On January 23, for instance, the Lincolns spent an evening at the Washington Theater, watching a performance of Verdi’s Il Trovatore. But the president found it impossible to relax or forget. Others could thrill to the “Anvil Chorus”; Lincoln could not stop worrying about the navy’s failure to finish the flotilla of mortar gunboats that Halleck needed for the western rivers. The city around him seemed to be rushing headlong toward the future, but he felt the loss of every passing day like a lash.
* * *
The morning after the opera, across the ocean in Paris, U.S. ambassador William Dayton was ushered into a private meeting with the French foreign minister, Edouard Thouvenel. The situation in Europe, soothed briefly by the settlement of the Trent crisis, was sour again. One of Dayton’s best sources was reporting that Emperor Louis-Napoleon, Napoleon III, was preparing a speech for the opening of the French legislature in which he would call for the European powers to intervene on behalf of the Confederacy. It was now Friday; the emperor’s cabinet would meet on Saturday to discuss this fateful step, and the speech would be delivered on Monday.
The emperor, a nephew of the great general, was despised by members of the Lincoln administration. An “unscrupulous adventurer,” one confidant of the president called him, who had “no admirers among the garrison of the White House.” It was said that Louis-Napoleon rued his uncle’s decision to sell the vast French territory of Louisiana to the shrewd Thomas Jefferson, and that nothing would please him more than to see the power created by the Louisiana Purchase split up, with France reestablished in North America. He was, in fact, sending troops to Mexico at that very moment—ostensibly to collect on old debts, but well-founded rumor had it that he intended to install a puppet government.
Dayton’s mission, daunting for even the most experienced diplomat, was to persuade the foreign minister that the emperor should defer his call for intervention. But William Dayton was not an experienced diplomat. He couldn’t even speak French. He was a New Jersey lawyer and politician whose backbone had impressed Lincoln years earlier, an antislavery man from a state full of Southern sympathizers, a Republican from a Democratic stronghold. Whether this courage and independence would serve him well in high-stakes diplomacy was an open question.
Dayton began the discussion with a gambit suggested by the secretary of state. Seward’s idea was to play on centuries of hostility between France and England, in hopes of driving a wedge between the two countries that would prevent them from taking joint action now. For decades, the French had grumbled about the unchallenged power of the Royal Navy, yet in the dispute over the Trent, England had defended the right of neutral ships to sail unmolested. For the first time, the bully of the seas had insisted that navies must honor treaties and respect other nations’ vessels. Wasn’t this the moment, Dayton asked Thouvenel, to drive home the point and call for even more formal restrictions on the use of naval power? Dayton assured the French minister that the United States would support its old ally France in any effort to shackle Britain’s navy with tighter international rules.
Thouvenel was quick to respond. What about naval blockades—shouldn’t they be restricted as well? The question was hardly academic. Lincoln’s blockade of Southern ports was beginning to bite: the French were extremely worried that their textile mills would be idled by lack of cotton, while their luxury exports could not reach the wealthy planters of the South. But Seward had anticipated this question in his last dispatch to Dayton. The quickest way to open the Southern ports, Dayton answered, was to support Lincoln’s efforts to put down the rebellion.
But what about Charleston harbor? Thouvenel demanded. In recent weeks, the Union had deliberately sunk a “stone fleet” of weighted ships to obstruct the channel leading to the harbor. The European press was in an uproar over this supposed barbarity, claiming that the port was ruined forever. “One of the principal objects of my visit,” Dayton responded smoothly, “is to correct erroneous impressions as to this matter.” He proceeded with all his lawyer’s skill to explain how easy it would be to remove the sunken hulks when the war was over, if storms and tides didn’t move them first. Besides, he added, similar military tactics had been employed around the world since ancient times. Deftly turning the tables, Dayton pointed out that the Confederates were sinking vessels in various river channels to close them to Union gunboats.
Thouvenel seemed impressed. He wondered whether America’s ambassador in London had explained all this to the British. And why, he asked, didn’t the Americans get these explanations into the press? Dayton could sense that he was gaining ground, so he took out a map of the United States and invited Thouvenel to have a look. Mixing a bit from Seward’s dispatches with a dollop from the newspapers, then infusing the whole with his own best guesses, Dayton sketched a broad military campaign to capture ports and force open rivers and cut railroads vital to the Confederacy. He made the task of subduing the rebellion—a task most Europeans considered hopeless—seem plausible. All the United States needed was “a little time,” Dayton begged. “Having gotten on our armor, foreign governments must give us a chance.”
