Rise to Greatness

by David Von Drehle

  “Gentlemen, I understand all this matter perfectly well,” Lincoln snapped in reply. “It is only a political raid against General McClellan.” The president believed that this squabble over a mansion on the peninsula was but a small piece of a larger struggle. The war in Virginia was taking the Union army into a treasure house of American history, and McClellan’s conciliatory policy called for preserving its gems, no matter who owned them. The mansion Green had his eye on, called White House, had been the home of Martha Dandridge Custis until her marriage to George Washington. Descendants of the original first lady grew up in that house, including her grandson George Washington Parke Custis, who became the father-in-law of Robert E. Lee. Earlier in the war, Union troops had also seized Lee’s own estate, called Arlington, on the heights overlooking Washington, D.C. McClellan was protecting that property as well.

  Lee’s connection to both estates meant that this dispute, which Dr. Green dropped in Lincoln’s lap, was really another version of the hard war–soft war debate. “General McClellan does not choose to give up these grounds, and a political party is determined that he shall be compelled to do it,” Lincoln continued, siding with the general. “There is no necessity that this property should be used for this purpose.”

  But Green was persistent. “Are our brave soldiers to die off like rotten sheep there because General McClellan chooses to protect the grounds of a rebel?” he demanded. As the doctor argued his case, Lincoln’s irritation shifted from the Republicans seeking to mortify Lee to the Rebel general himself. If this was to be a hard war—and Lincoln could now see that it was—then the men who chose to wage it must pay the price along with the suffering troops.

  Abruptly changing his mind, the president declared: “I will tell you the truth of the case: General McClellan promised Mrs. General Lee that those grounds should be protected from all injury, and that is the reason he doesn’t want them used. McClellan has made this promise, but I think it is wrong.” It no longer made sense to think that the antebellum world should, or could, be preserved for Rebels to come home to once their project to break up the Union flickered out. Better to snuff the old world forever. Within weeks, the mansion known as White House would be in ruins, and by war’s end the rolling grounds of Arlington would become a lasting reminder of the cost of rebellion and the high price of freedom. “He doesn’t want to break the promise he has made,” Lincoln concluded, “and I will break it for him.”

  * * *

  The same unforgiving mood prevailed in Congress, where the Senate was wrestling with a similar question of how to treat the Rebels’ property—especially their human property, the slaves. The debate was led by men Lincoln had known for many years. Lyman Trumbull, a thin-faced Yankee schoolteacher turned Illinois politician, occupied the Senate seat that Lincoln had once hoped would be his. A former Democrat, Trumbull was now firmly in the hard-war camp, and his passion during this session of Congress was to promote a bill to confiscate all the slaves in Rebel territory, regardless of their owners’ loyalties. Trumbull was steadily gathering support from Republicans tired of Lincoln’s cautious approach; among others, he had won over John Sherman of Ohio, who argued that the South’s violent resistance made harsh measures unavoidable. How could the North debate property rights when Unionists were being killed in the South? “If we are so forbearing to the Rebels while they are so cruel to loyal citizens, will it not be the interest of every man, even in the Border States, to be a secessionist?” Sherman asked.

  Trumbull was trying to accomplish through legislation the emancipation that Lincoln was unwilling to order. The president was skeptical that Congress actually possessed such power; he was even more doubtful that Trumbull’s law, if passed, could survive Roger Taney’s Supreme Court. Arguing against the bill was Trumbull’s fellow Illinois senator, Orville Browning. In the frantic final weeks of the legislative session, hardly a day went by that Browning didn’t visit the president, so when he rose in the Senate to argue that only the chief executive could free the slaves as an act of war, it was reasonable to imagine that he spoke not just for himself but also for the man at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. But would Lincoln veto Trumbull’s bill if it passed? Not even Browning knew.

  Clearly, the slavery issue was coming to its crisis. Congress passed a law that Lincoln happily signed, outlawing slavery in all U.S. territories. The capital city, meanwhile, was filling with runaway slaves from nearby states, seeking freedom. Civilian and military authorities couldn’t agree on what to do with them. Under martial law, if the slaves had fled from rebellious owners, they were not to be returned. But under civil law, which applied to slave owners who remained loyal to the Union, returned they must be.

