ALSO BY RONALD C. WHITE, JR.
…
The Eloquent President:
A Portrait of Lincoln Through His Words
Lincoln’s Greatest Speech:
The Second Inaugural
Liberty and Justice for All:
Racial Reform and the Social Gospel
An Unsettled Arena:
Religion and the Bill of Rights
(editor with Albright G. Zimmerman)
Partners in Peace and Education
(editor with Eugene J. Fisher)
American Christianity:
A Case Approach
(with Garth Rosell and Louis B. Weeks)
The Social Gospel:
Religion and Reform in Changing America
(with C. Howard Hopkins)
For my wife,
Cynthia Conger White
CONTENTS
…
LIST OF MAPS
CAST OF CHARACTERS
CHAPTER 1 A. Lincoln and the Promise of America
CHAPTER 2 Undistinguished Families 1809–16
CHAPTER 3 Persistent in Learning 1816–30
CHAPTER 4 Rendering Myself Worthy of Their Esteem 1831–34
CHAPTER 5 The Whole People of Sangamon 1834–37
CHAPTER 6 Without Contemplating Consequences 1837–42
CHAPTER 7 A Matter of Profound Wonder 1831–42
CHAPTER 8 The Truth Is, I Would Like to Go Very Much 1843–46
CHAPTER 9 My Best Impression of the Truth 1847–49
CHAPTER 10 As a Peacemaker the Lawyer Has a Superior Opportunity 1849–52
CHAPTER 11 Let No One Be Deceived 1852–56
CHAPTER 12 A House Divided 1856–58
CHAPTER 13 The Eternal Struggle Between These Two Principles 1858
CHAPTER 14 The Taste Is in My Mouth, a Little 1858–60
CHAPTER 15 Justice and Fairness to All MAY 1860-NOVEMBER 1860
CHAPTER 16 An Humble Instrument in the Hands of the Almighty NOVEMBER 1860-FEBRUARY 1861
CHAPTER 17 We Must Not Be Enemies FEBRUARY 1861-APRIL 1861
CHAPTER 18 A People’s Contest APRIL 1861-JULY 1861
CHAPTER 19 The Bottom Is Out of the Tub JULY 1861-JANUARY 1862
CHAPTER 20 We Are Coming, Father Abraham JANUARY 1862-JULY 1862
CHAPTER 21 We Must Think Anew JULY 1862-DECEMBER 1862
CHAPTER 22 What Will the Country Say? JANUARY 1863–MAY 1863
CHAPTER 23 You Say You Will Not Fight to Free Negroes MAY 1863–SEPTEMBER 1863
CHAPTER 24 A New Birth of Freedom SEPTEMBER 1863–MARCH 1864
CHAPTER 25 The Will of God Prevails MARCH 1864–NOVEMBER 1864
CHAPTER 26 With Malice Toward None, with Charity for All DECEMBER 1864–APRIL 1865
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
LIST OF MAPS
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THE KANSAS-NEBRASKA ACT OF 1854
WASHINGTON, D.C., DURING THE CIVIL WAR
BATTLEFIELDS OF THE CIVIL WAR
CAST OF CHARACTERS
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EDWARD DICKINSON BAKER (1811-61) A close friend, Baker served with Lincoln in the Illinois legislature. Lincoln named his second son, Edward, after Baker. Elected U.S. senator from Oregon, he raised the California Regiment at the outbreak of the Civil War.
EDWARD BATES (1793-1869) Missouri lawyer and conservative Whig politician who took his time in entering the Republican Party. Vied with Lincoln for the Republican nomination in 1860 and then served as attorney general during the Civil War.
MONTGOMERY BLAIR (1813-83) Member of a distinguished Democratic family who became a Republican over the slavery issue. Served as counsel for Dred Scott. Controversial postmaster general in Lincoln’s cabinet.
NOAH BROOKS (1830-1903) Correspondent for the Sacramento Daily Union who became a close friend of both Abraham and Mary Lincoln. He reported on life inside Lincoln’s White House, and was slated to become Lincoln’s secretary in his second term.
ORVILLE HICKMAN BROWNING (1806-81) Conservative Illinois Republican who supported Edward Bates at the Republican convention. After the death of Stephen Douglas in 1861, Browning was appointed to complete his term. His diary is a source of information on Lincoln.
