Lincoln, the unknown

by Tom Clancy

  And he fired them right and left and backward and forward.

  Cursing and swearing, he insulted meddlesome Congressmen. He waged a fierce and relentless war on dishonest contractors; ignored and violated the Constitution; arrested even generals, clapped them into prison and kept them there for months without trial. He lectured McClellan as if he were drilling a regiment, declared that he must fight. He swore that "the champagne and oysters on the Potomac must stop"; seized all the railroads; commandeered all the telegraph lines, made Lincoln send and receive his telegrams through the war-office; assumed command of all the armies, and wouldn't let even an order from Grant pass through the adjutant-general's office without his approval.

  For years Stanton had been racked with head pains, had suffered from asthma and indigestion.

  However, he was driven like a dynamo by one absorbing passion: to hack and stab and shoot until the South came back into the Union.

  Lincoln could endure anything to achieve that goal.

  One day a Congressman persuaded the President to give him an order transferring certain regiments. Rushing to the war-office with the order, he put it on Stanton's desk; and Stanton said very sharply that he would do no such thing.

  "But," the politician protested, "you forget I have an order here from the President."

  "If the President gave you such an order," Stanton retorted, "he is a damned fool."

  The Congressman rushed back to Lincoln, expecting to see him rise up in wrath and dismiss the Secretary of War.

  But Lincoln listened to the story, and said with a twinkle in his eye: "If Stanton said I was a damned fool, then I must be, for he is nearly always right. I'll just step over and see him myself."

  He did, and Stanton convinced him that his order was wrong and Lincoln withdrew it.

  Realizing that Stanton bitterly resented interference, Lincoln usually let him have his way.

  "I cannot add to Mr. Stanton's troubles," he said. "His position is the most difficult in the world. Thousands in the army blame him because they are not promoted, and other thousands blame him because they are not appointed. The pressure upon him is immeasurable and unending. He is the rock on the beach of our national ocean against which the breakers dash and roar, dash and roar without ceasing. He fights back the angry

  waters and prevents them from undermining and overwhelming the land. I do not see how he survives, why he is not crushed and torn to pieces. Without him, I should be destroyed."

  Occasionally, however, the President "put his foot down," as he called it; and then—look out. If "Old Mars" said then that he wouldn't do a thing, Lincoln would reply very quietly: "I reckon, Mr. Secretary, you'll have to do it."

  And done it was.

  On one occasion he wrote an order saying: "Without an if or an and or but, let Colonel Elliott W. Rice be made Brigadier-General in the United States army—Abraham Lincoln."

  On another occasion he wrote Stanton to appoint a certain man "regardless of whether he knows the color of Julius Caesar's hair or not."

  In the end Stanton and Seward and most of those who began by reviling and scorning Abraham Lincoln learned to revere him.

  When Lincoln lay dying in a rooming-house across the street from Ford's Theater, the iron Stanton, who had once denounced him as "a painful imbecile," said, "There lies the most perfect ruler of men the world has ever seen."

  John Hay, one of Lincoln's secretaries, has graphically described Lincoln's manner of working in the White House:

  He was extremely unmethodical. It was a four years' struggle on Nicolay's part and mine to get him to adopt some systematic rules. He would break through every regulation as fast as it was made. Anything that kept the people themselves away from him, he disapproved, although they nearly annoyed the life out of him by unreasonable complaints and requests.

  He wrote very few letters, and did not read one in fifty that he received. At first we tried to bring them to his notice, but at last he gave the whole thing over to me, and signed, without reading them, the letters I wrote in his name.

  He wrote perhaps half a dozen a week himself—not more.

  When the President had any rather delicate matter to manage at a distance from Washington, he rarely wrote but sent Nicolay or me.

  He went to bed ordinarily from ten to eleven o'clock . ..

  and rose early. When he lived in the country at the Soldiers' Home, he would be up and dressed, eat his breakfast (which was extremely frugal, an egg, a piece of toast, coffee, etc.) and ride into Washington all before eight o'clock. In the winter, at the White House, he was not quite so early. He did not sleep well, but spent a good while in bed. . . .

  At noon he took a biscuit, a glass of milk in winter, some fruit or grapes in summer. ... He was abstemious— ate less than any man I know.

  He drank nothing but water, not from principle, but because he did not like wine or spirits. . . .

  Sometimes he would run away to a lecture or concert or theater for the sake of a little rest. . . .

  He read very little. He scarcely ever looked into a newspaper unless I called his attention to an article on some special subject. He frequently said, "I know more about it than any of them." It is absurd to call him a modest man. No great man was ever modest.

  A,

  sk the average American citizen to-day why the Civil War was fought; and the chances are that he will reply, "To free the slaves."

  Was it?

  Let's see. Here is a sentence taken from Lincoln's first inaugural address: "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it now exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so."

  The fact is that the cannon had been booming and the wounded groaning for almost eighteen months before Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. During all that time the radicals and the Abolitionists had urged him to act at once, storming at him through the press and denouncing him from the public platform.

