These newspaper headlines broadcast the news of John C. Frémont’s proclamation of August 30, 1861, which freed the slaves of enemies of the Union in Missouri.
Frémont decided to send his reply in the person of his wife. On September 8, 1861, Jessie Benton Frémont boarded a train in St. Louis ready to defend her husband’s reputation as well as his point of view on slavery. After two days and two nights sitting up in hot, squeaking cars, she arrived at the Willard Hotel in Washington. Immediately upon her arrival, without an opportunity to bathe or rest, she sent a message to the president requesting a meeting. To her surprise, a reply came back immediately: “Now, at once. A. Lincoln.” It was after 9 p.m.
She was in a state of high tension as she was ushered into the Red Room. In a short while, Lincoln entered and, leaving the door ajar, remained standing without offering her a seat. Lincoln’s every indication was that he was not there for a long conversation. She handed him her husband’s letter, explaining that she wanted to be sure it reached him. He took the letter and stood under the chandelier to read it. Finally, looking up, Lincoln told her, “It was a war for a great national idea, the Union,” and that “General Frémont should not have dragged the Negro into it—that he never would if he had consulted with Frank Blair. I sent Frank there to advise him.” With that, Mrs. Frémont launched into her own defense of her husband’s actions, implying that her husband was superior to the president in wisdom, and arguing that this war could not be won by force of arms. Annoyed and offended at her words and demeanor, Lincoln exclaimed, “You are quite a female politician.” Lincoln would say later that Mrs. Frémont “taxed me so violently with many things that I had to exercise all the awkward tact I have to avoid quarrelling with her.”
Frémont, who had earned his initial fame as the Pathmarker of the physical geography of the West, seemed unable to find his way in the admittedly complicated political geography of Missouri. He stubbornly tried to hang on to his command by finally taking the field. But in a short one hundred days, Lincoln terminated Frémont’s appointment as commander of the Department of the West.
Governor John Andrew of Massachusetts voiced the sentiments of many in the North when he declared that Frémont’s proclamation offered “an impetus of the grandest character to the whole cause.” New England poet and essayist James Russell Lowell asked, “How many times are we to save Kentucky and lose our self-respect?”
Frederick Douglass turned his editorial guns on Lincoln for not supporting Frémont’s proclamation. “Slavery is the bulwark of rebellion—the common bond that binds all slaveholding rebel hearts together. Cut that bond, and the rebellion falls asunder. If the Government does this, it will succeed, and if it does not, it will not deserve success.”
Lincoln was not surprised by the comments of Andrew and Douglass, but he was astonished at how all of the New York newspaper generals, as well as politicians in his own Republican Party, rallied to Frémont’s proclamation. The proclamation raised Frémont to the stat ure of an antislavery hero in the eyes of many Republicans, putting Lincoln in an awkward position. Many Republicans were appalled when they learned that he had rescinded Frémont’s order. Lincoln’s correspondence with his friends demonstrated how divisive Frémont and his proclamation were.
Joshua Speed spoke for many in the border states when he wrote to Lincoln from Kentucky on September 3, 1861, “I have been so distressed since reading … that foolish proclamation of Frémont that I have been unable to eat or sleep.” Speed voiced his concern that “it will crush out every vestage of a union party in the state—I perhaps & a few others will be left alone.”
Illinois senator Orville Browning, usually a conservative on matters of slavery, wrote from his home in Quincy on September 22, “Frémont’s proclamation was necessary, and will do good. It has the full approval of all loyal citizens of the west and North West. It was rumored here that the cabinet had disapproved it, but I trust this is not so. Such a step would disappoint and dishearten all loyal men who are fighting for the life of the Government.”
