.

  Interpreting Lincoln, we might say: We overestimate our own interest, and we underestimate our adversary’s, so that the advice to yield on all small matters, and on all matters that even to our distorting eyes seem equally balanced, is a moral corrective. Here is a lawyer, and a politician, and a war leader in the midst of tremendous battles giving this surprising advice: quarrel not at all.