Lincoln's Mentors

by Michael J. Gerhardt

  All three of Lincoln’s first three appointments to the Court subsequently supported his administration when challenges to his actions or policies came before it. In one of the first and most important, known as the Prize Cases because the fate of prizes of war was at issue, the question was whether Lincoln as president had the authority to order the seizure of vessels bound to or from Confederate ports prior to July 13, 1861. On July 13, Congress declared a state of insurrection, but Lincoln had ordered the blockade before then, in April. On March 10, 1863, the Supreme Court, by the narrow margin of 5–4, announced its decision agreeing with Lincoln. It noted, “As a civil war is never publicly proclaimed [as a formal matter] against insurgents, its actual existence is a fact in our domestic history that the court is bound to notice and to know.”108 Given the circumstances, the Court reasoned that the president was “bound to meet [the war] in the shape it presented itself, without waiting for Congress to baptize it with a name.”109 The four dissenting justices included Chief Justice Taney. All three of Lincoln’s appointees joined with two Democratic appointees to form the five-member majority. Their decision ultimately provided the legal foundation for Lincoln’s use of emergency powers to combat the seven Southern states’ rebellion against the United States. Historian Mark Neely described the case as “the most important Supreme Court decision of the Civil War.”110

  On the same day that the Court decided the Prize Cases, the Senate unanimously confirmed Lincoln’s fourth nominee for the Court, Stephen Field of California. Browning was not a candidate for the fourth seat, since Congress had created it solely for a new circuit, which included the states of California, Oregon, and later Nevada. Field was an obvious choice, since he had served with distinction as both an associate justice and chief justice of the California Supreme Court, graduated first in his class at Williams College, and was a Democrat who had been a leader in keeping California within the Union. His brother, David Dudley Field, was a prominent advocate for legal reform and abolition. He had helped Lincoln win the presidential nomination in 1860 but became one of the president’s sharpest critics among Radical Republicans, who thought he moved too slowly and timidly in eradicating slavery. The nomination did not silence Dudley Field, but it did reward his brother, who was a fierce defender of the Union and had strong political support, including from California’s governor, Leland Stanford.

  The fact that Field’s appointment was the first in history in which a president had crossed major party lines was no accident. With his chances for reelection the next year already looking bleak, Lincoln had to attract some Democratic support to have any chance at all.

  VII

  * * *

  The war dragged on. Both the North and South were desperately looking for ways to expand the numbers of their troops. With only limited success, the Confederacy kept trying to expand the requirements for service in the military but met with resistance, sometimes violent. Lincoln had signed a series of laws, including as recently as March 3, 1863, to register all males between twenty and forty-five, including aliens with the intention of becoming citizens, by April 1. Lincoln had once opposed Douglas’s and the Democrats’ efforts in Illinois to count aliens as residents, but of the 168,649 people the draft reached, nearly two-thirds were substitutes and around seventy-five thousand were actually pressed into service. These numbers barely told the story. Over the course of the war, nearly 2,000,000 troops fought for the Union as compared with 750,000 for the Southern Confederacy.

  Each conflict seemed more momentous than the ones before. This was especially true when, on July 1–3, 1863, the Union Army of the Potomac and Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia clashed at Gettysburg in one of the most decisive battles of the war. Many believed that the fate of the Civil War was at stake.

  Such a clash had been a long time coming, and each side had steadily amassed the forces to annihilate the other. Lee had rarely been beaten and never caught and had thus become the bane of the Union’s existence. Having defeated Union forces at the Battle of Chancellorsville in Virginia, Lee turned his army northward toward Pennsylvania, only the second time after Antietam that Lee brought his forces north. He aimed to bring the war into the Union’s own territory and once and for all break the will of stubborn Northern politicians who had been pressing for continued engagement with the South. Lee would bring with him nearly seventy-five thousand troops.

  Aware that Lee’s forces were heading North for what might be a decisive confrontation with the Union, just three days before one of the most famous battles of the Civil War, Lincoln decided to replace the Army of the Potomac’s commanding general, Joseph Hooker, who had been reluctant to reengage with Lee’s forces after his defeat at Chancellorsville. Lincoln’s replacement was General George Meade. A career army officer, Meade had graduated from West Point and distinguished himself in the Second Seminole War and the Mexican War. Meade had been a temporary commander at the Battle of Antietam in September and was one of the few commanders who were not disgraced by the South’s slaughter of Union troops at the Battle of Fredericksburg in mid-December 1861.

