The creative force of the Emancipation Proclamation came not in the words on the page but in its conception. The measure untied a legal knot that had bound up many exacting minds, both adhering to the Constitution and effecting the aim of freedom. And the measure was immediately understood as the first step toward universal emancipation. From slaves in southern fields to mill workers in England to old-school northeastern abolitionists, the acclaim rang clear. “Sincere thanks for your Emancipation Proclamation,” Vice President Hamlin wrote to Lincoln on September 25. “It will stand as the great act of the age.” The commendations from around the world, Lincoln replied, were indeed “all that a vain man could wish.”
Yet here, too, Lincoln saw the dark points at hand. “My expectations are not as sanguine as are those of some friends,” he wrote Hamlin. Deserters were laying down their arms, and volunteers were not coming forward to replace them. “We have fewer troops in the field at the end of six days than we had at the beginning—the attrition among the old outnumbering the addition by the new. The North responds to the proclamation sufficiently in breath; but breath alone kills no rebels. I wish I could write more cheerfully.” Indeed, the measure inflamed the opponents of black freedom in the North, not to mention the border slave states. Copperheads made big gains in the fall elections. They denounced the “wicked, inhuman and unholy” movement, as they said, to liberate Negroes and enslave white men.
The cold winter month of December 1862 powerfully illustrates the depths Lincoln could sink to and the heights he could rise to all the while. After a year and a half of war, with the Union armies bogged down in the East and the West, a federal assault on Fredericksburg, Virginia, produced twenty-six thousand casualties and not a whit of advantage. After the battle, Lincoln’s face was “darkened with particular pain,” his secretary said. He walked the floor of his office, moaning in anguish, asking over and over, “What has God put me in this place for?” In Washington, rumors swirled of a coup d’état—this on top of the threat that Confederate troops would overrun spotty defenses and storm the capital. Visitors to the White House around this time often found Lincoln hopeless and distressed. He was awake at all hours of the night. His six-foot-four-inch frame seemed to stoop under the weight of his burdens, a reporter noticed, and his eyes looked “sunken” and “deathly.” Lincoln’s nominal allies in the Republican party—never a bedrock of support—heaped opprobrium on him, ascribing the nation’s troubles to the “fourth-rate man” who served as chief executive.
On December 17, Republican senators met. “Many speeches were made,” recorded Browning in his diary, “all expressive of want of confidence in the President and his cabinet. Some of them denouncing the President and expressing a willingness to vote for a resolution asking him to resign.” The next evening, Browning came to the White House, brushed past the porter, and proceeded to Lincoln’s second-floor office. “He soon came in,” Browning wrote. “I saw in a moment that he was in distress—that more than usual trouble was pressing upon him.” Lincoln told Browning that he felt worse than at any other time in his life: “We are now on the brink of destruction,” he said. “It appears to me the Almighty is against us, and I can hardly see a ray of hope.” “They wish to get rid of me,” Lincoln said darkly of the Republican Senate caucus, “and I am sometimes half disposed to gratify them.”
The next day, December 19, Lincoln held two separate meetings of his cabinet, sent dispatches to his general-in-chief, and heard an offer of resignation from his postmaster general. In the midst of this melee, his old colleague David Davis came around. Davis had recently been appointed by the president to the U.S. Supreme Court. Today he asked Lincoln for a personal favor. Would he write a letter of condolence to a young woman in Bloomington, Illinois? She was in the midst of a deep depression, nearly at the edge of her wits, and Davis thought a word from the president could do her good.
William McCullough, a one-armed, half-blind man, had died in a skirmish outside Coffeeville, Mississippi, on December 5. The forty-nine-year-old Union lieutenant colonel had been riding with his regiment, the 4th Illinois Cavalry, on a muddy road through a thicket of jack oak and brush on a pitch-black night when the 14th Mississippi Infantry, hidden in the woods, opened fire. Three days later, a telegram arrived in Bloomington, where McCullough had worked as a sheriff and clerk of courts and raised a family. From the clicks of the telegraph, an operator wrote out the message:
Oxford Miss.
Dec 8, 1862
Col McCullough killed in battle—buried by the enemy, flag of truce gone for the body
Leonard Swett was the first to hear of the death. An old friend of the colonel’s and himself a veteran of the Mexican War, Swett said that he would have preferred to go to battle himself than tell this “evil” news to the McCullough family. He especially dreaded telling “Fanny.” Mary Frances “Fanny” McCullough, the colonel’s twenty-one-year-old daughter, was a witty young woman who could be both flirtatiously coy and endearingly earnest. Slight and pretty, she had chestnut hair and wide, dark eyes. She also had a “nervous condition,” Swett said, and with all the griefs that attended the death of Colonel McCullough, Swett declared that anxiety for her “led us all to forget everything else.” Indeed, when he delivered the news, Fanny quickly showed signs of what Swett called “nervous excitement.” She wrung her hands and cried out, “Father’s dead! Father’s dead! Poor Father! Is it so? Why don’t you tell me? Why don’t you tell me?” “The doctor,” Swett said, “was sent for.” Fanny gradually became calmer. Then she went to her room, shut the door, and sank into a ghastly depression. For days, she refused to eat and would not sleep, but alternated, a friend said, between “pacing the floor in violent grief, or sitting in lethargic silence.”