AMBROSE EVERETT BURNSIDE (1824-1881) A likeable and self-effacing West Pointer, Burnside and Lincoln struggled to find the right strategy for the Army of the Potomac’s advance south and the curtailment of the Copperhead movement in the Midwest.
SIMON CAMERON (1799-1889) As a senator from Pennsylvania, he became a candidate for the Republican nomination for president in 1860. With some misgivings, Lincoln appointed him secretary of war in his cabinet.
PETER CARTWRIGHT (1785-1872) A Methodist circuit-riding evangelist who, as the Democratic candidate, ran against Lincoln in the 1846 congressional election.
SALMON P. CHASE (1808-73) Ohio senator and governor, and an anti-slavery leader in politics, Chase became a candidate for the Republican nomination for president in 1860. Chase served as secretary of the treasury in Lincoln’s cabinet. He tried to outflank Lincoln for the Republican nomination in 1864. Despite all their differences, Lincoln appointed Chase chief justice of the United States.
HENRY CLAY (1777–1852) Lincoln admired Clay, a fellow Kentuckian, who three times ran unsuccessfully for president. He advocated Clay’s “American System” of strong government support for economic growth. Lincoln called Clay his “beau ideal of a statesman.”
JAMES C. CONKLING (1816-99) Lincoln’s neighbor and fellow lawyer; when Lincoln decided he could not return to speak to a Union rally in Springfield in September 1863, he sent Conkling his speech to read at the meeting.
DAVID DAVIS (1815-86) Illinois lawyer and judge and a close friend of Lincoln when they traveled together across the Eighth Judicial Circuit in the 1850s. He served as Lincoln’s campaign manager at the Republican convention in Chicago in 1860.
STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS (1813-61) Illinois Democratic rival, sponsored the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 whose language about the extension of slavery into the territories helped prompt Lincoln’s return to politics. Their debates in 1858 brought Lincoln national attention even though he lost to Douglas in a contest for the Senate. Douglas ran against Lincoln in the presidential contest of 1860.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS (1818-95) Editor and abolitionist, Douglass watched Lincoln from a distance starting in 1858, and then met him twice at the White House during the Civil War. A former slave, Douglass formed a distinctive relationship with Lincoln, culminating in Douglass’s presence at Lincoln’s second inauguration.
JOHN C. FRÉMONT (1813-90) The first Republican candidate for president, he lost to James Buchanan in 1856. Lincoln appointed him commander of the Department of the West in July 1861, but the president, Frémont, and Frémont’s wife, Jessie, soon differed over government policy, including slavery.
ULYSSES S. GRANT (1822-85) Having failed in several civilian jobs in the 1850s, Grant rose through the Union army to become general in chief by the end of the Civil War. As Lincoln went through general after general in the first years of the war, Grant gained the president’s admiration, which was returned in kind.
HORACE GREELEY (1811-72) Founding editor of the New York Tribune and powerful opinion maker, Greeley changed his opinion of Lincoln often. Lincoln’s reply to Greeley’s plea for him to move faster on emancipation marked the beginning of a series of public letters to present his views to a wider public.
PHINEAS DENSMORE GURLEY (1816-68) Lincoln appreciated the sermons of this learned minister of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C. Lincoln met Gurley in the years he was rethinking the meaning of faith and God’s activity in history.
; JOHN J. HARDIN (1810-47) A friend, lawyer, and Whig politician from Jacksonville, Illinois, Hardin opposed Lincoln on internal improvements in the Illinois legislature and defeated him for the Whig nomination for Congress in 1843.
JOHN HAY (1838-1905) Young John Hay, a graduate of Brown, served as one of Lincoln’s secretaries. With a literary flair, he and Lincoln read to each other. Hay’s diary is one of the most insightful guides to the inner history of the Lincoln administration.
WILLIAM H. HERNDON (1818-91) Lincoln’s surprise choice as law partner in 1844. Herndon, so unlike his senior partner in temperament and more radical in his political views, actively supported Lincoln’s rise in Illinois politics.
JOSEPH HOOKER (1814-1879) He earned the nickname “Fighting Joe” for his courage under fire in the Virginia Peninsula campaign in the spring of 1862. Lincoln appointed him commander of the army of the Potomac in January 1863, and watched, with both admiration and alarm, Hooker’s military leadership unfold at a critical time in the war.