Browning’s letter caught Lincoln off guard. Had he so misjudged the attitudes of conservative Republicans? Lincoln replied, “Coming from you, I confess it astonishes me.” Because of his long friendship with Browning, Lincoln took the time in his response to say, in private, what he never quite said in public. “Genl. Frémont’s proclamation, as to the confiscation of property, and the liberation of slaves, is purely political, and not within the range of military law, or necessity.” Lincoln then got to what for him was the nub of the matter. “You speak of it as being the only means of saving the government. On the contrary it is itself the surrender of the government. Can it be pretended that it is any longer the government of the U.S.—any government of Constitution and laws—wherein a General, or a President, may make permanent rules of property by proclamation?”
Lincoln’s letter to Browning is one of the best indications of his thinking in the fall of 1861. Even as his own power as president and commander in chief was increasing, he articulated his belief that no general, or president, could put himself above or outside the laws embodied in the Constitution in an attempt to deal with the vexing issue of slavery. Bound by the Constitution, he could not envision such a sweeping liberation of slaves at this time.
By the end of 1861, Lincoln had played his first hands in a contest with four border states as the prizes. He stood pat on Delaware. He undertook a high-stakes strategy with Maryland and, by alternating both pressure and passivity, allowed state politics to emerge into a modified Unionist posture. After initially underestimating the complexity of conflicting loyalties in Kentucky, his hands-off posture succeeded not simply because of the wisdom of his policies but because of the misguided hands-on policies of the Confederacy. Missouri, farthest from Washington and closest to Kansas and the frontier, became the most difficult hand for Lincoln to play. His tendency to stay with the leadership he had appointed made it difficult for him to change. But change he did when he nullified Frémont’s declaration of emancipation. Lincoln’s action cost him dearly in the short run, but he had come to believe that military strategy must grow out of the policies directed by the commander in chief alone.
ON A BALMY SUNDAY AFTERNOON in October 1861, Lincoln welcomed his old friend Edward Dickinson Baker to the White House. As Lincoln leaned against a tree on the lawn, just as he used to do long ago in New Salem, the two old friends talked of their days together as lawyers and politicians in Illinois. Baker had introduced Lincoln at his inauguration, but other than that they had seen little of each other in recent years. He had moved to San Francisco in 1852, ran unsuccessfully for the Senate, and then moved to Oregon in 1859, where he won election to the Senate in 1860. When the war broke out, Baker organized a California regiment. Lincoln offered to appoint him a brigadier general, but he turned it down, saying he would serve as a colonel, which would allow him to retain his Senate seat. As Baker rose to leave, he lifted ten-year-old Willie in his arms. Mary Lincoln gave him a bouquet of autumn flowers as a measure of their affection for him.
All summer, Baker—courageous but impetuous—had had a premonition that he would die in combat. In August, he had prepared a will and put his affairs in order. Before midnight on October 20, 1861, he was ordered to prepare his men for battle. Brigadier General Charles P. Stone, operating under orders from General McClellan, led 2,000 Union troops against 1,600 Confederates in a badly synchronized effort to cross the Potomac and capture Leesburg, Virginia. The Confederates, under the command of General Nathan “Shanks” Evans, counterattacked and forced the Union forces over the bluff and into the Potomac River. Ball’s Bluff, although a small battle, was a disaster with large implications. The Union forces suffered a total of 1,070 casualties, including more than 700 captured, compared to only 149 casualties for the Confederates.
As Lincoln was monitoring the progress of the battle in the War Department, a telegram came through announcing the death of Colonel Baker. In scaling Ball’s Bluff on th
e Virginia shore, he and his men were surrounded by Confederate forces and Baker was killed. Lincoln emerged from the telegraph office “with bowed head, and tears rolling down his furrowed cheeks, his face pale and wan.”
Of all the tributes to Baker in the Senate, in Washington, and in San Francisco where he was buried, the most touching may have been the one by Willie Lincoln. In what he called his “first attempt at poetry,” Willie wrote a poem that he sent to the editor of the National Republican.
There was no patriot like Baker,
So noble and so true;
He fell as a soldier on the field,
His face to the sky of blue.
