A. Lincoln

by Ronald C. White, Jr.

  One man stepped forward. Talented and experienced as governor, senator, and secretary of the treasury, Salmon P. Chase had long desired the highest office of all. He also chafed in Lincoln’s cabinet, especially after his embarrassing defeat as the leader of the mutiny against Secretary of State William Seward in December 1862. Chase would admit that Lincoln treated him with respect, yet he felt that his work as secretary of the treasury went unappreciated. His chief complaint against Lincoln was that he was too cautious. Chase, as president, would have moved more quickly toward emancipation and the use of black troops.

  In September 1863, Lincoln read aloud to Chase an unfinished letter explaining why he felt the need to include exceptions in his Emancipation Proclamation. As was Lincoln’s style, he then posed for Chase a series of questions to demonstrate the many sides to the question of emancipation. One month later, Chase wrote to an Ohio newspaper editor, “Oh! that the President could be induced to take the positive responsibility of prompt action as readily as he takes the passive responsibility of delay and letting bad enough alone.”

  As was the custom, Chase campaigned for Lincoln in Ohio and Indiana at the time of the October state elections. His speeches on behalf of the president, however, did not fool Attorney General Edward Bates, who confided to his diary, “That visit to the west is generally understood as Mr. Ch[a]se’s opening campaign for the presidency.”

  Lincoln’s response to Chase’s ambition was never to join the criticisms of the secretary of the treasury voiced by the president’s friends. Lincoln’s own secure sense of self meant he did not become defensive against Chase’s criticisms. By 1863, John Hay, while barely twenty-five, had become a confidant of the president. The observant Hay complained to the president about the ways Chase undercut Lincoln’s leadership. The president responded, “It was in very bad taste, but that he had determined to shut his eyes to all these performances: that Chase made a good secretary and that he would keep him where he is.” Lincoln added, “If he becomes Pres all right. I hope we may never have a worse man. I have seen all along clearly his plan of strengthening himself.”

  By mid-December, Kansas senator Samuel Pomeroy headed up a covert Chase presidential campaign. Prominent supporters included Senators B. Gratz Brown of Missouri and John Sherman of Ohio.

  Anthony Berger took this seated portrait on February 9, 1864.

  CHAPTER 25

  The Will of God Prevails March 1864–November 1864

  IN THE PRESENT CIVIL WAR IT IS QUITE POSSIBLE THAT GOD’S PURPOSE IS SOMETHING DIFFERENT FROM THE PURPOSE OF EITHER PARTY—AND YET THE HUMAN INSTRUMENTALITIES, WORKING JUST AS THEY DO, ARE OF THE BEST ADAPTATION TO EFFECT HIS PURPOSE.

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  Meditation on the Divine Will [1864]

  N MARCH 1864, ABRAHAM LINCOLN EAGERLY LOOKED FORWARD TO meeting General Ulysses S. Grant for the first time. Lincoln had long admired the small man from Galena, Illinois, and could not wait to talk with him about what he hoped would become the war’s decisive campaign in the spring and summer of 1864.

  Grant arrived in Washington on the afternoon of March 8, 1864, accompanied by his thirteen-year-old son, Fred. A planned official welcoming committee to meet him at the Baltimore and Ohio railway station never materialized, so Grant took a carriage with his son to the Willard Hotel. Dressed in a travel-stained duster that hid his uniform, he was not recognized by the hotel clerk, who assigned him to a small room on the top floor. When the clerk turned the register around and saw the name “U.S. Grant and son, Galena, Illinois,” his demeanor suddenly changed. The now-attentive clerk reassigned Grant Parlor Suite 6, the best rooms in the hotel—indeed, the same ones Abraham and Mary Lincoln had stayed in when they had arrived in Washington in February 1861.

  A message from the president awaited General Grant: Would he join him that evening for the weekly reception at the White House?

  After dinner at the Willard, where other guests gawked and gossiped about the famous general, Grant walked two blocks to the Executive Mansion. Directed through the foyer, he walked down the great corridor. When he entered the brightly decorated East Room, the guests fell silent. Grant saw the tall man at the far side of the room and walked toward him. Lincoln extended his hand. “Why, here is General Grant! Well, this is a great pleasure, I assure you.”

  Only nine days before, on Leap Year Day, February 29, 1864, the Senate confirmed what the House had already passed: The rank of lieutenant general, last held by General George Washington in 1798, would be conferred upon Grant in grateful recognition of his military accomplishments.

  Lincoln turned Grant over to Secretary of State Seward, who introduced him all around. Shouts went up, “Grant, Grant, Grant,” accompanied by cheer after cheer. It was one of the few times the president of the United States was not the center of attention, but, smiling, Lincoln seemed perfectly pleased to cede the spotlight. He hoped that the arrival of Grant as the new commander of all the Union armies would mean the beginning of the end of the war. Although quite willing to defer to his new military commander, as commander in chief, Lincoln also relished the opportunity to sit down with Grant to talk together about the upcoming campaigns.