  The two great armies clashed near the small Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg, where they fought for nearly three days in a battle won by the Union but that produced more than fifty thousand casualties, the largest number of any battle in the entire Civil War. So many men died on both sides that, in the aftermath, both Lee and Meade tried in vain to submit their resignations to their respective leaders, Lee because the fighting had ended so badly (and, to many, inexplicably) and Meade because of the catastrophic losses at Gettysburg compounded by his failure to prevent Lee and his army from escaping across the Potomac and retreating back into Virginia. When Meade told Lincoln that Lee and his men had fooled his entire Army of the Potomac by leaving campfires lit to give the appearance that the Confederate troops were still encamped and not escaping stealthily at night, Lincoln exploded in anger, “We had them within our grasp. We had to only stretch our hands and they were ours.”111 On July 14, he drafted a letter he never sent to Meade explaining his “deep distress” over Meade’s failure to have his men pursue Lee’s army and crush them once and for all.112

  On the evening of November 18, 1863, more than four months after the battle, Lincoln visited Gettysburg for the first time. He arrived as one of a handful of speakers to dedicate the battlefield to honor fallen soldiers on both sides of the conflict. He came knowing that, in spite of some notable Union victories that year, no end to the war was in sight. Still, after so many bloody battles, the carnage at Gettysburg was unprecedented. His speech was planned as the shortest and billed in the program merely as “Dedicatory Remarks.”113 The featured speaker was Senator Edward Everett of Massachusetts, who was scheduled to deliver the only “oration” for the program.114 Everett was a close ally and protégé of Daniel Webster, and widely considered to be nearly Webster’s equal at great oratory. In 1860, conservative ex-Whigs placed him on the ticket of the Constitutional Union Party as a vice presidential candidate alongside its presidential candidate John Bell, but in winning thirty-nine electoral votes they mostly ensured Lincoln’s victory and Douglas’s loss. Everett was among the many people Lincoln welcomed the chance to work with to save the Union, in spite of past political differences.

  At Gettysburg, Everett spoke, as people often did at such ceremonies, for more than two hours. In contrast, Lincoln’s “few remarks,” as he called them, lasted for three minutes. There is no consensus on precisely every word Lincoln said. At least five different versions of the text written in Lincoln’s hand can be found, and Lincoln might have deviated from the written text when he spoke. Even the four stenographers working the event did not report the same words.

  The first notable thing about Lincoln’s speech is what it was not. Classical funeral orations, like those he delivered for Clay and Taylor or like what Everett delivered at the Gettysburg ceremony on November 19, were of epic duration. In contrast, Lincoln spoke only 271 or 272 words (scholars agree on that range
). Historical accuracy was one of the aims of those longer orations, as were marking the significance and achievements of the person(s) who had died. Everett did all of that and more, mentioning the names of many of the fallen, incanting them like the tolls of a bell. Lincoln, on the other hand, never mentioned slavery or the names of any soldiers who died there.

  Lincoln’s deliberate concision reflected the maturation of his rhetorical development. Clay’s most famous speeches were lengthy, and the vast majority of Lincoln’s, ranging from the Lyceum Address to each of his debates with Douglas, also had been protracted. Long, complex sentences were common in Clay’s speeches and many of Lincoln’s earlier ones. It is not because their thoughts were unclear or meandering. They were made this way, as exemplified in the last sentence of the Gettysburg Address, because they were to be spoken slowly and to be heard. The delivery was the important thing. However, as president, Lincoln had come to believe that the public had no patience for long speeches. More important, they would remember nothing from them.

  From his decades of studying the orations of his predecessors, Lincoln had come to appreciate the adage, often attributed to the French intellectual Blaise Pascal, “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.” Just a few weeks before his address in Gettysburg, Lincoln had referred to the character Polonius in Hamlet, the same Polonius who had admonished his son, Laertes, “Brevity is the soul of wit” just before Laertes left for school.115

  Brevity was a virtue, particularly for presidents—it could be easily grasped, recorded, and disseminated. In his eulogy for Clay, Lincoln had praised Clay’s “impassioned tone,” but for Lincoln that tone required plainness of language. Lincoln understood that both Clay and Webster each had achieved their unique kind of eloquence, but neither was plain nor concise in his rhetoric. A marriage of condensation and majesty was harder to achieve than prolixity but more memorable, and worthy of the grandeur of both the office and the message. As president, Lincoln no longer spoke as a partisan. As president, he was obliged to act in the best interests of all Americans and the Constitution. He expected people would be reading and reciting his remarks aloud, as he had done himself for other speeches for decades.

  Everett came to Pennsylvania to do what was expected in commemorating battlefields; this was not his first time to do so. But honoring the battle was secondary to Lincoln. He had his eyes on the bigger picture. What had happened at Gettysburg was monumental, but it was only part of the larger Civil War, which remained unsettled.

  Politics were not entirely absent from his remarks, but they were, Lincoln believed, of a greater strategic nature that went beyond party. Pennsylvania’s governor, Andrew Curtin, was facing a difficult reelection campaign, and Lincoln’s own reelection was less than a year away. From where (and when) he stood in Gettysburg, his prospects looked no better.

  The questions he had not yet answered to the public’s satisfaction were, What were these soldiers dying for? and, Why reelect the president?

