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Lincoln's Mentors

Page 40

by Michael J. Gerhardt


  Up until the late 1850s, Lincoln mostly relied on his handwritten notes, not a manuscript, when making a speech, though he used manuscripts for special occasions—the House Divided and Cooper Union speeches as a candidate for office, and as president the First Inaugural and now the Gettysburg Address. He continued to rework his draft as late as the evening before. He did not work alone. According to the daughter of William Slade, an African American who had long been Lincoln’s servant and traveled with him,

  the president locked himself in his [hotel] room with only Slade present. He then began carefully to weigh every thought and carve every word in the address which has become so famous. After writing a sentence or so he would pause, and read the piece to Slade. He would then say, “William, how does that sound?” Slade, who by this time was quite a critic, would express his opinion. This went on until all was completed and he then sent for his secretary and others to hear it. Having received the praise and criticism of his messenger Lincoln felt that even the most ordinary person would understand his speech.

  This account resonates with Lincoln’s own account of how he wrote. As he told a law student in the 1840s, “I write by ear. When I have got my thoughts on paper, I read it aloud, and if it sounds all right I just let it pass.”

  The next day after Lincoln delivered the speech, John Hay confirmed in his diary how “the President, in a fine, free, way, with more grace than is his wont, said his half dozen words of consecration.”128 While virtually every contemporary report on the event focused primarily on Everett’s address, Everett well understood the significance of what Lincoln had said in his three minutes. The day after the event, Everett wrote Lincoln a short note: “I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near the central idea of the occasion in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”129 Everett’s praise was not mere puffery. He had helped to write some of Webster’s finest speeches and had a distinguished career in his own right—member of the House of Representatives, governor of Massachusetts, and president and professor of Greek Literature at Harvard before becoming secretary of state and senator. No one had better claim to being the leading expert on American oratory than Edward Everett.

  Lincoln’s remarks at Gettysburg became known as an “address” because their level of eloquence was much higher and commanding than that of other presidential remarks. As compared with their all too frequent off-the-cuff, forgettable remarks, Lincoln’s were aimed at something different. They reflect the continuing influence of the theater, Shakespeare, classical tropes, and the Bible on his rhetoric. The influence of each of these may be found at length in the voluminous literature on Lincoln’s remarks. Clay was best remembered for his theatrics, the most distinctive part of his speeches. The words on the page often seem flat. But Clay was a man on fire when he spoke, and it was that spectacle that many of his colleagues in Congress considered to be what distinguished his oratory.

  Lincoln did something no president had done—not Washington, not Jefferson, not Jackson. He had spoken in the rhythm of America’s greatest poetry. Lincoln captured in the brevity of his rhythmic verse the solemnity of the recommitment of the nation and its people to the “unfinished work” of the war, which was to ensure that the Constitution guaranteed liberty and equality to all citizens.130

  As Shakespeare’s Henry IV rallied his “band of brothers” to his cause, Lincoln hoped to do the same for his. Certainly Lincoln’s words could rally the people to fight for a worthy cause, but the fighting still had to be done. Less than a week after Lincoln’s remarks at Gettysburg, the Union scored another significant victory. On November 23–25, the Union Army, under the command of Major General Ulysses Grant, broke the Confederate siege of Chattanooga, ultimately forcing the Confederate Army, under the command of General Braxton Bragg, to retreat back into Georgia. The defeat was so severe that Jefferson Davis recalled Bragg to Richmond. After a draw one week later at Mine Run Creek, Confederate forces under the command of General James Longstreet, a veteran of the Mexican War and Gettysburg, lay siege to Knoxville, where Union forces successfully rebuffed their attack. The rebels were losing more than they were winning, but the final defeats were yet to come as Lincoln let his army do the talking.

