A. Lincoln

by Ronald C. White, Jr.

  In the end, Lincoln chose a course of no action: He did not respond, appeal, or order the release of Merryman. Chief Justice Taney, on May 28, 1861, ruling in Ex parte Merryman, gladly delivered a sermon to Lincoln and the nation about the true meaning of the Constitution. Taking care to strike his title as presiding judge of the U.S. Circuit Court, Baltimore, in favor of chief justice, he argued that Lincoln was usurping the role of both Congress and the judicial branches of government in his employment of the military to carry out his purposes. Taney warned that Lincoln was on the road to becoming a military dictator. Nevertheless, the president’s decisive action was applauded by the Republican press.

  ON MAY 3, Lincoln issued a proclamation calling for an additional 42,034 three-year volunteers and 18,000 sailors, as well as expanding the regular army by 22,714 men. By the end of May, the war was beginning to achieve a human face, for no one more than Lincoln.

  Somehow during the first confusing days of the Civil War, Lincoln found time to correspond with a young soldier named Elmer E. Ellsworth. Born in Saratoga County, New York, in 1837, Ellsworth had moved to Springfield, Illinois, in August 1860, to read law in Lincoln’s office. Boyish in appearance, only five feet six, with clean-cut features, Ellsworth quickly became like a son to Lincoln. He accompanied the Lincolns on the Presidential Special to Washington. With Robert away at Harvard, Ellsworth became like an older brother to the two younger Lincoln boys, even catching the measles from them.

  Ellsworth, after meeting a French Zouave veteran, Charles A. DeVillier, reorganized the Sixtieth Regiment of the Illinois State Militia into a Zouave unit. Ellsworth led his fifty young American men, dressed in bright red, blue, and gold uniforms with jaunty red caps with orange or gold decoration. In city after city, Ellsworth’s Zouaves mesmerized audiences as they went through their military routines: marching, retreating, parrying and thrusting their bayonets, and loading and firing their Sharps rifles in every possible position, even kneeling and on their backs.

  After Fort Sumter, Ellsworth hurried to New York City, where he organized the New York Zouaves, an 1,100-man volunteer regiment made up of New York firemen. Returning to Washington on April 29, 1861, he paraded his disciplined troops up the “Ave,” the locals’ name for Pennsylvania Avenue. Thereafter, almost daily, Ellsworth paraded his men in front of the Executive Mansion, and sometimes on the South Lawn, for Lincoln to review with pride.

  When Virginia formally seceded on May 23, 1861, Ellsworth prepared his men to march on Alexandria. Landing at the Alexandria waterfront early on the morning of May 24, Ellsworth led his men to the telegraph office to cut all communication to the South. Spying a Confederate flag flying from the Marshall House, a three-story hotel, Ellsworth crossed the street and went inside. He took down the flag, but as he was coming back down the stairs, James W. Jackson, the hotel owner, shot and killed him with a double-barrel shotgun. Elmer Ellsworth was the first commissioned officer to die in the Civil War.

  An officer brought news of Ellsworth’s death to the White House. The young captain found Lincoln in the library and told him the sad news. At that moment, Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts and a reporter entered the library. Lincoln, stunned and heartbroken, turned to the visitors, extended his hand, and said simply, “Excuse me, but I cannot talk.”

  Elmer Ellsworth almost like a son to Abraham Lincoln, was the first Union officer to die in the Civil War. This illustration depicts the deed of the first hero killed in battle.

  Abraham and Mary went down to the Washington Navy Yard to view Ellsworth’s body. The president ordered it to lie in state in the East Room. A funeral service took place in the White House on May 26, 1861. Throughout the North, Ellsworth became a symbol of courageous young men willing to give their lives for the Union. His death also helped shake off any remaining complacency in the Northern public.