  The answer came in the opening line of his remarks, “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the principle that all men are created equal.”116 This was why they had gathered, this was why they had fought, and this was why the Union needed to win, an imperative that Lincoln affirmed in his next sentence: “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”117 Later, many newspapers expressed outrage that Lincoln had redefined the purpose of the war to include the securement of not just liberty but equality, but for Lincoln this objective reflected the inextricable connection between the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, a synthesis that Clay had spent his adult life advocating and Lincoln his life learning. Lincoln was not oblivious to the fact that the founding document of the nation was the Constitution, not the Declaration, but he understood the Constitution as built on the foundation of the Declaration. Lincoln had also come to understand, through his own painful struggles and those of the nation, that his link was not widely appreciated in the United States. With newspapers taking down every word he spoke, this was his moment to commemorate this “new birth of freedom” to the American people.118

  Webster had built a concept of constitutional union that was precisely what Lincoln saw himself, his administration, and the Union Army defending. Lincoln still recited to himself lines from Webster’s extraordinary response to Hayne’s promotion of the dangerous doctrine of nullification, and his argument that Americans had come together as one people long before the Constitution was drafted and ratified. “It is,” Webster had declared in his reply, as he stared at Calhoun as presiding officer of the Senate, “the people’s Constitution, the people’s government, made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people.”119 (Lincoln was fond of this phrasing. In the 1850s, he had filed a copy of an address from a speech by abolitionist Theodore Parker, in which Parker defined democracy as “Direct Self-government, over all the people, for all the people, by all the people.”) Rejecting Hayne’s notion that all federal power came from the states, Webster declared, “We are here to administer a Constitution emanating immediately from the people, and trusted by them to our administration. It is not the creature of State governments.”120

  Lincoln had adopted the same understanding of democracy, using similar words, in his First Inaugural Address. Tracking the same argument that Webster repeatedly had made, Lincoln explained, in his First Inaugural, that it was the people, not the states, who existed before the Constitution, and that the people, not the states, were the source of authority for the Constitution itself. If that were not the case, Lincoln explained, “The United States [would] be not a government proper, but an association of States in the nature of a contract merely.”121 He further declared, “Descending from these great principles, we find the proposition that, in legal contemplation, the Union is perpetual, confirmed by the history itself.”122 Lincoln then traced, as Clay and Webster each had done, the lineage of the Constitution back to its original source, the Declaration of Independence. He had no intention of delivering the same history lesson again in his brief Gettysburg remarks. Instead, he asked the thousands gathered there (and the thousands more who would read the remarks) to “resolve that the dead shall not have died in vain” and “that the nation shall, under God, have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”123 Here was Webster’s great articulation of American democracy reformulated into simpler, more easily remembered words. Complexity of language remained, but to create rhythmic momentum, as, for example, Lincoln’s contrasting “those who here gave their lives” with the “people,” whose system of government “shall not perish from the earth.” Lincoln juxtaposed references to the past and the present, the dead and the living at Gettysburg, and the “new birth of freedom” against the Founding Fathers’ bringing forth “the great task remaining.”124 Lincoln concluded his remarks with an eighty-two-word sentence in which devotion to a worthy cause is forcefully driven home:

  It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

  Edward Everett’s most famous student, Ralph Waldo Emerson, immediately recognized (as did Everett) the grandeur of Lincoln’s sparse remarks: “His brief speech at Gettysburg will not easily be surpassed by words on any recorded occasion.”125 Emerson’s assessment was in stark contrast to how he had judged Daniel Webster’s speech defending the Compromise of 1850 and its noxious fugitive slave provision for the sake of maintaining the Union. “Let Mr. Webster for de
cency’s sake,” Emerson had declaimed, “shut his lips once and forever on this word [liberty]. The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan.”126 With less grandiosity than Webster, Lincoln declared, “The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here,” though of course it did because of his eloquence that day.127 Lincoln stood where Clay and Webster had dreamed of standing, and had the confidence, born from years of speaking to ordinary citizens, to take what those two great orators had done and do it better. Lincoln had taken the additional step, urged for decades by Clay and Webster, to equate liberty and union. Here was a renewed understanding of its foundation in the fulfillment of the promises made in the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln understood that Clay and Webster each had achieved their unique kind of eloquence, but neither spoke to the common folks that Lincoln had always aimed to reach. Jackson and Taylor were each brief in most of their orders and proclamations, but neither was eloquent. Lincoln aspired to be both concise and eloquent.

  Lincoln was not the kind of man who left things to chance. He polished his sparse remarks as if they were fine diamonds. Rather than having written them on an envelope at the last moment, he was seen working on them, off and on, for days, and he had seen Everett’s lengthy oration the evening before the day of the dedication. Days before the event, Lincoln asked aides to review schematics of the area. They did the evening before his remarks and reported to him the size of the space and how the speech would carry.