BY NOVEMBER 1861, as the leaves began to vanish from the trees in Washington, the aura around McClellan, the summer sunshine soldier, was starting to darken. He was acclaimed in July as the rescuer of the nation, but by the fall critics from all sides—newspaper generals, politicians, and ordinary citizens—were questioning the Young Napoleon’s capacity to lead and fight. Lincoln wanted to support McClellan, but he, too, was growing impatient for the army to move south before winter. On a crisp Wednesday evening, November 13, 1861, Lincoln, accompanied by Secretary of State Seward and Hay, called on McClellan at his home. When they arrived, Ellen McClellan told the president that the general was attending a wedding but would return soon. After about an hour, the general returned. Informed the president was waiting to see him, he “went up stairs, passing the door of the room where the President and Secretary of State were seated.” After waiting yet another half hour, the president asked the servant to inform the general, again, that they were waiting to speak with him. Presently the servant returned to announce that “the General had gone to bed.” On the walk home, Hay spoke with Lincoln about what had just taken place, “but he seemed not to have noted it specially, saying, it was better at this time not to be making points of etiquette & personal dignity.”
Three days later, on November 16, 1861, Lincoln watched McClellan present sixty-five thousand men on parade before thirty thousand spectators. Criticism was mounting. With so many men in uniform, why could they not move from the parade ground to the battleground?
In December, during one of Senator Orville Browning’s regular visits to the White House, Lincoln asked the Illinois senator if he would come along with him on another evening visit to McClellan. Lincoln valued Browning’s opinion and wanted his judgment on the general. This was Browning’s first meeting with McClellan. He wrote later that night in his diary, “I was favourably impressed—like his plain, direct straight forward way of talking and acting. He has brains—looks as if he ought to have courage, and I think, is altogether more than an ordinary man.” McClellan once again made a good first impression, and Lincoln took no action.
THE TOPIC OF SLAVERY would not go away, even if Lincoln told Frémont to stop talking about it. Lincoln himself was continually thinking about it and by the end of 1861 began to test ideas and tease out the issue in his varied communications.
Lincoln believed that Delaware, with its less than two thousand slaves, might prove to be the best test case for compensated emancipation. In November, Lincoln presented his idea to Congressman George P. Fisher. They discussed how much compensation to provide for each slave. In the end, they proposed a bill that called for a payment of $400 per slave, or a total of $719,200 to Delaware. The bill called for adult slaves over thirty-five to be freed immediately. In the draft, Lincoln wrote that all remaining slaves would be freed by 1893, but then struck that date and changed it to 1872. The bill would cover 587 slave owners in Delaware. Lincoln told Fisher it was the “cheapest and most human way of ending this war and saving slaves.”
When Fisher introduced the bill in the Delaware legislature, the debate quickly turned not on the fate of slaves but on the political loyalties of representatives. Some of the bill’s detractors were nonslavehold-ers who characterized its proponents as “Black Republicans.” In the end, the bill was never voted on in the legislature.
Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts was determined to keep talking with Lincoln about slavery. Sumner believed the only course for the government was to proclaim a policy of emancipation. He had grown concerned about Lincoln’s slowness to act. Yet, Sumner believed Lincoln was “a deeply convinced and faithful anti-slavery man.” He was sure that before too long Lincoln would be forced to act.
Sumner, the chairman of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, also believed that keeping peace abroad was directly related to freeing the slaves at home. He struggled to get Lincoln to understand that an emancipation edict would cut off any chance for the recognition of the Confederacy by foreign nations. Though Lincoln seemed to be making no movement toward emancipation, Sumner worked hard to win his trust. He refused to attack Lincoln as many of his radical Republican friends were beginning to do.
When Congress reassembled in December, Sumner resumed his conversations with the president. After one particularly long discussion, Lincoln said to Sumner, “Well, Mr. Sumner, the only difference be tween you and me on this subject is a difference of a month or six weeks in time.”