  TWO AND A HALF WEEKS LATER, on March 26, 1864, Lincoln received three visitors who had traveled all the way from Kentucky to give the president an earful about growing resentment in their native state over the recent recruiting of African-American troops. Kentucky governor Thomas E. Bramlette, former United States senator Archibald Dixon, and Albert G. Hodges, editor of the Frankfort Commonwealth, met with Lincoln for an unusually long Saturday morning interview. At the conclusion, Lincoln asked if he could make “a little speech.” He wanted them to understand why he had changed course from the pledge in his inaugural address that he would not interfere with slavery where it already existed, to his decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation and subsequently deploy black troops.

  Lincoln’s “little speech” made such an impact on Hodges that the editor came back in the afternoon to ask if he could take a copy of the president’s remarks to Kentucky. Lincoln replied that what he had said was extemporaneous, but he told Hodges he would write him a letter re-creating his words.

  Lincoln’s public letter to Kentucky editor Albert G. Hodges spoke of his attitude toward slavery and his own “agency” in the Civil War.

  On April 4, 1864, Lincoln sent his promised letter, which, in the intervening nine days, had become a public letter meant for an audience beyond the three Kentucky leaders. The content and style rose to the level of the president’s best public rhetoric. His letter began forcefully: “I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I cannot remember when I did not so think, and feel.” These initial words were unambiguous. The president, who often acted as a moderator between extremes, now unequivocally owned his personal position as “anti-slavery.”

  The words achieve additional resonance when we remember to whom Lincoln was speaking. He was not talking with strong abolitionists such as Senators Charles Sumner and Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, but with leaders from a key border state. Next, he spoke about the tension he felt between his loathing for slavery and his duty under the Constitution.

  And yet I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling. It was in the oath I took that I would, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. I could not take the office without taking the oath. Nor was it my view that I might take an oath to get power, and break the oath in using the power. I understood, too, that in ordinary civil administration this oath even forbade me to practically indulge my primary abstract judgment on the moral question of slavery.

  He reminded his audience that he had overruled attempts at emancipation by General John C. Frémont, former secretary of war Simon Cameron, and General David Hunter in South Carolina. He recalled his own three appeals for compensated emancipation in 1862, all of wh
ich the leaders of the border states rebuffed.

  Lincoln reiterated this narrative in some detail so that the Kentuck-ians might appreciate that, in the latter part of 1862, he had been “driven to the alternative of either surrendering the Union, and with it, the Constitution,” or arming Southern slaves. If at the beginning of his letter Lincoln spoke of his antislavery beliefs in moral terms, by the middle of the letter he discussed the arming of black soldiers in strategic terms.

  Lincoln was remarkably candid in admitting the uncertainty in his decision. “I hoped for greater gain than loss; but of this, I was not entirely confident.” Lincoln’s willingness to openly discuss his doubts is a distinguishing characteristic of his political leadership.

  As Hodges came to the end of the “little speech,” he must have been surprised to see that the letter continued beyond what the president had said in their meeting. “I add a word which was not in the verbal conversation,” he wrote.

  In telling this tale I attempt no complement to my own sagacity. I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me. Now, at the end of three years struggle the nation’s condition is not what either party, or any man devised, or expected. God alone can claim it. Whither it is tending seems plain. If God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that we of the North as well as you of the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find therein new cause to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God.

  Some observers have used one sentence from this paragraph, “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me,” to emphasize the overall passivity of Lincoln’s leadership. They have suggested, with this sentence given as proof, that Lincoln’s essential nature was more responsive than initiatory.

  But if one reads the whole paragraph, it is clearly not about passivity. Lincoln, as if a lawyer in a courtroom, began his case with three negative statements:

  “no complement to my own sagacity”;

  “I claim not to have controlled events”;

  “the nation’s condition is not what either party, or any man devised or expected.”

  These negative assertions, building in crescendo from a singular negation of Lincoln himself, to the wider negation of “either party,” to a universal negation of “any man,” were meant to prompt the question: What was the source of “the nation’s condition”?

  Lincoln answered in four positive assertions that more than balanced the three negative ones.

  “God alone can claim it”;

  “If God now wills the removal of a great wrong”;

  “wills that we of the North as well as you of the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong”;

  “to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God.”

  The central meaning of the paragraph becomes clear. By employing the verb “devised,” Lincoln spoke about the agency—the politicians and generals—responsible for carrying out the war. He did not exempt himself. The trajectory of the paragraph meant to underscore the “agency” of God. Crafted with a lawyer’s logic, the letter pointed beyond Lincoln as president to God as the primary actor. Lincoln was quite willing to acknowledge his passivity as a way to emphasize the larger truth of the activity of God.

  Hodges received Lincoln’s letter with delight. Lincoln, in person and now by letter, made such a strong impression on the influential Kentucky editor that he began to correspond regularly with the president, supplying information and opinions about affairs in Kentucky. Starting on April 22, he would write twelve letters to Lincoln in 1864 and two more in 1865.

