When he sent Greeley to Niagara Falls, Lincoln wrote out a statement “To Whom it may concern,” stating that “any proposition which embraces…the restoration of the peace, the integrity of the whole Union, and the abandonment of slavery” will be “received and considered” by the executive.*73 It was the third item—“the abandonment of slavery”—that set hair on fire. It went further than Lincoln had gone before. Whatever shadows the Emancipation Proclamation had cast, it had had limits of geography and of status as a war measure; it was vulnerable to later decision. It did not indicate that the entire institution of slavery was to be uprooted and permanently destroyed. But now this phrase from Lincoln suggested that a permanent and complete end to slavery was a condition of peace. And Democrats seized upon the phrase as confirmation that Lincoln’s position on slavery would prevent peace.
SOMEBODY OTHER THAN LINCOLN?
HERE WAS LINCOLN’S political plight: the Copperheads condemned him because he was conducting an abolitionist war, and the abolitionists condemned him because he wasn’t. And the apparent bloody stalemate accentuated the negative on all sides.
Lincoln was by no means guaranteed the support of all Republicans; the Republican Party was a newly formed entity, without any prior experience with presidencies and administrations. Lincoln’s term was the first time the party had held office. The party had suffered blows in the congressional election of 1862, after Lincoln’s preliminary emancipation proclamation. When the party did better in the 1863 elections, the Radicals took credit. Mingled with the usual disgruntlements and the usual rival ambitions—why should he be president instead of me?—were heavy ideological components. That a president would serve two terms was not presumed. None of the eight presidents since Andrew Jackson had served two terms. Polk had indicated from the start that he would serve only the one term; Tyler, Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan had not been nominated by their own party for a second term. No sitting president had been renominated by his party since Van Buren in 1840; no sitting president had been reelected since Jackson in 1836.
The Republican Party comprised conservatives or “moderates” (like Lincoln’s friends Orville Browning and David Davis, and perhaps Lincoln himself) and the more sharply etched and abundantly labeled group, most often called Radicals but also called Jacobins (by John Hay), Ultras or Unconditionals (by William Zornow), and Vindictives (by James Randall). In addition to these groups within the Republican Party, Lincoln needed the Democrats who supported the war; in the 1864 election his party would call itself the Union Party and nominate for vice president the Union-supporting Tennessee Democrat Andrew Johnson.
The Radicals, the most pungently ideological Republican group, were the chief source of proposed alternatives to Lincoln, beginning at least at the end of 1863, when in his annual message Lincoln proposed a generous amnesty for rebels, and continuing throughout the election year of 1864, even after the renomination of Lincoln in June in Baltimore. Of the various boomlets for alternatives to Lincoln, the ones that had the most support and persistence were for Salmon Chase and John C. Frémont. Salmon Chase was right on slavery and race but also righteous, and endlessly eager to be president, even as he served in Lincoln’s cabinet. Chase had a long-cultivated cadre of supporters in the minions of the Treasury, and he coyly let others take initiatives toward his supplanting his chief. Two pamphlets circulating in February indicated that Lincoln could not and even should not be reelected and that Secretary Chase had exactly the qualities needed in a president. The effort boomeranged; in response to the second of these pamphlets (called the Pomeroy circular, from the name of the Kansas senator who sent it out), the legislature of Chase’s home state, Ohio, declared for Lincoln. After Lincoln was renominated in Baltimore in June, Chase made another of his many threats to resign; Lincoln surprised him by accepting it. The incorrigible Chase thereupon hinted that he might now be willing to accept the Democratic nomination. As historian William Zornow observes: “Chase apparently would not only swap horses but was willing to exchange streams as well.”
Frémont, his military career long since over, had the support of Missouri German radicals and of leading abolitionists, going back to his effort at emancipation by military decree in August 1861. He was nominated as a third-party candidate by a convention in Cleveland that allowed anyone passing by on the street to enter, speak, and vote. When the New York Herald estimated finally that there were four hundred in attendance, Lincoln “at once asked for a Bible.” When a Bible was brought in, he found 1 Samuel 22:2 and read aloud: “And everyone that was in distress, and every one that was in debt, and everyone that was discontented, gathered themselves unto him; and he became a captain over them; and there were with him about four hundred men.”
Frémont’s third-party candidacy—the party called “Radical Democracy”—continued as a threat to split the Lincoln vote throughout the month of August; he was not persuaded to withdraw until he finally did, under complicated and somewhat disputed circumstances, on September 22.
A DEEP LATENT SADNESS
IN THE SUMMER of 1864 the Lincolns were spending their nights, as they had done in the previous two summers, in the cooler surrounding of the Soldiers’ Home, a facility for disabled veterans on the border of the district with Silver Spring, Maryland, that had come to function as the Camp David of its time.*74 “He never sleeps at the White House during the hot season,” Walt Whitman had written the previous summer about Lincoln, “but has quarters at a healthy location some three miles north of the city, the Soldiers’ home, a United States military establishment.”