  Overcome with grief, Lincoln wrote a letter to Ellsworth’s parents on the day before the funeral. “In the untimely loss of your noble son, our affliction here, is scarcely less than your own.” He described Ellsworth’s sterling qualities, “a fine intellect, an indomitable energy, and a taste altogether military, constituted in him, as seemed to me, the best natural talent, in that department, I ever knew.” Lincoln then turned to his own relationship with the young man—“as intimate as the disparity of our ages, and my engrossing engagements, would permit.” He added, “What was conclusive of his good heart, he never forgot his parents. … In the hope that it may be no intrusion upon the sacredness of your sorrow, I have ventured to address this tribute to your brave and early fallen child. May God give you that consolation which is beyond all earthly power.” Lincoln’s letter, the first of hundreds he would write to the parents or spouses of fallen soldiers, is remarkable in both its affection and eloquence—written by a man consumed in grief.

  THE MOST PUBLIC MAN in America lived in a White House that served as both home and office. The West Wing, which houses the current White House offices, would not be added until 1902 by President Theo dore Roosevelt. This arrangement became the setting of an odd mixture of politics and pomp.

  William Howard Russell, correspondent of the Times of London, described the White House as “the moderate mansion.” He and other visitors from abroad compared it unfavorably to London’s Buckingham Palace or Paris’s Tuileries. Abraham and Mary Lincoln, on the contrary, were impressed with a home that had thirty-one rooms set amid twenty-two acres of woodlands. To try to add to the dignity of the residence, President James K. Polk had placed a bronze statue of Thomas Jefferson on the North Lawn in 1848. President Buchanan had built a conservatory to replace a greenhouse, but admittedly much of the surrounding woodlands were untidy and contained old, unused buildings and sheds. There was also the marshy Ellipse that slanted down to the Potomac River. The White House had obtained city water just two years before the Lincolns arrived.

  Mathew Brady took this photograph of Mary Lincoln sometime in 1861. She is proud of her role as the hostess of the White House and is seen here in a beautiful gown with a floral headdress.

  Inside, the Executive Mansion—as it was called on official stationery until the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt—boasted the large elegant East Room, the ornate Red Room with a piano, and the lovely Blue Room, on the main floor. On their first evening in their new home, Mary Lincoln led a tour of inspection and was surprised to find the upstairs family quarters in shabby condition, with cracked wallpaper, worn carpets, dilapidated draperies, and furniture that looked like it had belonged to the first residents, John and Abigail Adams. Rather than an Executive Mansion, most of the private residence had the appearance of a run-down hotel.

  Mary Lincoln believed she was prepared, by family background and education, to be “First Lady,” a title that had been conferred for the first time in 1857 upon Harriet Lane, the orphaned daughter of bachelor James Buchanan’s much-loved sister. At age forty-two, Mary eagerly set out to take responsibility for the public life in the White House.

  She welcomed her new position. If her husband was the new commander in chief in the masculine public sphere of the nation, she wanted to be the commander in chief in the feminine sphere of the home. As her husband took the lead in building a ragtag army into a modern, well-equipped military, she became determined to turn the run-down White House into a modern, well-furnished public place for the people.

  Mary found herself living a difficult “semiprivate” life, a space in between the customary private lives of women in the nineteenth century, and the public life of the new First Lady of the White House. She had always taken pleasure in the political aspects of public life. In Illinois, she had grown accustomed to being a part of her husband’s inner circle, offering him counsel and advice. In Washington, she expected to do the same.

  But Mary was not prepared for the cold reception she would receive in Washington. She found herself excluded from Washington society by various cliques of women. Although Mary was a Southerner by birth, the Southern women who remained in Was
hington rebuffed her because they deemed her husband the “Black Republican.” On the other hand, Eastern women snubbed her because they saw her as an uncivilized frontier woman from the West.