This subtle performance, running the octaves from classic power politics to earnest pleading, from cool logic to the kindling of ancient grudges, went on for ninety minutes. Dayton left the sumptuous room feeling more confident than he had in months. If he had perhaps promised more than the United States could deliver, well, there had been no choice. With the emperor preparing his incendiary speech, “things had arrived at such a pass … that something must be done,” he reported to Seward. During his meeting with Thouvenel, the foreign minister had visibly softened, and that was all that mattered.
Dayton waited until the following Monday to complete his dispatch to Washington so that he could include a report on the emperor’s speech. Evidently, the administration’s arguments had worked; though the emperor briefly lamented the war, he did not call for European intervention. Louis-Napoleon’s “reference to our country is all that we could ask or expect,” Dayton boasted, but then he added a warning. This victory could not endure without clear progress on the military campaign, progress he had promised to Thouvenel. “If weeks more shall pass away and spring shall open and nothing yet have been done” to win the war, “the impression will, I fear, become fixed in the European mind that our efforts to suppress the insurrection are hopeless.”
* * *
Abraham Lincoln did not need William Dayton to tell him that. Yet his generals all had reasons why they couldn’t start fighting: the roads were too wet, the men were too green, the rebels were too numerous, the armies lacked horses or wagons or muskets or cannon. Each explanation was reasonable in itself; taken together, they were ruinous. The year was already nearly a month old, but Lincoln’s difficulty had only become more acute.
And so on January 27, the same day that his ambassador summarized the emperor’s speech, Lincoln did some writing of his own. Two weeks earlier, he had toyed with the idea of leading the troops into battle. He would not do that—not yet, anyway—but this would be the next closest thing. “President’s General War Order No. 1,” he wrote on his official letterhead. “Ordered that the 22nd Day of February 1862”—George Washington’s Birthday—“be the day for a general movement of the Land and Naval forces of the United States against the insurgent forces.”
As an exercise in military strategy, this order was crude at best. Who knew whether conditions in Washington and Cairo and the Gulf of Mexico would all favor an advance on any given day a few weeks hence? Yet as an assertion of presidential authority over the military, it was both blunt and extraordinary. Once the secret order was issued to all the president’s top commanders, no one fighting for the Union could doubt Lincoln’s intention to direct the conduct of the war personally.
To one enterprising young general itching to strike a blow, Ulysses Grant, Lincoln’s order was precisely what he was looking for. Grant immediately renewed his request for permission to assault the river forts in Tennessee, thoug
h he had no intention of waiting for Washington’s Birthday.
3
FEBRUARY
In his inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln made a statement that would only later become controversial: “One section of our country believes slavery is right and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong and ought not to be extended. This is the only substantial dispute.” The fact that slavery was the crux and cause of the war did not mean, however, that Northerners were ready to fight and die to end slavery. In early 1862, Lincoln believed that most people in the North cared “comparatively little about the Negro, and [were] anxious only for military successes.” As he reminded a visiting abolitionist toward the end of January: “We didn’t go into the war to put down slavery. To act differently at this moment would, I have no doubt, not only weaken our cause but smack of bad faith.… The first thing you’d see would be a mutiny in the army.”
As if in response, The Atlantic Monthly, the voice of New England’s abolitionist intellectuals, devoted the cover of its February 1862 issue to a new poem of five short stanzas by a Boston writer named Julia Ward Howe. Even by the standards of Boston, hotbed of America’s antislavery movement, the poet and her husband held extreme views. Samuel Gridley Howe was an educator and philanthropist whose hatred of slavery and the plantation aristocracy led him to support violent action even before the war broke out. He organized the rescue of fugitive slaves from Northern prisons, funneled guns and ammunition to the antislavery settlers in “Bleeding Kansas,” and secretly financed the efforts of John Brown to stir up an armed slave revolt. His wife had a more literary temperament, but her poem demonstrated that her convictions were just as intense.
Howe’s verses were an immediate sensation among the strong minority of Northern women and men for whom the Union was not worth saving unless it could be cleansed of the stain of slavery. Her words expressed with coiled power the radical belief that the Union armies must not be wasted on restoring the presecession status quo; no, those thousands of soldiers were God’s mighty instrument with which to purge America of its original sin.
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.
In late 1861, Mr. and Mrs. Howe had visited Washington to inspect the camps where troops from Massachusetts were being trained. Because the peacetime U.S. Army had been so small—only about 16,000 soldiers—there was no organization large enough to provide medical care and sanitation for the volunteer armies now numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Private citizens therefore took over the tasks of setting up clean camps, providing healthful foods and medicine, and recruiting surgeons and nurses in ever greater numbers. Women like Dorothea Dix and Clara Barton plunged in, much as Britain’s Florence Nightingale had done a few years earlier during the Crimean War. To harness the money and time of Northern citizens who wanted to serve the needs of Federal soldiers, the U.S. Sanitary Commission was created. Little by little, some order was brought to the chaos. Lessons were learned that laid the foundations of America’s public health systems and gave birth to the American Red Cross.