NORMAN B. JUDD (1815-78) As an anti-Nebraska Democrat, he voted against Lincoln in the legislative vote for the Senate in 1855. Judd became a prominent Republican, chaired the state committee, and became a voice for Lincoln in northern Illinois and at the Republican convention in Chicago in 1860.
GEORGE B. MCCLELLAN (1826-85) Lincoln named McClellan, who received the nickname “Young Napoleon,” commander of the Army of the Potomac in July 1861, and then general in chief of the Union army. Excellent at organizing and preparing his men to fight, he nonetheless shrank from fighting, often exaggerating the strength of enemy forces.
JOHN G. NICOLAY (1832-1901) Lincoln’s loyal secretary, he admired the president in all ways. His notes about life in the White House would become source material for a biography of Lincoln he would write with John Hay.
WILLIAM H. SEWARD (1801-72) Lincoln’s chief opponent for the Republican nomination for president in 1860; Lincoln asked him to become secretary of state. Disliked and criticized by many, Seward would become Lincoln’s best friend in his cabinet.
WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN (1820-1891) After a struggling start at West Point, in business, and in the first years of the Civil War, Sherman rose to become a much-loved and criticized Union general who won victories at Atlanta and across the South in his controversial march to the sea.
JOSHUA F. SPEED (1814-82) A fellow Kentuckian, Speed became Lincoln’s only truly close friend. They met when Lincoln moved to Springfield in 1837 and remained friends even when Speed moved back to Kentucky in 1841.
EDWIN M. STANTON (1814-69) A renowned lawyer, Stanton first met Lincoln in the “Reaper Case” in Cincinnati in 1855. Lincoln invited Stanton, a Democrat, to become his second secretary of war in January 1862.
CHARLES SUMNER (1811-74) Antislavery Republican senator from Massachusetts. Early in the war he believed Lincoln moved too slowly in his aid for African-Americans. As chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, he proved enormously helpful to Lincoln.
LEONARD SWETT (1825-89) A lawyer who met Lincoln in 1849 on the Eighth Judicial Circuit, he told Lincoln in 1854, “Use me in any way you may think you can.” Swett supported all of Lincoln’s subsequent political campaigns and traveled to the White House from Illinois because Lincoln so valued his counsel.
LYMAN TRUMBULL (1813-96) A lawyer and Illinois Democrat, he ran against Lincoln for the 1855 Illinois Senate seat. He supported the founding of the Republican Party in Illinois in 1856 and thereafter became a critical ally of Lincoln.
ELIHU B. WASHBURNE (1816-1887) An antislavery Republican congress man from northern Illinois, he supported Lincoln in his 1855 and 1858 Senate races. Washburne became Lincoln’s eyes and ears in Washington during the long secession winter before his inauguration in March 1861.
GIDEON WELLES (1802-78) As secretary of the navy in Lincoln’s cabinet, he became one of the president’s most sympathetic supporters. His diary is an invaluable source for understanding the Lincoln presidency.
The best-known sculpture of Abraham Lincoln is in the templed space of the Lincoln Memorial. Daniel C. French sculpted this working model in 1916. His final rendering of the huge statue was dedicated in 1922.
CHAPTER 1
A. Lincoln and the Promise of America
e signed his name A. Lincoln. A visitor to Abraham Lincoln’s Springfield, Illinois, home at Eighth and Jackson would find “A. Lincoln” in silvered Roman characters affixed to an octagonal black plate on the front door. All through his life, people sought to complete the A—to define Lincoln, to label or libel him. Immediately after his death and continuing to the present, Americans have tried to explain the nation’s most revered president. A. Lincoln continues to fascinate us because he eludes simple definitions and final judgments.
Tall, raw boned, and with an unruly shock of black hair, his appearance could not have been more different from that of George Washington and the other founding fathers. Walt Whitman, who saw the president regularly in Washington, D.C., wrote that Lincoln’s face was “so awful ugly it becomes beautiful.” But when Lincoln spoke, audiences forgot his appearance as they listened to his inspiring words.
He is one of the few Americans whose life and words bridge time. Illinois senator Everett Dirksen said fifty years ago, “The first task of every politician is to get right with Lincoln.” At critical moments in our nation’s history, his eloquent words become contemporary.