“Mr. President,” Sumner responded, “if that is the only difference between us, I will not say another word to you about it till the longest time your name has passed by.” Sumner kept his promise to Lincoln in the White House, while in the Senate he kept building support for emancipation.
THE CONVENING OF the Thirty-seventh Congress only one month after the retirement of General Scott quickly became a forum for debate about the progress of the Union war effort. There was restlessness in the air. Lincoln was under obligation to give an annual message to Congress when it assembled on December 2, 1861. He had addressed Congress in special session on July 4, but that was a targeted message asking for support at the beginning of the war. The annual message, by tradition, had become a cobbling together of reports by cabinet secretaries, long on detail and short on eloquence. Lincoln adhered to this tradition in this, his first annual message, but he also offered his perspective on what was important at the close of 1861.
At the center of his address was his report on the border states. “Noble little Delaware led off right from the first. Maryland was made to seem against the Union.” After recounting the story of the assault on soldiers, bridges, and railroads, he rejoiced in the fact that at a regular election, the people of Maryland “have sustained the Union.” He was most pleased to declare, “Kentucky, too, for some time in doubt, is now decidedly, and, I think, unchangeably ranged on the side of the Union.” Finally, “Missouri is comparatively quiet; and I believe cannot be overrun by the insurrectionists.”
Lincoln was not sure yet how best to use the traditional format, in which his words would be read by someone else. He did not include any of the striking words that marked his formal addresses and many of his letters. But at the end of the speech, as he looked to the future, one could almost hear his voice. He recalled that, from the first census in 1790 to the last in 1860, the nation was “eight times as great as it was at the beginning.” He then predicted that there would be some “among us” who, “if the Union be preserved,” would live to see a nation of 250 million people. “The struggle of today, is not altogether for today—it is for a vast future also. With a reliance on Providence, all the more firm and earnest, let us proceed in the great task which events have devolved upon us.”
The fresh memory of the October defeat at Ball’s Bluff, as well as Lincoln’s decision to relieve General Frémont of his command, produced determination among returning Congressmen to exercise more congressional oversight over the war. Radical Republicans led the way, establishing a Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. Republicans controlled the committee 5 to 2.
Under the leadership of Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio, the committee called General McClellan as their first witness for a meeting scheduled on December 23, 1861. McClellan, in bed with typhoid fever, could not attend. In light of his absence, other witnesses began to paint an unfavorable portrait of Li
ttle Mac’s inaction.
Lincoln took an initial benign posture to the committee’s oversight. He gave the members easy access to himself and the War Department. He chose not to become defensive in response to their inquiries even when it became obvious the committee was pushing him for a more aggressive prosecution of the war. He may have become rankled as the committee started evaluating his generals—especially the Democratic ones—not on their performance in the field but on their political allegiances. But Lincoln came to the conclusion that the efforts of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, even when noisy or overblown, could be used to support his own positions as commander in chief.
BY THE END OF 1861, Secretary of War Simon Cameron was proving to be the most problematic member of Lincoln’s cabinet. Cameron had a dignified bearing: tall, with a high, broad forehead, abundant gray hair, and intense gray eyes. People sometimes initially regarded him as aloof but changed their minds as he proved himself a person of ability. He had succeeded in business and accumulated a fortune before entering politics and, so his critics said, turned politics into his business, where he made even more money. A man of energy and affability, he had worked with large groups of people in both of his careers, which suggested he could succeed at his admittedly large task of equipping the War Department to be the engine of a new kind of war.
Simon Cameron, former senator from Pennsylvania, served as secretary of war in the first year of the Civil War
Lincoln quickly recognized that the secretary of war had been handed the most difficult task of all. He inherited a woefully small department that was expected to support a huge and growing army. In April 1861, the War Department consisted of eight bureaus staffed by about ninety employees and used out-of-date systems of record keeping. Cameron, recognizing his own shortcomings as an administrator, welcomed Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase’s assistance. With Lincoln’s blessing, it was Chase who drafted the order on May 3 enlarging the army that was sent out under Lincoln’s name.
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