American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Thin, gaunt, his face deeply lined and his eyes shadowed, Lincoln himself seemed one of the casualties of war by the summer of 1864. This fourth year of the war had been expected to be a time of culmination for the President and his cause, but it had turned out a period of dashed hopes, frustration, war weariness, and widespread gloom. Lincoln had a special anxiety—this was an election year. Not a single respected voice had been raised against the fantastic notion that the people should actually pass judgment on their commander-in-chief—should fire or rehire him—at the height of a war for survival. Certainly Lincoln, a republican to the core, would not have dreamed of it. Still, by late 1864, it seemed likely that he would lose the battle of the ballots if not that of the bullets—so likely, indeed, that the President himself took out a sheet of stationery late in August and wrote: “This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he can not possibly save it afterwards.” Thus Lincoln was reaffirming a noble democratic idea—peaceful transfer of power to the succession, even a hostile succession.

  Was it conceivable, though, that a President at the height of his powers—a commander-in-chief who seemed finally to be winning the war though still losing some battles, the leader who embodied Northern hopes and expectations—that this man could lose an election in which the old southern bastion of the opposition Democratic party could not even vote? The fact that Lincoln was a masterly operator of the governmental and party machinery only sharpened the question.

  Lincoln’s political management was based on the strategy of balance, in which he alone acted as master balancer. He had built a Cabinet and Administration in which radicals were counterpoised against moderates. When that balance threatened to collapse during the dark days of late 1862, the President had secured letters of resignation from both Secretary of State Seward and Treasury Secretary Chase, and then retained both Cabinet members, exclaiming to a friend, “I can ride now. I’ve got a pumpkin in each end of my bag.” Foes of the Secretary of State continued to arouse public pressure against him by gaining signatures for petitions demanding “reconstruction of the cabinet,” but Lincoln fended them off. He had just the balance he wanted in his official family.

  The President strove for this balance throughout his Administration. He pitted general against general, governors of border states against radical senators, party faction against faction, congressional bloc against bloc, border states against the “Solid North.” He coached his subordinates on being balancers themselves, instructing a new general that if either both local political factions “or neither shall abuse you, you will probably be about right. Beware of being assailed by one and praised by the other.” He used patronage and other presidential resources expertly to maintain the balance. He knew how to be ambiguous when need be; he knew how to time his actions, waiting for political forces to become identifiable and measurable before striking. He knew how to slow down, taking one problem at a time. He was a political acrobat, proceeding step by step along a swaying tightrope, balancing a pole along which danced politicians, generals, lobbyists, officials, businessmen.

  Nowhere was Lincoln’s managerial touch more delicate than in foreign policy. In the first year of the war, after Navy captain Charles Wilkes stopped the British mail steamer Trent on the high seas and seized two Confederate envoys on their way to Europe, the President had given a conciliatory reply to a British demand for an apology, amid an anti-British uproar throughout the North. Lincoln was not about to war on the South and on Britain at the same time. Rather, he concentrated on his key objective—persuading Britain and France not to recognize or aid the Confederacy. Lincoln’s policy began to pay off within a few months of Union victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg. The British government forbade Confederate “Laird rams”—floating fortresses with formidable wrought-iron “piercers”—under construction in Liverpool to leave that port, and Napoleon III ordered several naval vessels under construction for Richmond to be sold to European governments. By 1864, as Union fortunes rose, Confederate hopes for foreign recognition faded.

  So, as a practical manager of captains and kings, of ships and shoes and cabbages and many other things, Abraham Lincoln had shown endless dexterity and persistence. Hence it was all the more remarkable that the President by 1864 had lost the confidence of some key leaders in his own party. The “most striking thing is the absence of personal loyalty to the President,” Richard Henry Dana reported earlier from Washington. “He has no admirers, no enthusiastic supporters, none to bet on his head.” Republican critics, David Donald was to note, called the President unfit, a political coward, a dictator, timid and ignorant, pitiable, too slow, uneducated, dazed, utterly foolish. Many important Republican leaders, Donald found—Chase, Sumner, Greeley, Thaddeus Stevens, Thurlow Weed, among others—doubted the advisability of a second term for Lincoln.

  The criticisms came from all sides and often were mutually inconsistent. Some flayed the President for being ignorant of economics, diplomacy, the military arts; others for meddling too much. Some wanted a stronger hand on the tiller, others charged tyranny. Charles Francis Adams, Lincoln’s minister in London, called Jefferson Davis “in some respects superior to our President.” Fierce criticism erupted not only from Peace Democrats and War .Democrats, but from radical Republicans. To them, Lincoln’s resourcefulness was feckless improvisation, his deliberateness was indecision and drift, his balancing sheer juggling. Above all, they differed with Lincoln over postwar reconstruction—especially over his plan to recognize Southern state governments as soon as 10 percent of the 1860 electorate took the oath and the state agreed to emancipate; and when Lincoln pocket-vetoed the Wade-Davis Bill embodying their own plan of requiring a majority of each state electorate to take an oath of past as well as future loyalty, the radicals’ hostility rose to white heat.