  VIII

  * * *

  The war dominated the shifting political landscape. The longer it lasted, the more trouble Republicans were facing at the polls, particularly in the border states. The shifts were apparent even in Illinois, where Republicans had never dominated. One of the casualties was Orville Browning. In early 1863, he left the Senate, only to return to Washington as a partner in a small law firm. He would be of less use to Lincoln as an outsider who was becoming increasingly pessimistic about the progress of the war and Lincoln’s chances for reelection. The two interacted often, but Browning never felt that Lincoln sought his counsel as much as he once had, perhaps because Lincoln likely figured that Browning could not offer the inside information he once had and was not supportive of his reelection or policies.

  In another sign of the shifting political landscape, John Todd Stuart was returning to Washington, as the representative for the eighth district of Illinois, though this time no longer as a Constitutional Unionist but as a Democrat. He had won the seat in a close contest against Leonard Swett, his and the president’s old friend. Lincoln backed Swett but did not campaign back home out of respect for Stuart. Stuart won.

  The shifting political landscape, exemplified in the exodus of Browning and the return of Stuart, underscored several problems Lincoln was facing at the end of his last full year in office before the presidential election. The first was that Lincoln was more isolated and alone. In spite of their differences, Browning and Lincoln always could speak honestly with each other, though Lincoln had become increasingly less likely to hear Browning’s advice. Lincoln and Stuart still enjoyed a cordial relationship, undoubtedly a testament to how each managed to keep the vicious politics of the time from becoming overly personal to either of them. Stuart knew as well as Lincoln did that Browning provided better and stronger emotional support than he could. Browning provided better insight into substantive matters, too. Stuart simply was not the deep, pondering thinker that Browning was, nor was he the strong party man that either Browning or Lincoln was. (Browning was a Whig for decades and a Republican until 1869; Stuart had switched parties more than once and was not returning as a member of either of the two major parties.) Though Stuart remained friendly with Lincoln and informed him of House activities, he was no longer someone on whom Lincoln could count for support.

  Of even greater import, Lincoln could not escape the ever increasing toll of the protracted war. In 1863, the Union had scored major victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, but they were achieved at an awful cost in lives and did not seem to have brought the war any closer to an end. None of Lincoln’s generals had succeeded yet in doing what he kept insisting be done—fulfill the objective that Scott had identified at the outset of the war: crushing the enemy to death. Lee had lost multitudes of men, including some of his ablest generals (Stonewall Jackson had died of pneumonia eight days after being shot at the Battle of Chancellorsville), but others were out there, including Lee, as elusive and dangerous as ever. The Union still had superior resources, including far greater manpower, but Lincoln stayed up late into the night, wracked with insomnia, worrying about how his army’s advantages were being squandered.

  Lincoln worried, too, about what he should do if the war ever ended. Even before the Union victories of 1863, he and his allies were trying to look ahead. In early January 1863, ground was broken in Sacramento to begin construction on the transcontinental railroad approved the prior year by Congress. More than a few, including Lincoln, thought that the Union could develop a policy on reunion sufficiently appealing to the war-weary Southerners that it might erode their continued will to fight. Lincoln, after all, had never been a prosecutor or long-serving judge. He was a dealmaker, having learned the art from Stuart and through decades of negotiatio
ns in courtrooms, conventions, and legislatures. On December 8, 1863, he delivered his last Annual Message to Congress before the beginning of the presidential election year, a message that was pervaded by a surprisingly strong sense of optimism for the future. He acknowledged that the Emancipation Proclamation, which began the year on a forceful note, had been “followed by dark and doubtful days.”131 Yet Lincoln’s confidence had not been shaken. Now, near year’s end, “the crisis which threatened to divide the friends of the Union is past.”132 He reassured Congress and the nation that the African American troops who were joining the army were “as good soldiers as any” and had helped convert many opponents to supporters of emancipation.133 (There was precedent: African American soldiers served under Washington during the war of independence and served under Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans.) Referring to developments in Maryland and Missouri, which were both exempt from his Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln said that neither of those states “three years ago would tolerate any restraint upon the extension of slavery into new territories,” but they “only dispute now as to the best mode of removing it within their own limits.”134