  By June 11, some two months after emancipation in the District of Columbia, confusion over how to handle the runaways was so widespread that Lincoln had to haul the city marshal, Ward Hill Lamon, and the commander of the army in Washington, James A. Wadsworth, into his office to hash things out. Lamon, who was being pressed by furious slaveholders from loyal Maryland, argued that it was his duty to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law and return the runaways, while Wadsworth recited his instructions not to return slaves who had reached Union lines. Lincoln asked Browning to arbitrate. Under the president’s weary eye, the trio arrived at a laborious process for separating contraband from chattel—a grotesque exercise that served only to show how near the whole rotten slave system was to collapse.

  It was increasingly apparent that the problem of slavery and the problem of war were inseparable, not least because slave labor was a significant part of the Confederate war effort. As Jefferson Davis fretted in a letter to his wife dated that same day, a dangerous “prejudice in our Army against Labor” meant that the hard work of running camps and building fortifications was usually being left to slaves. Abolitionist leaders hammered at this idea in their meetings with Lincoln, layering a pragmatic argument for emancipation on top of the moral case they had been making for years.

  On June 20, for example, Lincoln received a visit from a delegation of Progressive Quakers from Chester County, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia. Their meetinghouse was an important stop on the Underground Railroad, and it frequently rang with the voices of the most famous abolitionists in the country. One of them, Thomas Garrett, was credited with helping to guide some 2,700 runaway slaves to freedom during a forty-year career as a stationmaster on the secret road. Broad-faced and white-haired at seventy-two, Garrett now led a group of three men and three women into Lincoln’s office, where they presented the president with a petition arguing that the war was a “golden opportunity” to end “the grinding oppression of an unfortunate race.” The petition touched on some of the same ideas Lincoln had been turning over in his own mind, including the role of Providence in creating the crisis that could end the iniquity of slavery. The Quakers had no doubt on this point: “Vials of Divine retribution” were now being “poured out upon the whole land” because of the nation’s offense against the “millions [who] clank their chains in the house of bondage.” Slavery was “the cause, purpose, and combustible materials” of the bloody rebellion, and must be abolished if the South was to be tamed.

  Characteristically, when the presentation was finished Lincoln responded with a joke. It was a relief to have visitors who weren’t begging for jobs, he said—office seekers remained his greatest trouble. Pivoting quickly, he added that slavery was a close second and assured the Quakers that he, too, believed it immoral. But then Lincoln turned defensive. What good would it do, he asked testily, to issue an emancipation decree when he couldn’t enforce even the Constitution itself in the breakaway South? Had a decree been enough to free the slaves, John Brown would have done it already.

  His visitors were unmoved. That the Constitution was not respected in the South did not mean Lincoln should quit trying to enforce it, said a man named Oliver Johnson. More pragmatically, Johnson argued that Lincoln couldn’t save the Constitution without ending slavery: “We are solemnly convi
nced the abolition of slavery is indispensable to your success.” At this, the president softened his tone, assuring the group that he “felt the magnitude of the task before him” and hoped for guidance through “the very trying circumstances by which he was surrounded.”

  At the mention of the word “guidance,” another delegate chimed in. William Barnard reminded Lincoln of the biblical story of Mordecai and Queen Esther. In that well-known tale, the queen, at great personal risk, interceded to save the oppressed people of Israel. Barnard said he hoped that Lincoln might likewise be led “under divine guidance” to save the United States from destruction, in which case, generations “yet unborn would rise up to call him blessed.”

  This give-and-take seems to have struck a chord with Lincoln, because it condensed into a brief exchange many of the ideas and tensions he had been struggling with for months. On one hand, an executive order freeing the slaves would be fraught with dangers in the border states, while remaining all but meaningless in the Confederacy. On the other hand, how could he kill the rebellion without striking at its cause and resources? The idea of being steered by a vast power toward an epic end was compelling to a man who felt himself to be both the main player and a helpless pawn in a cataclysmic event. Barnard had even touched Lincoln’s secret desire to make a name that would last forever.