  The ideas and language of the last paragraph of the letter to Hodges did not stay put. Eleven months later, that final paragraph would become the basis of the opening sentences of the third paragraph of Lincoln’s finest speech.

  AT SOME POINT during the latter part of his presidency, Lincoln put his pencil to a small piece of lined paper to ruminate on the question of the presence of God in the Civil War.

  The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party—and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose. I am almost ready to say that this is probably true—that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By his mere great power, on the minds of the now contestants, He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And, having begun He could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds.

  Lincoln’s private reflection “Meditation on the Divine Will,” unknown during his life, is a signpost revealing his developing beliefs about the activity of God in the Civil War

  A question is often asked of Lincoln’s speeches: As a shrewd politician, did he use religion in his speeches because he knew it would play well with the largely churchgoing American public? This private reflection is critical in answering that question, for its theological ideas were never meant for public consumption.

  As in his letter to Hodges, he started with an unambiguous affirmation. Lincoln brooded here not on an abstract problem in philosophy or theology; the impetus for his musing grew out of the very real forces of war pressing in upon him as president. He had received claims on a regular basis from delegations telling him that “God is on our side.”

  In this reflection, Lincoln weighed the validity of these claims. His first response: “Both may be, and one must be wrong.” This language is typical of Lincoln as he thinks his way into a problem. At first he is tentative in his judgments. His tendency is to look at all sides of a problem. The rational Lincoln, as if working through the logic of a syllogism, comes to the conclusion that both of the claimants may be wrong and one must be wrong. Why? “God cannot be for, and against the same thing at the same time.” His answer presumed something about the nature and purposes of God. For Lincoln, this God was not the original first cause of Jefferson. Lincoln’s meditation is about a God who acts in history.

  One sentence may be the best clue to Lincoln’s understanding of God’s purposes in the Civil War. “In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party—and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose.” Lincoln appears to be seeking an equilibrium between God’s action and human actions. Forced by the war to think more deeply, Lincoln emerged broader than his contemporaries in discerning the ways of God. While nearly everyone else, North and South, was declaring “God is on our side,” Lincoln wrote that “God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party.” As the war was beginning to turn in the Union’s favor, Lincoln had arrived at a remarkable declaration about God’s purposes.

  On the trip from Springfield to Washington in 1861, Lincoln had called himself one of those “human instrumentalities” on several occasions. In this reflection, he adds that “human instrumentalities” are “the best adaptation” to do God’s work in the world. The noun “adaptation” suggests the act or process of adjustment to external conditions. With the word “almost,” Lincoln suggested a point of view to which he was only now arriving. He qualified this affirmation further by the use of the second adverb, “probably.”

  Even more surprising was his judgment that God “wills that it shall not end yet.” In public, Lincoln, as commander in chief, was working night and day to bring the war to an end; in private, he was writing that God seemed to be deciding that the war should continue.

  Who, then, is this God of whom Lincoln speaks? Four times, in the brief 147 words of the reflection, Lincoln described God as a God who “wills.” Lincoln’s repetitive use of tha
t active verb underscored the main point of his meditation: God is the primary if “quiet” actor in the war.

  The content of this private reflection illuminates how far Lincoln had traveled on his journey from fatalism to providence. The modern suggestion that fatalism and providence are part of a continuum would have surprised Protestant theologians in the nineteenth century. The two constellations of ideas had different origins and different outcomes. In fatalism, events unfolded according to certain laws of nature. In 1859, Francis Wharton, author of A Treatise on Theism and Modern Skeptical Theories, described fatalism as “a distinct scheme of unbelief.” Wharton, an Episcopal minister, who after the Civil War would become a professor at the new Episcopal Theological Seminary in Cambridge, Massachusetts, singled out fatalism as an opponent of Christianity because it did not acknowledge a God who acted in history. Wharton contrasted fatalism with the God of Christianity known by “his watchful care and love.”

  Lincoln’s brief contemplation would remain unknown during his lifetime. John Hay would find it after Lincoln’s death. In 1872, Hay gave it the title “Meditation on the Divine Will.” But in 1865, this private musing, along with the letter to Hodges, would form the core of what would become Lincoln’s best address.

  WHAT WERE THE SOURCES of Lincoln’s thinking about the purposes of God? Phineas Densmore Gurley, the minister of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, an often-overlooked person in the Lincoln story, is a chief resource. Lincoln’s attendance at New York Avenue Presbyte rian coincided with his deepening struggles to understand the meaning of God’s activity in the war.

  Beginning in March 1861, Abraham and Mary sat in their reserved pew eight rows from the front of the church sanctuary. Attorney General Edward Bates noted their attendance, as did Illinois senator Orville Browning. Noah Brooks, correspondent for the Sacramento Daily Union, observed the Lincoln’s from the gallery at New York Avenue “where they habitually attended.” He wrote, “Conspicuous among them all, as the crowd poured out of the ailes, was the tall form of the Father of the Faithful, who is instantly recognizable.”