Abraham Lincoln

by Stephen B. Oates

  WARRIOR FOR THE DREAM

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

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  1: THE CENTRAL IDEA

  In the flames of civil war, Lincoln underwent seemingly endless crises that might have shattered a weaker man. Here he was—a President who lacked administrative experience, suffered from chronic depression, hated to fire inept subordinates and bungling generals (he had never liked personal confrontations anyway)—thrust into the center of a fratricidal conflict. Here he was, forced to make awesome decisions in a war that had no precedent in all American history, a war without constitutional or political guidelines for him to follow. At the same time, Lincoln had to live with the knowledge that he was the most unpopular President the Republic had known up to that time. His hate mail from the public was voluminous and grotesque, as for instance the letter that came to him in 1861: “You are nothing but a goddamned Black nigger.” On his desk, too, fell a southern newspaper clipping that offered $100,000 for his “miserable traitorous head.” Some Man of the People, this Lincoln of history! Through that first year of the war, Lincoln was a deeply troubled President, caught in a vortex of problems and pressures. One can picture him standing as he often did at a White House window, a haunted, harried man who did not know whether he could quell this “clear, flagrant, gigantic case of Rebellion” against him and his government.

  When an old friend visited him early in the war, Lincoln confessed that he was depressed and “not at all hopeful” about his or his country’s future. And the ravages of war—the wrecked homes, broken families, mounting casualties—took a terrible toll on one who was obsessed with death anyway, who had written lugubrious verse about it and still recited the mournful refrains of the poem “Mortality.” Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud, when so many already lay dead and gone: Elmer Ellsworth, a close friend of the Lincoln family, shot in Alexandria after taking down a rebel flag…460 Union soldiers slain and 2,430 wounded or missing in the swamps and woods of Bull Run (a distraught Lincoln watching from the White House as the remnants of the Union army staggered into Washington, moving like phantoms in the fog and rain)…Edward Baker, Lincoln’s old friend from Whig days in Sangamon County, blown to eternity at Ball’s Bluff. And who knew how many more would follow.

  And the country! From all directions came cries that Lincoln was unfit to be President, that he was too inexperienced, too inept, too stupid and imbecilic, to reunite the country. Even some of his Cabinet secretaries, even some of his friends, feared that the war was too much for him.

  Melancholy and inexperienced though he was, unsure of himself and savagely criticized though he was, Lincoln managed nevertheless to see this huge and confusing conflict in a world dimension. He defined and fought it according to his core of unshakable convictions about America’s experiment and historic mission in the progress of human liberty. The central issue of the war, he told Congress on Independence Day, 1861, was whether a constitutional republic—a system of popular government—could preserve itself. There were Europeans who argued that anarchy and rebellion were inherent weaknesses of a republic and that a monarchy was the more stable form of government. Now, in the Civil War, popular government was going through a fiery trial for its very survival. If it failed in America, if it succumbed to the forces of reaction represented by the slave-based Confederacy, it might indeed perish from the earth. The beacon of hope for oppressed humanity the world over would be destroyed.

  To prevent that, Lincoln said, the government must meet force with force. It must teach southern dissidents “the folly of being the beginners of a war.” It must show the world “that those who can fairly carry an election, can also suppress a rebellion,” and that popular government was a viable system. “This is essentially a People’s contest,” the President said. “On the side of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.”

  Yes, this was the central idea of the war. This was what Lincoln had in mind when he said, “I shall do nothing in malice. What I deal with is too vast for malicious dealing.” And in various ways he repeated that central idea in the difficult days ahead. They were fighting, he told crowds and visitors at the White House, to preserve something that lay at the heart of the American promise, something he had cherished and defended almost all his political life. “I happen temporarily to occupy this big White House,” he said to an Ohio regiment. “I am a living witness that one of your children may look to come here as my father’s child has. It is in order that each of you may have through this free government which we have enjoyed, an open field and a fair chance for your industry, enterprise and intelligence; that you may all have equal privileges in the race of life, with all its desirable human aspirations. It is for this the struggle should be maintained, that we may not lose our birthright.”