Lincoln would ride back and forth each morning and evening, and Whitman would see him go by. “I see the President almost every day, as I happen to live where he passes to or from his lodgings out of town.” One August morning in 1863 Whitman had written: “I saw him this morning about 81/2 coming in to business, riding on Vermont avenue, near L street. He always has a company of twenty-five or thirty cavalry…They say this guard was against his personal wish, but he let his counselors have their way…Mr. Lincoln…looks about as ordinary in attire, &c., as the commonest man.” Although Whitman and Lincoln never spoke, Lincoln seems to have come to expect this bearded stranger at Vermont and L Street: “We have got so that we exchange bows, and very cordial ones…They pass’d me once very close, and I saw the President in the face fully, as they were moving slowly, and his look, though abstracted, happen’d to be directed steadily in my eye. He bow’d and smiled.” “Far beneath” Lincoln’s smile Whitman discerned something else that artists and photographers did not catch—that it would have taken a great portrait painter to catch: “I see very plainly ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S dark brown face, with the deep-cut lines, the eyes, always to me with a deep latent sadness in the expression.”
On Friday, August 5, 1864, Seward read to Lincoln the angry effusion by leading Republican Radicals in Congress, the so-called Wade-Davis Manifesto, attacking Lincoln for his pocket veto of the demanding reconstruction bill that Congress had passed that summer. The “manifesto” was said by Nicolay and Hay to be “the most vigorous attack that was ever directed against the President from his own party during his term.” The document said the president in his reconstruction efforts “strides headlong toward…anarchy…If he wishes our support, he must confine himself to his executive duties—to obey and execute, not make the laws—to suppress by arms armed Rebellion, and leave political reorganization to Congress.”
On August 10 Lincoln met with John Eaton, a sympathetic friend of black Americans who had been appointed by Grant to a key position dealing with freedmen in the Mississippi Valley. Eaton wanted to tell Lincoln about damaging regulations and treatment of “contrabands” in his care, and he found in the president a deep curiosity about the freedmen. On his way to Washington to see the president, Eaton had heard a lecture by Frederick Douglass, which included criticisms of Lincoln’s performance. Lincoln had Eaton tell him what Douglass had said, and then had a proposal. “[T]he President of the United St
ates and the greatest man of his time asked me,” Eaton wrote, “with the curious modesty characteristic of him, if I thought Mr. Douglass could be induced to come to see him. I replied that I rather thought he could.”
That’s a scene: Lincoln, expecting to lose the election, making earnest queries about the life and condition of the freedmen—there would be more than one conversation with Eaton—and modestly asking whether the freedmen’s greatest spokesman would be willing to meet with him.
On Friday, August 12, the astute New York Republican manager Thurlow Weed came to visit and generously shared the information that Lincoln’s reelection was impossible.
On Tuesday, August 16, a former governor of Wisconsin, named Alexander Randall, who was now in Washington serving as assistant postmaster general, handed Lincoln a long letter written by the editor of the Green Bay Advocate, Charles D. Robinson, who announced his position forthrightly: “Mr President: I am a War Democrat, and the editor of a Democratic paper. I have sustained your Administration since its inauguration, because it is the legally constituted government—I have sustained its war policy, not because I endorsed it entire, but because it presented the only available method of putting down the rebellion.” Robinson had taken “hard knocks” from his fellow Democrats who accused him of having been “abolitionized”: “We replied that we regarded the freeing of the negroes as sound war policy, in that the depriving the South of its laborers weakened the strength of the Rebellion. That was a good argument, and was accepted by a great many men who would have listened to no other.” Moral arguments passed them by. In fact, they felt much hostility to emancipation and black troops. But now Lincoln said his peace terms included “the abandonment of slavery.” Robinson wrote: “This puts the whole war question on a new basis, and takes us War Democrats clear off our feet, leaving us no ground to stand upon.”
The next day Lincoln took up his pencil and drafted a response, trying to work out what argument he could make to the Union supporters who were cool about, or hostile to, emancipation and black troops. He would later edit, tighten, and rewrite it in ink. The drafts included rigorous statements both of the moral and of the practical reasons for not betraying the black soldiers in the Union army. But Lincoln also wrote in these drafts a couple of dubious sentences that hinted at something else. The first sentence in the penciled draft reads:
To me it seems plain that saying re-union and abandonment of slavery would be considered, if offered, is not saying that nothing else would be considered, if offered.
In the later draft in ink, Lincoln made it worse by adding the words “or less”:
To me it seems plain that saying re-union and abandonment of slavery would be considered, if offered, is not saying that nothing else or less would be accepted considered, if offered.
Something less than abandonment of slavery would be “accepted”—strike that—considered?
The suspicion that Lincoln might have momentarily gone wobbly on emancipation (or might have hinted that he might consider suggesting that he might go wobbly) is increased by a last line he added to the draft in ink:
If Jefferson Davis wishes, for himself, or for the benefit of his friends at the North, to know what I would do if he were to offer peace and reunion, saying nothing about slavery, let him try me.
It must be added immediately that the point of these arguments was to bring the War Democrats to face the reality that Davis’s insistence on disunion, not Lincoln’s on emancipation, prolonged the war; that the body of these drafts included rigorous statements of both the moral and the practical reasons not to betray the black soldiers in the Union army; and finally, most important, that no version of this letter was ever sent.