  Soon after arriving in Washington, Mary decided to restore the Executive Mansion both as a personal home and as a public space. Not since Dolly Madison, a half century earlier, had a First Lady approached her task with such resolve. Ever since 1841, Congress had provided twenty thousand dollars annually for refurbishing the White House. Few of her predecessors had spent the full allowance. Harriet Lane, Buchanan’s niece, had focused her attention on social events on the main floor and spent nothing on the living quarters on the second floor. Mary Lincoln got busy spending the allowance on furniture, wallpaper, rugs, and china.

  In early May, Mary set off for New York and Philadelphia. Accompanied by her cousin Lizzie Grimsley and William Wood, who had been in charge of the Lincolns’ travel arrangements from Springfield to Washington, she attacked the finest stores in New York and Philadelphia. Alexander T. Stewart, known as “the Merchant Prince” of New York, hosted Mary at a dinner party and she returned the favor by buying two thousand dollars’ worth of rugs and curtains at his marble emporium on Broadway. This would be the first of eleven buying trips by the First Lady.

  CONGRESS RETURNED ON the first days of July 1861 to prepare for the special session. George Templeton Strong, who traveled to the capital during these same days, observed that Washington in early July was not for the fainthearted. “For all the detestable places, Washington is the first—in July, and with Congress sitting.” He described his experiences: “Crowd, heat, bad quarters, bad fare, bad smells, mosquitoes, and a plague of flies transcending everything within my experience.” Strong invoked Old Testament imagery to express his impressions of Washington and its best hotel. “Beelzebub surely reigns there, and Willard’s Hotel is his temple.”

  Lincoln had begun to compose his July 4 message to Congress in May. He had never written an executive report to a legislative body before. As the day approached, the president changed his open-door policy and would not see anyone except for members of the cabinet or high officials. He worked in his office alone, often speaking words aloud before he put pencil to paper.

  While writing and revising, Lincoln would sometimes look up and, in a brooding mood, gaze through the window, past the South Lawn, at the red sandstone Smithsonian Institution, which had only been completed in 1855, and beyond to the unfinished Washington Monument. Lincoln had been present when the cornerstone for the monument was laid in a grand patriotic ceremony on July 4, 1848. In the intervening years, work on the monument had stalled and then stopped. Improper management and a lack of funds dampened public support. At the outbreak of the Civil War, the monument still stood at 176 feet high, only about one-third of its final 555% feet. The grounds surrounding the monument had been turned into an open grazing pen for cattle, sheep, and pigs, giving it the name “the Washington National Monument Cattle Yard.” One of Lincoln’s heroes was George Washington, and the stoppage of work on the monument, coupled with the suspension of the completion of the dome of the Capitol, symbolized the fragile condition of the Union in the early summer of 1861.

  Lincoln could look through the south window of his office at the Washington Monument. As a congressman, he was present on July 4, 1848, for the laying of the cornerstone, but the monument remained unfinished in 1861.

  As Lincoln moved from the first to the second draft of his July 4 address, he invited his cabinet to look over the proof sheets. Secretary of State Seward again became an editor, offering more than twenty revisions. Once more, his editing was aimed at “softening the expression and eliminating potential problems,” but his revisions did not have the same impact as they had on Lincoln’s inaugural address. In the end, Lincoln’s chief editor was Lincoln himself; he revised again and again, making nearly a hundred revisions in the several versions of the text.

  After the secession of eleven states, the new Thirty-seventh Congress comprised 105 Republicans and 43 Democrats in the House of Representatives and 31 Republicans and 10 Democrats in the Senate. Democrats had lost almost half their representation in Congress. A new force in Congress were the “War Democrats,” those from the South who supported Lincoln’s efforts to preserve the Union, such as Senator Andrew Johnson from Tennessee, whose home state was the last Southern state to secede.

  There was also a deeply felt absence. Stephen Douglas, Lincoln’s longtime opponent, had died on June 3, 1861, in Chicago, probably of cirrhosis of the liver. He was only forty-eight years old. To the end, Douglas had gone far out of his way to express his support for President Lincoln. At Douglas’s death, Lincoln ordered the White House and government buildings draped in bereavement bunting. Department offices closed.