  Fighting for that idea, keeping it uppermost in his mind, Lincoln found the inner strength to surmount his multitude of woes—the vituperation he suffered throughout his presidency, the devastating loss of his cherished son Willie, the ensuing breakdown of his wife Mary, and above all the endless, endless war. The war consumed him, demanding almost all his energy from dawn until late into the night. He had almost no time for his family, for recreation beyond a daily carriage ride, for meals and leisurely jokes and laughter with old friends, for government matters unrelated to the conflict. He seldom initiated legislation on Capitol Hill and used his veto less than any other important American President. Beyond signing his name, he had little connection with the homestead, railroad, and banking bills flowing out of the wartime capitol. Not that he lacked interest in such measures. No, they implemented his own national economic outlook—they promoted the “material growth of the nation” and the rise of the “many,” and so were related to the central idea. Yet he was too preoccupied with the war to initiate economic legislation in Congress.

  Every day, whenever he could spare a moment, Lincoln hurried to the telegraph office of the War Department to get the latest war news. He was there during almost all the crucial campaigns, pacing back and forth with his hands clasped behind him, sending out anxious telegraphic messages to some southern battlefront: What news now? What from Hooker? What goes? He even brought documents to the telegraph office and worked on them at a borrowed desk. It was here, as he awaited military developments, that he wrote an early draft of his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.

  In short, the war and Lincoln’s response to it defined him as a President. Here is a classic illustration of how the interaction of people and events shapes the course of history. As the war grew and changed, so Lincoln grew and changed. At first, he warned that the conflict must not turn into a “remorseless revolutionary struggle,” lest that cause wide-scale social and political wreckage. As a consequence, his initial war strategies were cautious and limited. But when the conflict ground on with no end in sight, Lincoln resorted to one harsh war measure after another to subdue the rebellion and save popular government: he embraced martial law, property confiscation, emancipation, Negro troops, conscription, and scorched-earth warfare. These turned the war into the very thing he had cautioned against: a remorseless revolutionary struggle whose concussions are still being felt.

  And it became such a struggle because of Lincoln’s unswerving commitment to the war’s central idea.

  2: DEATH WARRANT FOR SLAVERY

  Nowhere was the struggle more evident than in the nagging problem of slavery. How Lincoln approached that problem—and what he did about it—is one of the most written about and least understood facets of his presidency. As we examine this dramatic and complicated story, recall that what guided Lincoln in the matter of emancipation was his commitment, not just to the Union, but to what it represented and
symbolized. Here, as in all war-related issues, Lincoln’s devotion to the war’s central idea—to preserving a system that guaranteed to all the right of self-government—dictated his course of action.

  At the outset of the conflict, Lincoln strove to be consistent with everything he and his party had said about slavery: his purpose was to save the old Union as it was and not to uproot bondage in the South. He intended to crush the rebellion with his armies and restore the national authority in Dixie with slavery intact. Then Lincoln and his party would resume and implement their policy of slave containment, putting bondage once again on the road to extinction.

  There were other reasons for Lincoln’s hands-off policy about slavery in the South. Four slave states—Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri—remained in the Union. Should he try to free the slaves, Lincoln feared it would drive the crucial border into the Confederacy, which would have been a calamity for the Union. A rebel Maryland would create an impossible situation for Washington, D.C. And a Confederate Missouri and Kentucky would give the insurrectionists potential bases from which to invade Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. As a popular witticism went, “Lincoln would like to have God on his side, but he must have Kentucky.” So Lincoln rejected emancipation in part to appease the loyal border.

  He was also waging a bipartisan war effort, with northern Democrats and Republicans alike enlisting in his armies to save the Union and its experiment in popular government. Lincoln encouraged this because he insisted that the North must be united if it was to win the war. An emancipation policy, he feared, would alienate northern Democrats, ignite a racial powder keg in the northern states, and possibly cause a civil war in the rear. Then the Union cause really would be lost.