What most impressed Julia Ward Howe about those camps of waiting soldiers, though, was not their physical needs so much as their spiritual destiny.
I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps;
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.
I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
“As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on.”
The rhythm of the poem, capturing the relentless cadence of marching feet, was no accident. The author had in mind a popular but controversial marching tune sung by abolitionist volunteers as they paraded through the streets of Boston and New York and Washington: “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave; His soul is marching on.”
That song was anathema to men like George McClellan, who worried that zealots would turn a limited war for the Union into a bloodbath over slavery. In the eyes of such citizens, John Brown, the Harpers Ferry raider, was a terrorist who sought the murder of white men, women, and children across the South in a savage uprising of the slaves. Generations of white Americans had grown up hearing stories of the violent revolution of Haitian slaves sixty years earlier, and fear that such scenes would be replayed in the South “hovered over the antislavery debates like a bloodstained ghost,” in the words of the historian David Brion Davis. McClellan had idealists like the Howes in mind when he remarked that he despised the reformers of Massachusetts as much as he did the secessionists of South Carolina. “I will not fight for the abolitionists,” the general told his wife. “I am fighting to preserve the integrity of the Union & the power of the Government—on no other issue.”
Howe’s poem took the rhythm of the familiar song and gave it a religious, millennial message; though less vulgar than the song, the poem was every bit as aggressively impatient and intolerant of compromise. There was a message here for McClellan and Buell and Halleck and the other Democratic generals—as well as for Lincoln: God himself was calling the army into holy battle.
He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat:
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.
Not a day passed without Lincoln hearing from these passionate, idealistic men and women. Abolitionists dominated the congressional joint committee on the war and held chairmanships of many of the major committees in the House and Senate. Their voices rang in pulpits and newspapers across the North. They wrote letters and sent delegations to Washington. Some of them led regiments and brigades of volunteers. And they were fed up with the president’s cautious approach to the matter of emancipation. They rejected completely what Lincoln had said in his inaugural address: that the Constitution left the issue of slavery to each state to decide for itself, and that, as president, he was obliged to uphold that Constitution. The abolitionists believed in a higher law, above the Constitution and above the Union itself. As Howe expressed it in her final stanza:
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me:
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.
The North’s soldiers would not die for the Union; they would die to set the slaves free. The abolitionists pressed Lincoln relentlessly to adopt this vision of the war, to make Howe’s stern, terrifying verses the true Battle Hymn of the Republic.
But the president resisted. In Lincoln’s view, the end of slavery was not a matter of if; it was a question of when, and how. Long before he became a national figure, he had predicted that the time would come when all Americans would be forced to choose sides over slavery, and he knew which side he would be on. Slavery was “a great and crying injustice,” he said, “an enormous national crime.” To one friend he said simply: “Slavery is doomed.” On another occasion he said: “I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel.” Even so, he perceived a clear impediment: “And yet I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling.”
Lincoln was constrained by a Constitution that countenanced slavery, by a Supreme Court that defended slavery, by the political need to hold on to the loyal slave states, and by the wide range of opinions among Northern voters. Though t
he hour for choosing sides seemed to be at hand, Lincoln resisted, offering legalisms and demurrals. He brushed aside the complaints of antislavery activists—called “ultras” by their critics, on account of their no-compromise approach—or fended them off with frontier anecdotes. He told one delegation of abolitionists about “a party of Methodist parsons traveling in Illinois when I was a boy.” The parsons learned that a river up ahead was flooding, “and they got considerin’ and discussin’ how they should git across it, and they talked about it for two hours,” Lincoln recounted. Finally the oldest one said, “Brethren, this here talk ain’t no use. I never cross a river until I come to it!”
Lincoln urged the ultras to stop pushing him and instead try to build public support for his idea of a gradual emancipation, phased in over years or even decades, with the federal government compensating slave owners for their losses. After all, he noted, the entire country—not just the South—was complicit in creating the slave economy, and the North as well as the South had grown rich on it. Everyone should share the cost of ending slavery. Gradual, compensated emancipation would appeal to moderate public opinion, Lincoln believed; moreover, such a plan would cut through constitutional barriers. Chief Justice Taney would never stand for emancipation by federal order, but he would have no grounds for objecting to emancipation freely chosen by the states.
Lincoln’s careful approach was intended to avoid “a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle,” as he put it. In fact, Confederate operatives in Europe were actively using Lincoln’s caution against him, assuring French and British opinion leaders that they needn’t have qualms about recognizing the Confederacy, because the alternative—Lincoln’s government—was doing nothing to end slavery, either.
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