  In 1861, the president did not deliver an annual message to Congress in person. George Washington and John Adams, the nation’s first two presidents, had personally delivered their annual messages, but Thomas Jefferson changed this tradition. Jefferson held a deep aversion to the monarchical configuration from which the colonies freed themselves. He believed the symbol of the president speaking to Congress smacked of the old order, in which the king or queen spoke from on high to Parliament. He declared a clean break from his two Federalist predecessors by saying he would not address Congress in person, but rather send up a written message. Jefferson’s practice lasted more than one hundred years, all the way into the early twentieth century. Woodrow Wilson broke with this precedent in his first year as president when he spoke in person to Congress about the State of the Union in 1913.

  On July 4, 1861, all the members of Congress gathered for a chief ceremonial occasion in the young republic: the reading of a presidential message. The clerk read Lincoln’s words in a dull monotone.

  At the outset, Lincoln restated the policy he had announced in his inaugural address: to pursue “all peaceful measures” to avoid war, reminding friend and foe that the policy of his administration was to rely on the peaceful measures of “time, discussion, and the ballot box.” He continued, “And this issue embraces more than the fate of these United States. It presents to the whole family of man, the question, whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy—a government of the people, by the same people can, or cannot, maintain its territorial integrity, against its own domestic foes.”

  In Lincoln’s opening paragraphs, he signaled that his audience was to be more than Congress. He directed his remarks to the people of the South and the North, as well as to foreign governments who were making up their minds about their posture toward the Union and the new Confederate government.

  Lincoln introduced his discussion of the suspension of habeas corpus by acknowledging that “the attention of the country has been called to the proposition that one who is sworn to ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed,’ should not himself violate them.” After addressing the ramifications of his actions, he asked a question that anyone in his audience could understand: “To state the question more directly, are all the laws but one to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?” In the end, Lincoln went out of his way to offer assurance. “Whether there shall be any legislation upon the subject, he was content to rely on the better judgment of Congress.” In his discussion of habeas corpus, he wanted Congress to know he believed he had acted “very sparingly,” but would act decisively in the future to preserve the Union.

  At the center of the address, Lincoln acted as a political guide eager to lead the way through a thicket of thorny definitions. For Lincoln, definitions mattered. It mattered most that this was not a war between the government of the United States and the government of the Confederate States of America. To use such terms would be to cede to the Southern states the constitutional prerogative of secession.

  This is essentially a People’s contest. On the side of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance, of government, whose leading obj
ect is, to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.

  The Civil War has been interpreted as a war to preserve the Union, but at the beginning of the war Lincoln declared the Union not an end, but a means to an end that was more than a particular system of political organization. For Lincoln, the Union was an ecology of political, social, and economic life that could nourish the common person’s opportunity to pursue their dreams, unrestricted by artificial obstacles.

  This address demonstrates Lincoln’s ability to combine both homely and high language in a new kind of American presidential communication. In his extended discussion of secession, he referred initially to its proponents by saying “they commenced by an insidious debauching of the public mind.” He continued his assault by arguing that “they invented an ingenious sophism,” an argument ultimately invalid, even if correct in form. After this high level of oratory—albeit in a communication read by a clerk—Lincoln suddenly exclaimed, “With rebellion thus sugar-coated, they have been drugging the public mind of their section for more than thirty years.”

  The government printer John D. Defrees, when he received Lincoln’s draft before July 4, objected to Lincoln’s phrase “sugar-coated.” Defrees had served as a member of the Indiana state legislature and had led the Indiana delegation at the Republican convention in Chicago. A politician and a printer, he informed Lincoln that sugar-coated “lacked the dignity proper to a state paper.” Lincoln replied, “Well, Defrees, if you think the time will come when people will not understand what ‘sugar-coated’ means, I’ll alter it; otherwise, I think I’ll let it go.”