Lincoln knew the late colonel and his family. He had stayed at their house and once held young Fanny on his knee. He said he would write to her. Two days later Justice Davis came back to remind him. “The cares of this Government are very heavy on him now,” Davis wrote, “and unless prompted the matter may pass out of his mind.” On December 23, the day after Congress adjourned, giving Lincoln a brief respite from what he called the “extreme pressure” of his official duties, he took a piece of Executive Mansion stationery and wrote in brown ink, his script sloping slightly to the right:
Dear Fanny
It is with deep grief that I learn of the death of your kind and brave Father; and, especially, that it is affecting your young heart beyond what is common in such cases. In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares. The older have learned to ever expect it. I am anxious to afford some alleviation of your present distress. Perfect relief is not possible, except with time. You can not now realize that you will ever feel better. Is not this so? And yet it is a mistake. You are sure to be happy again. To know this, which is certainly true, will make you some less miserable now. I have had experience enough to know what I say; and you need only to believe it, to feel better at once. The memory of your dear Father, instead of an agony, will yet be a sad sweet feeling in your heart, of a purer, and holier sort than you have known before.
Please present my kind regards to your afflicted mother.
Your sincere friend
A. Lincoln
The issues at stake in the Civil War included the future of slavery, the nature of democracy, and the fate of the United States. Lincoln’s letter to Fanny McCullough dealt explicitly with none of these things. But its plain words shine light on the heart of a man who saw suffering and sought to endure it and forge from it something meaningful. Like Fanny McCullough, Lincoln had long understood himself to be one whose heart was uncommonly affected by the pain of life. Like her, he had often found himself fearing the pain would never end. He had learned from severe experience that suffering had to be acknowledged and tolerated and that it might, with patience, lead to something “purer, and holier” than could be known without it. The same progression can be see
n in his presidency. The qualities associated with his melancholy—his ability to see clearly and persist sanely in conditions that could have rattled even the strongest minds; his adaptations to suffering that helped him to be effective and creative; and his persistent and searching eye for the pure meaning of the nation’s struggle—contributed mightily to his good work.
Lincoln himself had the connection between the personal and the political well in mind. Sometime in the cold winter months of 1862, Joshua Speed came to see his old friend, now the president of the United States. Speed had voted against Lincoln in 1860 but afterward dedicated himself to keeping Kentucky for the Union. The owner of eleven slaves, Speed opposed the Emancipation Proclamation, and he told Lincoln so. Knowing that Speed had opposed emancipation in the past, Lincoln was still surprised by his protest, because he expected Speed would see the benefits of the act. By way of illustrating how deeply he believed in its benefits, he reminded Speed of the winter of 1840–1841 when, around “that fatal first of Jany.,” Lincoln had been so depressed that he came close to killing himself, and Speed, the concerned friend, had told him he must rally or die. Lincoln had said that he was ready to die, but that he “desired to live,” to do something meaningful that would “redound to the interest of his fellow man.” Now, speaking of the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln said, “I believe in this measure my fondest hopes will be realized.” He had fulfilled his dream—“which,” Speed reflected, “few men live to realize.”
When he had articulated the goal more than two decades before, Lincoln had announced his deliberate decision to live despite the suffering that life would entail. Similarly, when he concluded that the goal had been reached, he saw that it would still entail considerable struggle to see it through. The final portion of Lincoln’s message to Congress in December 1862 is widely quoted, but perhaps we can appreciate it anew. The bulk of the speech was an argument for voluntary, compensated emancipation. To those who feared the sword of the Emancipation Proclamation, this was the olive branch. Take it, Lincoln said, and there would be peace. No matter what happened now, he told his colleagues, the struggle had been joined. No one could turn back from it. “Fellow-citizens,” he said, “we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.” The test of this generation of Americans, Lincoln said, was whether they would “nobly save, or meanly lose, the last, best hope of earth.”
Chapter 10
Comes Wisdom to Us
And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God above.
—AESCHYLUS
IT IS A PECULIAR feature of Lincoln’s story that, throughout his life, his response to suffering led to still greater suffering. As a young man, he stepped back from the brink of suicide, deciding he must live to do some meaningful work. This sense of purpose sustained him but also led him into a wilderness of doubt and dismay, as he asked, with vexation, what work he would do and how he would do it. This pattern was repeated in the 1850s, when his work against the extension of slavery gave him a sense of purpose but also fueled a nagging sense of failure. And as president, he identified the Emancipation Proclamation as the culmination of his life’s work. But his commitment to the measure led, over the next year and a half, to the real prospect of his own personal defeat and, more important, the defeat of the cause he valued more than life itself.