  But in little more than a year the pressures and problems of civil war caused Lincoln to change his mind, caused him to abandon his hands-off policy and strike at slavery in the rebel states, thus making emancipation a Union war objective. There was no single reason why he did so—certainly the reason was not political expediency. On the contrary, the pressures operating on Lincoln were varied and complex.

  First, from the summer of 1861 on, several Republican senators—chief among them Charles Summer of Massachusetts, Benjamin F. Wade of Ohio, and Zachariah Chandler of Michigan—met frequently with Lincoln and implored him to alter his slave policy. Perhaps no other group prodded and pushed the President so much as they.

  Sumner was a tall, elegant bachelor, with rich brown hair, a massive forehead, blue eyes, and a rather sad smile. He had traveled widely in England, where his friends included some of the most eminent political and literary figures. A humorless, erudite Bostonian, educated at Harvard, Sumner had a fondness for tailored coats, checkered trousers, and English gaiters. He was so conscious of manners, said a contemporary, “that he never allowed himself, even in the privacy of his own chamber, to fall into a position which he would not take in his chair in the Senate.” He spoke out with great courage against racial inequality. Back in 1856, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina had beaten him almost to death in the Senate chamber for his “Crime Against Kansas” speech, and Sumner still carried physical and psychological scars from that attack. The senator now served as one of Lincoln’s chief foreign policy advisers, often accompanied him on his carriage rides, and became the President’s warm personal friend and a close companion of his wife.

  Zachariah Chandler was a Detroit businessman who had amassed a fortune in real estate and dry goods. Profane, hard-drinking, and eternally grim, Chandler had been one of the founders of the national Republican party and had served on the Republican National Committee in 1856 and 1860. Elected to the Senate in 1857, he had plunged into the acrimonious debates over slavery on the frontier, exhorting his colleagues not to surrender another inch of territory to slaveholders. When southerners threatened to murder Republicans, brandishing pistols and bowie knives in the Senate itself, Chandler took up calisthenics and improved his marksmanship in case he had to fight. Once civil war commenced, he demanded that the government suppress the “armed traitors” of the South with all-out warfare.

  New serving his second term as Senator from Ohio, Benjamin Franklin Wade was short and thick-chested, with iron-gray hair, sunken black eyes, and a square and beardless face. He was blunt and irascible, known as “Bluff Ben” for his readiness to duel with slaveowners, and he told more ribald jokes than any other man in the Senate. Yet he also had a charitable side: once when he spotted a destitute neighbor robbing his corncrib, Wade moved out of sight in order not to humiliate the man. Once the war began, he was determined that Congress should have an equal voice with Lincoln in shaping Union war policies. According to a foreign diplomat, Wade was “perhaps the most energetic personality in the entire Congress.” “That queer, rough, but intelligent-looking man,” said one Washington observer, “is old Senator Wade of Ohio, who doesn’t care a pinch of snuff whether people like what he says or not.” Wade hated slavery as Sumner and Chandler did, and promised southern secessionists that “the first blast of civil war is the death warrant of your institution.”

  But, like most whites of his generation, Wade was prejudiced against blacks: he complained about their “odor,” growled about all the “Nigger” cooks in Washington, and insisted that he had eaten food “cooked by Niggers until I can smell and taste the Nigger…all over.” Like most Republicans, he thought the best solution to America’s race problem was to ship all Negroes back to Africa.

  As far as the Republican party was concerned, the three Senators belonged to a loose faction inaccurately categorized as “radicals,” a misnomer that has persisted through the years. These “more advanced Republicans,” as the Detroit Post and Tribune called them, were really progressive, nineteenth-century liberals who felt a powerful kinship with English liberals like John Bright and Richard Cobden. What advanced Republicans wanted was to reform the American system—to bring their nation into line with the Declaration’s premise—by ridding it of slavery and the South’s ruling planter class. But, while the advanced Republicans supported other social reforms, spoke out forthrightly against the crime and anachronism of slavery, and refused to compromise with the “Slave Power,” they desired no radical break with American ideals and liberal institutions. Moreover, they were often at odds with one another on such issues as currency, the tariff, and precisely what rights black people should exercise in American white society.