  Once a delegation of Chicago ministers appeared at the White House with what they declared was a direct command from Almighty God to free the slaves immediately. Lincoln told them that he imagined that if the Almighty had any advice to offer He would come direct to headquarters with it, instead of sending it around via Chicago.

  Finally Horace Greeley, irritated by Lincoln's procrastination and inaction, attacked the President in an article entitled, "The Prayer of Twenty Millions." Two columns bristling with bitter complaints.

  158

  Lincoln's answer to Greeley is one of the classics of the war —clear, terse, and vigorous. He closed his reply with these memorable words:

  My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors, and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.

  I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free.

  Lincoln believed that if he saved the Union and kept slavery from spreading, slavery would, in due time, die a natural death. But if the Union were destroyed, it might persist for centuries.

  Four slave States had remained with the North, and Lincoln realized that if he issued his Emancipation Proclamation too early in the conflict he would drive them into the Confederacy, strengthen the South, and perhaps destroy the Union forever. There was a saying
at the time that "Lincoln would like to have God Almighty on his side; but he must have Kentucky."

  So he bided his time, and moved cautiously.

  He himself had married into a slave-owning, border-State family. Part of the money that his wife received upon the settlement of her father's estate had come from the sale of slaves. And the only really intimate friend that he ever had—Joshua Speed—was a member of a slave-owning family. Lincoln sympathized with the Southern point of view. Besides, he had the attorney's traditional respect for the Constitution and for law and property. He wanted to work no hardships on any one.

  He believed that the North was as much to blame for the existence of slavery in the United States as was the South; and

  that in getting rid of it, both sections should bear the burden equally. So he finally worked out a plan that was very near to his heart. According to this, the slave-owners in the loyal border States were to receive four hundred dollars for each of their negroes. The slaves were to be emancipated gradually, very gradually. The process was not to be entirely completed until January 1, 1900. Calling the representatives of the border States to the White House, he pleaded with them to accept his proposal.

  "The change it contemplates," Lincoln argued, "would come gently as the dews of heaven, not rending or wrecking anything. Will you not embrace it? So much good has not been done, by one effort, in all past time, as, in the providence of God, it is now your high privilege to do. May the vast future not have to lament you have neglected it."

  But they did neglect it, and rejected the whole scheme. Lincoln was immeasurably disappointed.

  "I must save this Government, if possible," he said; "and it may as well be understood, once for all, that I shall not surrender this game, leaving any available card unplayed. ... I believe that freeing the slaves and arming the blacks has now become an indispensable military necessity. I have been driven to the alternative of either doing that or surrendering the Union."

  He had to act at once, for both France and England were on the verge of recognizing the Confederacy. Why? The reasons were very simple.

  Take France's case first. Napoleon III had married Marie Eugenie de Montijo, Comtesse de Teba, reputed to be the most beautiful woman in the world, and he wanted to show off a bit. He longed to cover himself with glory, as his renowned uncle, Napoleon Bonaparte, had done. So when he saw the States slashing and shooting at one another, and knew they were much too occupied to bother about enforcing the Monroe Doctrine, he ordered an army to Mexico, shot a few thousand natives, conquered the country, called Mexico a French empire, and put the Archduke Maximilian on the throne.

  Napoleon believed, and not without reason, that if the Confederates won they would favor his new empire; but that if the Federals won, the United States would immediately take steps to put the French out of Mexico. It was Napoleon's wish, therefore, that the South would make good its secession, and he wanted to help it as much as he conveniently could.

  At the outset of the war, the Northern navy closed all Southern ports, guarded 189 harbors and patrolled 9,614 miles of coast line, sounds, bayous, and rivers.

  It was the most gigantic blockade the world had ever seen.

  The Confederates were desperate. They couldn't sell their cotton; neither could they buy guns, ammunition, shoes, medical supplies, or food. They boiled chestnuts and cotton-seed to make a substitute for coffee, and brewed a decoction of blackberry leaves and sassafras root to take the place of tea. Newspapers were printed on wall-paper. The earthen floors of smokehouses, saturated with the drippings of bacon, were dug up and boiled to get salt. Church bells were melted and cast into cannon. Street-car rails in Richmond were torn up to be made into gunboat armor.

  The Confederates couldn't repair their railroads or buy new equipment, so transportation was almost at a standstill; corn that could be purchased for two dollars a bushel in Georgia, brought fifteen dollars in Richmond. People in Virginia were going hungry.

  Something had to be done at once. So the South offered to give Napoleon III twelve million dollars' worth of cotton if he would recognize the Confederacy and use the French fleet to lift the blockade. Besides, they promised to overwhelm him with orders that would start smoke rolling out of every factory chimney in France night and day.