With hard work and good fortune, he met and triumphed over the final challenge that lay before him. And then a man came up behind him and put a bullet in his head because of what he had done and stood for. Lincoln died as he had lived, a dramatic illustration of how suffering can be bound up with greatness. His story endures in large part because he sank so deeply into that suffering and came away with increased humility and determination. The humility came from a sense that, whatever ship carried him on life’s rough waters, he was not the captain but merely a subject of the divine force—call it fate or God or the “Almighty Architect” of existence. The determination came from a sense that, however humble his station, Lincoln was no idle passenger but a sailor on deck with a job to do. In his strange mix of deference to divine authority and willful exercise of his own meager power, Lincoln achieved transcendent wisdom, the delicate fruit of a lifetime of pain.
Emancipation threw oil on the fire of Lincoln’s northern opposition, the antiwar Democrats, or Copperheads, who began to actively oppose a war that they argued, with increasing success, was really about freeing Negroes and enslaving whites. In January 1863, Lincoln said that he feared this “fire in the rear” even more than the military struggle. Indeed, the two fires began to burn together. While the war’s northern opponents seized on every piece of bad news—defeats in battle, high taxes, conscription—Confederate leaders saw that every blow they struck had a political as well as a military effect. In May, Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia bested a Union force twice its size at Chancellorsville. His confidence high, Lee then invaded southern Pennsylvania in early June, believing he could crush northern morale and perhaps secure diplomatic recognition from England and France.
Either way, Lee’s invasion was bound to be a turning point, and Lincoln hoped that it could bring the war to an end. These hopes were buoyed when, over the first three days of July, around the small crossroads town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the Union army under General George Meade prevailed in a huge, ugly battle that left 50,000 dead, wounded, or missing. Lee lost 28,000 men, a third of his army, and limped back to the Potomac River, only to find the river swollen by rain and his pontoon bridges wrecked. He was trapped. Meanwhile, on July 4, General Ulysse S. Grant captured Vicksburg, the Confederate fortress that for more than two years had held the Mississippi River. Hearing this, Lincoln was in a rare good mood—“very happy,” wrote his secretary John Hay, “in the prospect of a brilliant success.”
His hopes were dashed, though, when Meade failed to pursue Lee. With three days to build a new bridge, the Confederates scampered safely back to Virginia. Robert Todd Lincoln, in a visit with his father, noted that he was “grieved silently but deeply about the escape of Lee.” Underscoring the troubles of war, on July 13 riots broke out in New York City, a culmination of months of unrest over a March draft law. The law made all men between the ages of twenty and forty-five eligible for military conscription, while exempting anyone who could pay $300. A combination of resentments—political, economic, racial—ignited groups of Irish immigrants, who sacked homes and lit buildings on fire. Blacks in particular felt their wrath. The Colored Orphan Asylum was burned to the ground. In four days of rioting about 120 people died. On July 14, Lincoln was, in his own words, “oppressed” and in “deep distress.” “My dear general,” he wrote to Meade, “I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee’s escape. He was within your easy grasp, and to have closed upon him would, in connection with our other late successes, have ended the war. As it is, the war will be prolonged indefinitely . . . I am distressed immeasurably because of it.” But the damage was already done. Lincoln kept his letter, putting it in an envelope that he took care to mark “never sent.”
Though there were practical reasons for Lincoln’s restraint, it may also reflect a shift that people noticed in him around this time. John Hay wrote in early August that the president “is in fine whack. I have seldom seen him more serene&busy . . . There is no man in the country, so wise so gentle and so firm.” Unhappy as he was, and as intense as the pressure continued to be, Lincoln found peace by acknowledging his own powerlessness over events. According to General James F. Rusling, Lincoln said that during the fighting at Gettysburg he turned to prayer, felt the whole thing to be in God’s hands, and “somehow a sweet comfort crept into his soul.”
It
was also in the summer of 1863 that Elizabeth Keckly, Mary Lincoln’s dressmaker, watched the president drag himself into the room where she was fitting the First Lady. “His step was slow and heavy, and his face sad,” Keckly recalled. “Like a tired child he threw himself upon a sofa, and shaded his eyes with his hands. He was a complete picture of dejection.” He had just returned from the War Department, he said, where the news was “dark, dark everywhere.” Lincoln then took a small Bible from a stand near the sofa and began to read. “A quarter of an hour passed,” Keckly remembered, “and on glancing at the sofa the face of the President seemed more cheerful. The dejected look was gone, and the countenance was lighted up with new resolution and hope.” Wanting to see what he was reading, Keckly pretended she had dropped something and went behind where Lincoln was sitting so she could look over his shoulder. It was the Book of Job.
Throughout history, a glance to the divine has often been the first and last impulse for suffering people. “Man is born broken,” the playwright Eugene O’Neill has written. “He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue!” Many conversion narratives include spates of melancholy—the dark night of the soul. And many secular stories of depression end with a spiritual awakening, as does Leo Tolstoy’s memoir, My Confession, about how a crisis of spirit became a crisis of faith, which he resolved by turning to Christianity.
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