As a young man, he won the nickname “Honest Abe” when his store in New Salem, Illinois, “winked out.” Rather than cut and run from his debts in the middle of the night, as was common on the frontier, he stayed and paid back what he called his “National Debt.” His political opponents invented a long list of denunciations, ranging from “the Black Republican” to “the original gorilla” to “the dictator.” His supporters crafted monikers of admiration: “Old Abe,” affectionately attached to him while he was still a relatively young man, and the “Rail Splitter,” to remind voters in the 1860 presidential campaign of his roots in what was then the Western frontier. During the Civil War, admiration became endearment when the soldiers he led as commander in chief called him “Father Abraham.” After his controversial decision to sign the Emancipation Proclamation on New Year’s Day 1863, grateful Americans, black and white, honored him with the title “the Great Emanci pator.”
Each name became a signpost pointing to the ways Lincoln grew and changed through critical episodes in his life. Each was an attempt to define him, whether by characterization or caricature.
Yet how did Lincoln define himself? He never kept a diary. He wrote three brief autobiographical statements, one pointedly in the third person. As the Lincolns prepared to leave for Washington in the winter of 1861, Mary Lincoln, to protect her privacy, burned her correspondence with her husband in the alley behind their Springfield home. In an age when one did not tell all, Lincoln seldom shared his innermost feelings in public. Lincoln’s law partner, William Herndon, summed it up “He was the most … shut-mouthed man that ever existed.” Yet when Lincoln spoke, he offered some of the most inspiring words ever uttered on the meaning of America.
Each generation of Americans rightfully demands a new engagement with the past. Fresh questions are raised out of contemporary experiences. Does he deserve the title “the Great Emancipator”? Was Lincoln a racist? Did he invent, as some have charged, the authoritarian, imperial presidency? How did Lincoln reshape the modern role of commander in chief? How are we to understand Mary Lincoln and their marriage? What were Lincoln’s religious beliefs? How did he connect religion to politics? As we peel back each layer of Lincoln’s life, these questions foster only more questions.
Actually, Lincoln did keep a journal, but he never wrote in a single record book. What I call Lincoln’s “diary” consists of hundreds of notes he composed for himself over his adult life. He recorded his ideas on scraps of paper, filing them in his top hat or his bottom desk drawer. He wrote them for his eyes only. These reflections bring into view a priva
te Lincoln. They reveal a man of intellectual curiosity who was testing a wide range of ideas, puzzling out problems, constructing philosophical syllogisms, and sometimes disclosing his personal feelings. In these notes we find his evolving thoughts on slavery, his envy at the soaring career of Stephen Douglas, and the intellectual foundations of his Second Inaugural Address.
Lincoln’s moral integrity is the strong trunk from which all the branches of his life grew. His integrity has many roots—in the soil, in Shakespeare, and in the Bible. Ambition was present almost from the beginning, and he had to learn to prune this branch that it not grow out of proportion in his life. Often, when contemporary Americans try to trace an inspired idea or a shimmering truth about our national identity, again and again we find Lincoln’s initials carved on some tree—AL—for he was there before us.
Lincoln was always comfortable with ambiguity. In a private musing, he prefaced an affirmation, “I am almost ready to say this is probably true.” The lawyer in Lincoln delighted in approaching a question or problem from as many sides as possible, helping him appreciate the views of others, even when those opinions opposed his own.
In an alternative life, Lincoln might have enjoyed a career as an actor in the Shakespearean plays he loved. As a lawyer, he became a lead actor on the stages of the courthouses of the Eighth Judicial Circuit of central Illinois. As president, he was a skillful director of a diverse cast of characters, civilian and military, many of whom often tried to upstage him. Although his military experience was limited to a few months in the Black Hawk War of 1832, Lincoln would become the nation’s first true commander in chief, defining and shaping that position into what it is today.
Lincoln is the president who laughs with us. His winsome personality reveals itself in his self-deprecating humor. As a young lawyer and congressman, his satire could sting and hurt political foes, but later in life he demonstrated a more gentle sense of humor that traded on his keen sense of irony and paradox. During the Civil War, some politicians wondered how Lincoln could still laugh, but he appreciated that humor and tragedy, as portrayed in Shakespeare’s plays, are always close companions.
A. Lincoln Page 1