  Napoleon therefore urged Russia and England to join him in recognizing the Confederacy. The aristocracy that ruled England adjusted their monocles, poured a few drinks of Johnny Walker, and listened eagerly to Napoleon's overtures. The United States was getting too rich and powerful to please them. They wanted to see the nation divided, the Union broken. Besides, they needed the South's cotton. Scores of England's factories had closed, and a million people were not only idle but destitute and reduced to actual pauperism. Children were crying for food; hundreds of people were dying of starvation. Public subscriptions to buy food for British workmen were taken up in the remotest corners of the earth: even in far-off India and poverty-stricken China.

  There was one way, and only one way, that England could get cotton, and that was to join Napoleon III in recognizing the Confederacy and lifting the blockade.

  If that were done, what would happen in America? The South

  would get guns, powder, credit, food, railroad equipment, and a tremendous lift in confidence and morale.

  And what would the North get? Two new and powerful enemies. The situation, bad enough now, would be hopeless then.

  Nobody knew this better than Abraham Lincoln. "We have about played our last card," he confessed in 1862. "We must either change our tactics now or lose the game."

  As England saw it, all the colonies had originally seceded from her. Now the Southern colonies had, in turn, seceded from the Northern ones; and the North was fighting to coerce and subdue them. What difference did it make to a lord in London or a prince in Paris whether Tennessee and Texas were ruled from Washington or Richmond? None. To them, the fighting was meaningless and fraught with no high purpose.

  "No war ever raging in my time," wrote Carlyle, "was to me more profoundly foolish looking."

  Lincoln saw that Europe's attitude toward the war must be changed, and he knew how to do it. A million people in Europe had read "Uncle Tom's Cabin"—had read it and wept and learned to abhor the heartaches and injustice of slavery. So Abraham Lincoln knew that if he issued his Proclamation of Emancipation, Europeans would see the war in a different light. It would no longer be a bloody quarrel over the preservation of a Union that meant nothing to them. Instead, it would be exalted into a holy crusade to destroy slavery. European governments would then not dare to recognize the South. Public opinion wouldn't tolerate the aiding of a people supposed to be fighting to perpetuate human bondage.

  Finally, therefore, in July, 1862, Lincoln determined to issue his proclamation; but McClellan and Pope had recently led the army to humiliating defeats. Seward told the President that the time was not auspicious, that he ought to wait and launch the proclamation on the crest of a wave of victory.

  That sounded sensible. So Lincoln waited; and two months later the victory came. Then Lincoln called his Cabinet together to discuss the issuing of the most famous document in American history since the Declaration of Independence.

  It was a momentous occasion—and a grave one. But did Lincoln act gravely and solemnly? He did not. Whenever he came across a good story, he liked to share it. He used to take one of Artemus Ward's books to bed with him; and when he read something humorous, he would get up, and, clad in noth-

  ing but his night-shirt, he would make his way through the halls of the White House to the office of his secretaries, and read it to them.

  The day before the Cabinet meeting which was to discuss the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln had gotten hold of Ward's latest volume. There was a story in it that he thought very funny. So he read it to the Cabinet now, before they got down to business. It was entitled, "High-handed Outrage in Utiky."

  After Lincoln had had his laugh, he put the book as
ide and began solemnly: "When the rebel army was at Frederick, I determined, as soon as it should be driven out of Maryland, to issue a proclamation of emancipation. I said nothing to any one, but I made the promise to myself and—to my Maker. The rebel army is now driven out, and I am going to fulfil that promise. I have called you together to hear what I have written down. I do not wish your advice upon the main matter, for that I have determined for myself. What I have written is that which my reflections have determined me to say. But if there is anything in the expressions I use, or in any minor matter, which any of you thinks had best be changed, I shall be glad to receive the suggestions."

  Seward suggested one slight change in wording; then, a few minutes later, he proposed another.

  Lincoln asked him why he hadn't made both suggestions at the same time. And then Lincoln interrupted the consideration of the Emancipation Proclamation to tell a story. He said a hired man back in Indiana told the farmer who had employed him that one steer in his best yoke of oxen had died. Having waited a while, the hired man said, "The other ox in that team is dead, too."

  "Then why didn't you tell me at once," asked the farmer, "that both of them were dead?"

  "Well," answered the hired man, "I didn't want to hurt you by telling you too much at the same time."

  Lincoln presented the proclamation to his Cabinet in September, 1862; but it was not to take effect until the first day of January, 1863. So when Congress met the following December, Lincoln appealed to that body for support. In making his plea he uttered one of the most magnificent sentences he ever penned —a sentence of unconscious poetry.

  Speaking of the Union, he said:

  "We shall nobly save or meanly lose The last, best hope of earth."

  On New Year's Day, 1863, Lincoln spent hours shaking hands with the visitors that thronged the White House. In the middle of that afternoon, he retired to his office, dipped his pen in the ink, and prepared to sign his proclamation of freedom. Hesitating, he turned to Seward and said: "If slavery isn't wrong, nothing is wrong, and I have never felt more certain in my life that I was doing right. But I have been receiving calls and shaking hands since nine o'clock this morning, and my arm is stiff and numb. Now this signature is one that will be closely examined, and if they find my hand trembled, they will say, 'He had some compunctions.' "