  Lincoln had attached to his Annual Message a document entitled Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction.135 He explained that, under his constitutional authority to grant pardons for offences against the United States, he was offering “full pardon” and restoration of property “except as to slaves” to former participants in the rebellion who would swear an oath of allegiance to the United States and to all laws and proclamations concerning emancipation.136 When the number of voters taking the oath in any state equaled 10 percent of the number of people who had voted in 1860, this contingent could reestablish a state government to which Lincoln promised executive recognition.

  While the Republican majority in the House had narrowed as a result of the most recent midterm elections, the party had expanded its margin of control in the Senate. This was not all good news for Lincoln. As 1863 gave way to 1864, Lincoln faced a Congress in disarray, with Republicans sharply split into radical and conservative camps. Radicals wanted to be tougher on the rebels, while conservatives urged Lincoln to be more solicitous of the South than he had been thus far. He defended his amnesty plan as a wartime measure to weaken Southern resistance. A “tangible nucleus” of loyal citizens was all that was needed to spark a state’s reentry into the Union. In March 1864, he continued to insist that he had made his proposal “to suppress the insurrection and to restore the authority of the United States,”137 but the plan went nowhere.

  As the legislative session of 1863–1864 was drawing to a close, there was little good news for Stuart to report to Lincoln. Congress seemed paralyzed until Radical Republicans mustered sufficient support in early July for both chambers in Congress to approve an alternative to the scheme Lincoln was proposing.

  The alternative had been put together by Representative Henry Winter Davis and Senator Benjamin Wade. Davis called their proposal “the only practical measure of emancipation proposed in this Congress.”138 It required, as a first step in the reorganization and readmission of any Southern state into the Union, that it commit to completely abolishing slavery. The bill specified further that 50 percent, rather than the 10 percent Lincoln suggested, of the 1860 voters must participate in elections to reorganize their respective state governments. In addition, the bill required that the electors in any constitutional conventions in any of the states that attempted to secede take a different oath than the one Lincoln had proposed, which had merely entailed swearing future fealty to the Union. Instead, the Wade-Davis bill required them to take an “iron-clad” oath swearing that they had never voluntarily borne arms against the United States or aided the rebellion. Those taking the oath would be blaming the state’s leaders for the rebellion.

  The bill posed a dilemma for Lincoln. Its substance was not just more extreme than anything he had previously supported, but the bill also would have forced him into aligning himself and his administration with the Radical Republicans, a realignment that chafed Lincoln’s moderate impulses and would almost certainly doom his chances for reelection, which depended on maintaining support from his base: Democrats who supported the Union and moderate Republicans.

  A faithful Whig was supposed to follow the lead of Congress. With his December message, Lincoln was reversing that arrangement and, in doing so, violating again a central tenet of Clay’s conception of the presidency. For much of 1863, Lincoln had avoided that dilemma. Congress had ultimately been inert, and he had already exploited a defect in the Whig orthodoxy, which never spoke to executive power in wartime. Lincoln was convinced that as commander in chief in the midst of the war he could take measures like the Emancipation Proclamation, aimed to press the war to its end. Come the middle of 1864, he had no choice but to confront the dilemma of whether to revert to the Whig philosophy of deferring to Congress or help his own reelection. It was not a hard choice. He chose the presidency and his political future over fealty to Congress or one faction within his party. He chose to let the Wade-Davis bill die through a pocket veto, a rarely used means of killing a bill passed at the end of a congressional session by simply not signing it. Any further pretense that Lincoln was a Clay Whig was discarded. Lincoln had surpassed his mentor in both word and deed.

  Chapter Eight

  Final Act

  (1864–1865)

  In 1860, Abraham Lincoln was the third youngest man ever elected president. When he won reelection four years later, he became the youngest president to be reelected. He remained the youngest person to have won two successive presidential terms until the only other president from Illinois, Barack Obama, was reelected nearly 150 years later.