  Before secession, the advanced Republicans had endorsed the party’s hands-off policy about slavery in the South: they all agreed that Congress had no constitutional authority to menace slavery as a state institution; all agreed, too, that the federal government could only abolish slavery in the national capital and outlaw it in the national territories, thus confining the institution to the South where they hoped it would perish, as Lincoln did. But civil war had removed their constitutional scruples about slavery in the southern states, thereby bringing about the first significant difference between them and the more “moderate” and “conservative” members of the party. While the latter insisted that the Union must be restored with slavery undamaged, the advanced Republicans argued that the national government could now remove the peculiar institution by the war power, and they wanted the President to do it in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief.

  This was what Sumner, Wade, and Chandler came to talk about with Lincoln. They respected the President, had applauded his nomination, campaigned indefatigably in his behalf, and cheered his firm stand at Fort Sumter. Now they urged him to destroy slavery as a war measure, pointing out that this would maim and cripple the Confederacy and hasten an end to the rebellion. Sumner flatly asserted that slavery and the rebellion were “mated” and would stand or fall together.

  Second, they reminded Lincoln that slavery had caused the war, was the reason the southern states had seceded, and was now the cornerstone of the Confederacy. It was absurd, the senators contended, to fight a war without removing the thing that had brought it about. Should the South re
turn to the Union with slavery intact, as Lincoln desired, southerners would just start another war over slavery, whenever they thought it threatened again, so that the current struggle would have accomplished nothing. If Lincoln really wanted to save the Union, he must tear slavery out root and branch and smash the South’s planter class—that mischievous class the senators thought had masterminded secession and fomented war.

  Sumner, as a major Lincoln adviser on foreign affairs, also linked emancipation to foreign policy. There was a strong possibility that Britain would recognize the Confederacy as an independent nation—something that could be disastrous for the Union. As a member of the family of nations, the Confederacy could form alliances and seek mediation and perhaps armed intervention in the American conflict. But, Sumner argued, if Lincoln made the destruction of slavery a Union war aim, Britain would balk at recognition and intervention. Why so? Because she was proud of her antislavery tradition, Sumner said, and would refrain from helping the South protect human bondage from Lincoln’s armies. And whatever powerful Britain did the rest of Europe was sure to follow.

  Also, as Sumner kept reminding everyone, emancipation would break the chains of several million oppressed human beings and right America at last with her own ideals. Lincoln and the Republican party could no longer wait for time to remove slavery. The President must do it by the war power. The rebellion, monstrous and terrible though it was, had given him the opportunity to do it.

  The abolitionists belabored that point too. They wrote Lincoln, petitioned him, addressed him from the stump and in their newspapers, descended on the White House one after another—right-minded men and women, black people and white, who battled slavery in Dixie and racial discrimination in the North, come now to convert the President himself. Foremost in that effort was Frederick Douglass, the most eminent Negro of his generation, a handsome, eloquent man who had escaped slavery in Maryland and become a self-made man like Lincoln, raising himself to prominence as an editor and reformer. From the outset, Douglass saw the end of slavery in this war, and he mounted a one-man crusade to win Lincoln to that idea. In his newspaper and on the platform, Douglass thundered at the man in the White House, playing on his personal feelings about slavery, rehearsing the same arguments that Sumner and his colleagues were giving Lincoln in person. You fight the rebels with only one hand, Douglass said. The mission of this war is the destruction of bondage as well as the salvation of the Union. “The very stomach of this rebellion is the negro in the condition of a slave. Arrest that hoe in the hands in the negro, and you smite rebellion in the very seat of its life,” he said. “The Negro is the key of the situation—the pivot upon which the whole rebellion turns,” he said. “Teach the rebels and traitors that the price they are to pay for the attempt to abolish this Government must be the abolition of slavery,” he said. “Hence forth let the war cry be down with treason, and down with slavery, the cause of treason.”