  Clearly moved, the president confessed to his visitors that he “had sometime thought that perhaps he might be an instrument in God’s hands” to accomplish the “great work” of ending slavery. The obvious sincerity in his voice as he said this—so unlike the tone he had struck at the start of the meeting—left his visitors deeply impressed. But in closing, he added a note of warning. God’s way of doing this work, he reminded the Quakers, might be different from their own.

  * * *

  Lincoln was further along than he let on. Years later, Hannibal Hamlin, Lincoln’s vice president, recalled that he was given a glimpse of Lincoln’s progress toward emancipation two days before the Quakers visited.

  Lincoln and Hamlin had a good partnership, as far as it went. They were nearly the same age, and both were self-schooled and self-made products of wild and nearly empty places. (Hamlin came from Maine.) Though Lincoln was a disciple of Henry Clay’s and Hamlin an Andrew Jackson man, they followed similar paths through the thicket of midcentury politics, staunchly opposed to the spread of slavery even as they remained convinced that the Constitution protected slavery where it already existed. They seem to have liked each other, though Hamlin did not care for the rather empty job of vice president: he was a fighter stuck on a shelf.

  On June 18, Hamlin was preparing to leave Washington for a summer break back home in Bangor. That afternoon, when he called on Lincoln to say goodbye, the president invited him to take a ride to the cottage at the Soldiers’ Home. The Lincoln family had finally relocated to the breeze-kissed hills outside of town, where Lincoln enjoyed relief from both the heat and the press of business: “The President comes in every day at ten and goes again at four,” Nicolay reported. Of course, work followed Lincoln wherever he went.

  Lincoln, as usual, had spent the day on a dizzying variety of tasks. He had settled the question of whether a U.S. marshal in Indiana could lawfully serve as colonel in a volunteer regiment and pushed along the nomination of an assistant quartermaster in Illinois. He had met with a leading supplier of uniforms for the Union army, who took it upon himself to deliver a blistering critique of McClellan and argue that John Pope, the latest darling of zealous Republicans, should take over command of the Army of the Potomac. And he had been in communication with Little Mac himself. In a coded telegram, the president pressed to know “about what day you can attack Richmond,” explaining that he could make better plans for sorting out jumbled armies if he knew the general’s timetable. McClellan had been reporting that his balloonists could see legions of Rebels arriving daily, sharpening his need for reinforcements. As always, he refused to be pinned down about his intentions; the closest he would come to answering Lincoln was to say he would attack “as soon as Providence will permit.”

  Now Lincoln and Hamlin were traveling on horseback (or maybe by carriage—Hamlin’s account went through several versions over the years) toward the Soldiers’ Home. They may well have been entirely by themselves, the president and vice president of the United States making their way alone up the heights from the stifling Potomac lowlands. Lincoln, after all, had continued to resist the idea that he should have a detail of bodyguards. “I see hundreds of strangers every day, and if anybody has the disposition to kill me he will find opportunity,” he protested. Stanton suggested a cavalry escort, but Lincoln scoffed that surrounding him with troopers would be like repairing a gap in a fence “when the fence was down all along.” Eventually Stanton prevailed, but for now, as Seward noted: “The President … goes to and from [the Soldiers’ Home] on horseback, night and morning, unguarded. I go there, unattended, at all hours, by daylight and moonlight, by starlight and without any light.”

  As they were riding, or perhaps at the cottage after they arrived—again, Hamlin’s memory is unreliable—Lincoln took out a paper and showed the vice president something he had been working on. Hamlin was delighted with what he read. It was the first draft of a “military proclamation freeing four millions of slaves.” This imperfect account marks the earliest claimed sighting of what would become the Emancipation Proclamation; while historians differ over how much credit to assign to Hamlin’s story, other evidence suggests that Lincoln had indeed begun to put ideas on paper around this time.