  Entering what most people expected would be his final full year as president in 1864, Lincoln was fifty-five. It was thirty-two years since Lincoln had cast his first vote in a presidential election when Henry Clay, then fifty-five, lost his first presidential race to Andrew Jackson. At fifty-five, Jackson had suffered a physical breakdown. With two bullets lodged in his body, he was completely exhausted from years of intensive military campaigning. He was coughing up blood, and his body shook uncontrollably. After several months of rest, he began to recover. Two years later, he mounted his first serious run for the presidency, in 1824. At fifty-five, Zachary Taylor was still in the army, working his way to becoming a colonel in the Black Hawk War in 1832.

  Now Lincoln squarely faced not just the question whether he would be reelected or not, but how he would be remembered. If the Union won the war, he could be sure to be remembered as one of America’s great presidents. If the Union did not, he would likely be its last.

  Throughout the first seven months of 1864, Lincoln, like most others, expected his term to end with the election of McClellan as president. He was preparing to lose, and he would have been hard-pressed to identify his accomplishments—not the closure of the war, not the establishment of the Republican Party, and neither the Thirteenth Amendment nor the formal abolition of slavery. His rhetorical flourishes might have died with him, considered an oddly poetic interlude in the Union’s final years.

  Perhaps his legacy would have been nothing more than that of all the other one-term presidents in the nineteenth century. Americans like a winner. They rarely fete the loser. If Lincoln failed to be reelected, he would likely have been remembered, if at all, for mishandling the war, placing the once heavy-drinking Grant (whom Mary Todd called a “butcher”1) in charge of the Union Army, and handing over to his successor a federal government depleted of precious resources and lives squandered on behalf of an impossible dream. Slavery would have endured and almost certainly expanded within and beyond the United States, subjugating entire new classes of people to bondage, bigotry, and avarice. Lost would have been Lincoln and Clay’s dream of sealing the connection between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Had Lincoln failed to be reelected, his idolization of Clay and Taylor would have mattered little; to the extent he had any right to be vi
ewed as their heir, he would have been a failed one, no more successful than either of them had been in averting civil war and saving the Union. Lincoln and the Republican Party would not be seen as the architects of “a new birth of freedom”2 but as the precipitating causes of the greatest destruction ever brought against whatever was left of the Union.

  In 1864, Orville Browning was no apologist for Lincoln. He shared with his friend Edward Cowan his opinion of Lincoln as president: “I faithfully tried to uphold him, and make him respectable; tho’ I have never been able to persuade myself that he was big enough for his position. Still, I thought he might get through, as many a boy in college, without disgrace, and without knowledge; I fear he is a failure.”3 Browning was far from alone in that harsh assessment.

  It is tempting to think of Lincoln’s final acts as preordained. As the presidential election of 1864 approached, he increasingly spoke of fate, divine will, and his belief that events were controlling him, not the other way around. This kind of talk might simply have been his way of hedging his bets or adopting Clay’s strategy of projecting humility. At the same time, Lincoln did not question success. He took it in stride, just as Clay, Jackson, and Taylor had each done. However, through the summer of 1864, nothing happening in the war indicated Lincoln would repeat Jackson’s feat of reelection.

  Still, even if greater forces shaped events, Lincoln never waited passively for events to break his way. As often as Lincoln spoke of forces beyond his control, he stubbornly thought of himself as a “self-made man” and wondered aloud how future generations would judge his presidency. No one knows what Lincoln thought late at night when he sat alone in his office with the portrait of Jackson hanging overhead, but it seems possible that he, as well as loyal friends like the Blairs, would have recalled the simple fact that Jackson had not gotten as far as he had without doing the hard work. Neither Jackson, nor Clay, nor Taylor left anything to chance.

 

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