  Above all, Republican leaders feared losing office. Could a man in Lincoln’s political straits win both nomination and reelection? The ease with which the President dominated the Republican presidential convention in Baltimore in June was a revealing indication of the reach of his balancing and managing skills. So adroitly had he handled the considerable patronage at his disposal, so delicately had he steered through intrastate factional politics, that Lincoln easily headed off booms for Chase and for the colorful and controversial general Ben Butler. More threatening had been a radical thrust behind General John C. Frémont, the 1856 Republican candidate; the President parried this by favoring a platform plank that called for continuing the war until the South’s “unconditional surrender.” Almost as easily as he won his own renomination, Lincoln put through the vice-presidential nomination of Andrew Johnson, his military governor in Tennessee, a stalwart Unionist and War Democrat.

  The choice of Johnson symbolized Lincoln’s strategy of a Unionist coalition against the Democrats. In typical major-party fashion the Democrats, convening in Chicago late in August, tried a different kind of coalition—a War Democrat running on a peace platform calling for cessation of the war “with a view to an ultimate convention.” The Democrats chose a formidable candidate in General George B. McClellan, still a hero to many Northerners, but he was fatally compromised by a platform that, in the view of the Richmond Examiner, “floats between peace and war.” It did not help the general that Clement Vallandigham, the notorious Ohio leader of the “Copperheads,” as Peace Democrats were called by their foes, had made his way back into the North via Canada after Lincoln had banished him to the Confederacy. In vain did the general shift from his “peace before reunion” position to reunion as a condition for peace. The Northern voters had moved ahead of him.

  Lincoln’s popular-vote victory in the fall, 2.2 to 1.8 million, resulted from a number of factors beyond his control—the absence of the Southern states, the grass-roots strength
of his party, the tendency of voters to coalesce behind their leadership during wartime. His victory also was due to a number of forces over which he had partial control: his selection of Grant, the military mobilization of the country, and the exhilarating September announcement that Atlanta at last had fallen. Not least was victory due to the willingness of the commander-in-chief and his generals to grant soldiers timely furloughs by the tens of thousands, enabling them to cast a vote that all knew would be heavily pro-Lincoln.

  But beyond all this, Lincoln won a victory over himself greater than his victory over McClellan. All his life a unionist who had put the Union before every other issue, including emancipation, he had come to realize that union could not be an end in itself but must be a crucial means to the nobler ends of liberty and equality. “From 1861 to 1865,” McPherson says, “Lincoln had moved steadily to the left: from limited war to total war; from gradual, compensated emancipation to immediate, universal abolition; from opposition to the arming of blacks to enthusiastic support for it, … from the colonization of freed slaves to the enfranchisement of black soldiers and literate blacks.” From union first and then emancipation, to union and emancipation and indeed union for emancipation—that was Lincoln’s supreme strategic shift.

  Perhaps Lincoln’s finest moment as a leader came during his darkest hour; about the time he expressed the August surmise that he probably would not be reelected. Henry J. Raymond, chairman of the Republican National Committee and editor of the New York Times, had urged him to appoint a commission to offer Richmond peace on the sole condition of reunion, with all other issues—notably slavery—to be settled afterward. Sorely tempted, the President drafted a letter in effect feeling out Jefferson Davis on reunion, with the slavery question to be adjusted later. But Lincoln never sent the letter nor appointed the commission. Such a move, he decided, would be bad politically, for it would alienate antislavery Republicans but, even more, it would be wrong morally, for it would violate the “solemn promise” of the Emancipation Proclamation.

  So, in the end, when all his famed political wiles had won him the support of his party, it was his capacity to transcend bargaining and brokerage and to embrace a politico-military strategy, to stick with it, to find the right men to carry it out, and to win with it, that characterized Lincoln’s leadership. A fox by training and instinct, in the end he rose to the stature of Herodotus’s hedgehog which knew one big thing—and of Machiavelli’s lion that could command followers and frighten wolves.

  Once again fortune seemed to favor the bold. Hardly were all the election returns in when Sherman struck from Atlanta toward the sea. He had won the reluctant consent of Grant to conduct a campaign that shocked the orthodox military mind as even madder than the Vicksburg gamble. Convinced that his armies must crush the Confederates’ morale and economy in order to make them “sick of war” for generations to come, Sherman would cram his soldiers’ knapsacks with rations, restrict his regiments to one wagon each, cut his troops loose from their Atlanta base, and march two hundred miles toward Savannah on the coast, in a campaign of total war. And this is precisely what he did, after leaving General George Thomas to hold Hood northwest of Atlanta. Cutting a swath sixty miles wide, Sherman’s men engulfed military stores, cotton gins, farms, factories, warehouses, railroads, all the time foraging, burning, pillaging, destroying. By the new year, 1865, they were consolidating their position on the sea. Then Sherman turned north to rampage through South Carolina.