On Thursday, August 18, Lincoln had a with-friends-like-these conversation with his longtime accomplice Leonard Swett, who told Lincoln he could not be reelected and asked if he was going to withdraw.*75
ON FRIDAY, August 19, at the executive mansion, in the context of these expectations of defeat, Lincoln had his second meeting with Frederick Douglass. This encounter was—not to put too small a frame on it—one of the signal meetings in American history, the great president meeting with the greatest black American at this crunch point in the national story, a defining moment for both men: as it would be seen in later years, icon meeting icon, worth examining in detail.
It was extraordinary in several obvious ways: first, that it happened at all (a president of a still slaveholding and widely racist republic meeting with a black man); second, that it came about through the president’s initiative (“President Lincoln did me the honor,” Douglass would write, “to invite me to the Executive Mansion for a conference on the situation”); third, that Lincoln seems from Eaton’s report to have been diffident about issuing the invitation.
While Douglass was meeting with Lincoln, there came a fourth extraordinary feature: his secretary twice announced Governor William Buckingham of Connecticut, and Lincoln told him to tell Governor Buckingham to wait because he wanted to have a long talk “with my friend Frederick Douglass.” Douglass himself observed that this last episode was probably the first time in the history of this republic when anything like that had happened—a white governor had been told to wait while the president talked to a black man. “We were long together and there was much said,” Douglass would write in a letter eight weeks later.
IN HIS REPORT of the meeting to the abolitionist editor Theodore Tilton eight weeks after the event, by which time the political situation had altered radically, Douglass would remind Tilton of the situation that had then prevailed:
The country was struck with one of those bewilderments which dethrone reason for the moment. Everybody was thinking and dreaming of peace, and the impression had gone abroad that the President’s antislavery policy was about the only thing which prevented a peaceful settlement with the Rebels…men were ready for peace almost at any price. The President was pressed on every hand to modify his letter, “To whom it may concern.”
That means he was pressed to modify the specific objective “the abandonment of slavery.”
Now came another extraordinary feature of this meeting: the president asked the ex-slave for his political advice in this highly charged, subtly complicated, and immensely consequential political situation. Douglass wrote to Tilton: “How to meet this pressure he did me the honor to ask my opinion.”
Lincoln showed Douglass the draft of the letter to Robinson, written, as Douglass would say, “with a view to meet the peace clamor raised against him.” The first point it made was that no man or set of men authorized to speak for the Confederate government had ever submitted a proposition for peace to him. Hence the charge that he had in some way stood in the way of peace fell to the ground. He had always stood ready to listen to any such propositions.
That was presumably what Lincoln was trying to get across with his concluding let-him-try-me sentence in the draft. But the next point was much harder:
[T]he charge that he had in his Niagara letter committed himself and the country to an abolition war rather than a war for the union, so that even if the latter could be attained by negotiation, the war would go on for Abolition.
The “Niagara letter” is another name for the “To Whom it May Concern” production; the point, to repeat, is its assertion that the abandonment of slavery is a requirement of peace. Douglass gave abolitionist Tilton the positive report about Lincoln’s position that both of them would want: “The President did not propose to take back what he had said in his Niagara letter.” But at the same time Douglass explained to his anti-Lincoln abolitionist friend Lincoln’s intricate political dilemma:
[He] wished to relieve the fears of his peace friends, by making it appear that the thing which they feared could not happen, and was wholly beyond his power. Even if I would, I could not carry on the war for the abolition of slavery. The country would not sustain such a war, and I could do nothing without the support of Congress. I could not make the abolition of slavery an absolute prior
condition to the reestablishment of the Union.
That is certainly a peculiarly difficult argument to make: Although I hold the abandonment of slavery as a war aim, please be reassured that I cannot attain it, and therefore continue to support me.
Whether or not Douglass got Lincoln’s attempted nuance exactly right, he certainly gave the right advice:
Now the question he put to me was—Shall I send forth this letter—To which I answered—Certainly not. It would be given a broader meaning than you intend to convey; it would be taken as a complete surrender of your anti-slavery policy, and do you serious damage. In answer to your Copperhead accusers, your friends can make the argument of your want of power, but you cannot wisely say a word on that point.
In general Douglass was not as shrewd a political strategist as Lincoln, but in this case he surely was correct both on the practicalities and on the moralities. Lincoln himself could not write a letter in August 1864 like the letter he had written in August 1863 to an audience that was pro-Union and anti-emancipation, because the situation had changed. Now “the peace clamor” had been raised against Lincoln, who was in political trouble in an impending election, and he had included the abandonment of slavery in his conditions for peace. Close reasoning would be lost on the public. Whereas his August 1863 letter to James Conkling and the Springfield Unionists, a big success, had been seen to be pulling racists up to his Union standard, a letter to a similar body of opinion in August 1864 would be seen to be lowering his own standard down to that of the racist Unionists. Don’t do it, advised Douglass.
President Lincoln- The Duty of a Statesman Page 48