  The occasion to act was not yet at hand, but Lincoln could see it coming closer and had begun to prepare. When he told the visiting Quakers two days later that he felt like “an instrument in God’s hands,” he was providing a glimpse inside the dynamic process leading him toward the defining moment of his presidency.

  * * *

  At the American legation in London, Charles Francis Adams received on June 11 a letter so shocking that his first reaction was the horrified thought that Britain must be trying to stir up a war. The signature belonged to Lord Palmerston, but the tone and the obvious haste of the composition were completely out of character. Written from Palmerston’s sprawling estate outside London, Brocket Hall, the letter was headed “Confidential.” Attached to it was a clipping from the previous day’s London Times. “My dear Sir, I cannot refrain from taking the liberty of saying to you that it is difficult if not impossible to express adequately the Disgust which must be excited in the mind of every honourable man by the general order of General Butler.” Never “in the History of Civilized Nations” had anyone committed “so infamous an act,” Palmerston continued, ablaze; he wondered what sort of government would allow itself to “be served by men capable of such revolting outrages.”

  Adams knew very well the outrageous subject of Palmerston’s rant: Benjamin Franklin Butler, the Union commander in New Orleans, five feet four inches of cross-eyed audacity, with the eyelids of a bloodhound and the chest of a rooster. If any man in Union blue was going to boil the blood of a cool and proper Englishman from a distance of some forty-six hundred miles, Butler was the one to do it. A relentless opportunist, the banty general had been from the beginning an untamed force on the political front of the war. After a flamboyant career in Massachusetts as a successful attorney and politician, Butler shocked the Bay State in 1860 by steering its Democratic convention delegates to none other than Jefferson Davis. Then, in early 1861, he shouldered his way to the front of the Union recruiting effort. Lincoln was so delighted to have a prominent Davis supporter defect to the Federal cause that he made Butler an instant major general.

  The president had been mopping up after him ever since. Assigned to keep a rail line open through Maryland, Butler decided to occupy Baltimore instead. Transferred to Fort Monroe—where he temporarily resolved the legal status of runaway slaves by declaring them to be “contraband” property—Butler set off on a disastrous campaign toward Richmond without bothering t
o tell anyone first; the result was a fiasco near a village called Big Bethel. Once more, Lincoln needed a new place to stash his famous loose cannon. New Orleans seemed ideal. As commander of army troops in what was largely a navy operation, Butler had scant opportunity to cause trouble.

  The confinement to safer quarters didn’t last. When the navy captured the city and the army moved in to occupy it, Benjamin Butler was again given an important responsibility—and again he proved to be a combustible mixture of competence and catastrophe. Butler rapidly restored order to a city in flames and prevented an incipient epidemic of yellow fever. But the discovery that Rebel passions still ran strong in New Orleans brought out the despot in Butler. He ordered the execution of a gambler named William Mumford, who had ripped the Stars and Stripes from a flagpole and dragged it through the streets. To make his point quite clear, Butler hanged the prisoner from the same pole. When city merchants resisted Butler’s efforts to reopen the cotton trade, the general fined them; meanwhile, he installed his brother in a position to profit handsomely from the restored commerce. Even clergymen were ordered to take oaths of allegiance to the Union.

  The event that incensed Lord Palmerston had occurred shortly after Butler’s arrival in New Orleans on May 1. The general was galled by the open contempt shown by the women of New Orleans for the occupying Yankees. Otherwise well-mannered ladies shouted at the soldiers, even spat on them. In at least one case, a woman dumped a chamber pot on troops passing below her window. In response, Butler issued Order No. 28, warning that henceforth, any woman behaving disrespectfully toward Federal soldiers would “be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation.” Apparently Butler meant that she would be arrested and jailed with ordinary prostitutes, but the prime minister and others took him to be authorizing the wholesale rape of Louisiana women. The letter in Adams’s hands practically smoldered as Palmerston pronounced Butler “guilty in cold Blood of so infamous an act as deliberately to hand over the female inhabitants of a conquered city to the unbridled license of an unrestrained soldiery.”