  By Lincoln’s second Inaugural Day on March 4, the Confederacy lay prostrate, cleft in two places but still fighting valiantly, its armies, always semi-autonomous, protecting their state bastions. The Union blockade was still tightening, especially after Admiral David Farragut’s defiance of Confederate torpedoes and his dramatic sortie into Mobile Bay the previous August, and the closing of the key North Carolina port of Wilmington in February. Thomas had virtually destroyed Hood’s army in Tennessee. Sherman’s men were roaring through South Carolina, leaving Columbia in flames, capturing Charleston intact, making “Sherman neckties” out of rails by heating them over bonfires and wrapping them around trees. As Sherman drove northward, closing in on Johnston’s defense forces, Lee tried to break through Grant’s besieging army by attacking east of Petersburg. After an initial penetration his drive failed. The men in gray could still hold off the men in blue when on equal terms, but now the Union forces had such overwhelming numbers that they could check the Confederates on a broad front and still send powerful forces around the flanks.

  Cornered, General Lee slipped out of Petersburg and Richmond toward the west, with 35,000 men, in a desperate effort to link up with Johnston’s forces to the south. Grant’s 80,000 men followed in hot pursuit, with General Philip Sheridan’s cavalry and mobile infantry corps racing on Lee’s left to prevent him from turning south. In a sharp engagement Lee lost 7,000 men captured, with minimal Federal casualties. “My God, has the Army dissolved?” Lee exclaimed as he watched the action. By now his hopes had, and his supply lines were cut. On April 9, he met Grant at Appomattox Courthouse.

  It was a poignant encounter between the two adversaries, Lee with dress sword and red sash, Grant in faded campaign blouse and muddy boots—two old soldiers who had met during the Mexican War but not seen each other since. Because Grant would offer only terms of surrender and Lee knew he had no choice, the parley went smoothly, except when Lee asked that his cavalrymen and artillerists be permitted to keep their horses, which they owned. Grant demurred; only officers, he said, were allowed to keep their “private property” under the terms. Then he relented, reflecting that most of the men in the ranks were small farmers who would need their horses to put their spring crops in.

  News of the meeting sped through both armies. Some on both sides disbelieved that Lee had actually surrendered. Said a Union colonel who had fought in Virginia for three years, “I had a sort of impression that we should fight him all our lives.”

  Grant telegraphed Lincoln: “General Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia this morning.” The President and Stanton threw their arms around each other; the austere Secretary of War, someone reported, “was trotting about in exhilarated joy.” The booming of guns aroused Washingtonians in the morning. Newspapers appeared with huge headlines. Welles wrote in his diary, “Guns are firing, bells ringing, flags flying, men laughing, children cheering, all, all are jubilant.” Lincoln had a few days of celebration as he spoke to hundreds gathered around the White House, turned his thoughts to reconstruction, granted some pardons and reprieves, joyously greeted General Grant, and had him meet with the Cabinet. The President had never seemed more cheerful than on that day of the Cabinet meeting. His son Robert was back after serving on Grant’s staff; the President and First Lady planned to attend the theater in the evening. It was Good Friday, April 14.

  The next day telegraph lines clacked out the dread news—the President in the rear of the box, the audience intent on Our American Cousin, the shot ringing out in the dark, the wild-looking man in black felt hat and high boots leaping from the box and catching his spurs on a regimental flag, the tumult in the theater, the President breathing laboriously, carried across the street to the house of a tailor, the room crowded with spectators, the slow death. And then the legend—of the Great Emancipator, of Father Abraham, of the ungainly fellow who told crude stories to relieve the tension within him, of the practical politician who had come to believe in union and liberty, of the men who hated him, including a man named Booth, of the unerring course of the assassin’s bullet, of a threnody by Whitman, and the grief of a people.

  Guns were still booming as Lincoln’s funeral train set out for the north and west, but soon Johnston and the other Confederate generals surrendered. The Confederacy was dead, and with it an experiment that few in the South had time to mourn and few in the North wanted to. It had been an experiment in extreme decentralization, in radical states’ rights, in a confederation in which each state was sovereign. The central government could
not impose tariffs or make internal improvements or of course interfere with slavery, except perhaps in wartime. Other powers, such as levying export duties or making appropriations not requested by the executive board, it could not exercise without a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress. It was the great misfortune of the confederationists that they had to run such a dispersed system under the pressing conditions of war, which on the one hand tended to compel central direction and control and on the other aroused, temporarily at least, feelings of state rather than Confederate solidarity. President Davis was chronically in despair over the refusal of sovereign states to cooperate in the war effort, and South Carolina, living up to the heritage of John Calhoun, virtually nullified an act of the Confederate Congress authorizing Richmond to impress goods and services.

  The North was ending an experiment too—in stepped-up national power. Upon the secession of the South and the departure of Southern Democratic members of Congress, Republicans and War Democrats controlled the White House and Congress. Thus they were able to put through the Homestead Act and other great measures including, early in 1865, the vital Thirteenth Amendment outlawing slavery. Could Northern Republicans and antislavery Democrats sustain their power through the harsh trials of reconstruction that seemed almost certain to lie ahead? In his second Inaugural, Lincoln had said in his compelling peroration: “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right.... let us strive ... to bind up the nation’s wounds” to achieve “a just, and a lasting peace.” Could the national government, however, keep a creative balance between firmness and compassion? Could it extend the fruits of liberty and equality to millions of freed men and women?