At the end of his message to Congress on December 1, 1862, a large part of which is devoted to a discussion of the then forthcoming Proclamation of Emancipation and the supporting legislation required for it, Lincoln gives an indication of what his own inner feelings were in the matter of freeing the slaves. He concludes with the moving words:
Fellow-citizens, 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. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We—even we here—hold the power and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just—a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.
Lincoln was keenly conscious of the tides of opinion throughout the world. He was in full sympathy with liberal thought and he was eager to have the real nature of the cause for which his country was fighting understood by people everywhere. In England a remarkable division of attitude had occurred. The aristocracy, as has already been indicated, was in almost complete sympathy with the South, but the British working people were in hearty accord with the aims of the North. Even the operators in the Lancashire mills, who were being starved as a result of the cotton shortage caused by the blockade, steadfastly supported the Union cause. The working-men of Manchester addressed a letter to the President at the beginning of the new year 1863, enclosing a resolution of sympathy with the aims of the Northern Government. On January 19, Lincoln answered them, saying that the example set by the Lancashire mill operators was “an instance of sublime Christian heroism which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country.” The people of the Northern states, moved by the plight of the English factory hands, subscribed large sums of money for relief and sent shiploads of wheat to Liverpool.
The horizon of the Illinois lawyer who had become President was expanding. He had been occupied successively with town, county, state and national problems. Now his mind had to take in those vast and subtly interconnected relationships which tie together all the peoples of the world. He realized that he was playing a role in history; he knew that what he did would be commented on for generations to come; he knew that what he said would be recorded for all time. A man who is conscious of his historic destiny thinks and acts in terms of long-range conduct. Nevertheless, the Lincoln of the White House was still the Lincoln of New Salem hill and Speed’s store and the circuit-towns of the prairies. He had not forgotten his origins or his training. He was now applying to greater problems the simple universal things he had learned during his youth.
Stories of his humanity and his sympathy multiply during the war years until they merge into a legend that is half truth and half fiction. Yet however unsubstantiated some of the incidents may be there is no doubt of the underlying truth. And Abraham Lincoln is remembered by the mass of people, not for his politician’s skill or his historical importance, but for the way he acted in little personal relationships with the common people who came to see him for all sorts of reasons. The entrance hall to the White House was always filled with them. Indians, Tennessee mountaineers, Negroes, immigrants, religious men of all denominations, wives and widows, old friends and neighbors—and just plain citizens—came in an endless stream. He saw them all. Even lunatics came to him in droves, with all sorts of wild schemes to which he listened gravely. By treating the insane as though they were sane he found that he could deal with them easily. Actually, to the tired and aging man who sat in the White House day after day listening to the pleas and criticism and curses of his people, they must eventually all have come to seem alike, sane and insane.
However, the time he spent with his visitors was by no means wasted. It enabled him to take a public-opinion poll of his own. His secretaries were often surprised to find that the President, who read so little, knew so much about what was going on in the country. Nothing of what he heard was lost on him. He listened and he remembered. When the time came he acted accordingly.
Familiar as it is, no part of the Lincoln legend is more worthy of serious respect than that which has to do with his pardoning of soldiers. No record was ever kept of the actual number of cases that passed through his hands, but it must, by all accounts, have been large. And, contrary to popular belief, he did not pardon every case that was brought to his attention. He went out of his way to see that justice was done, and he was earnestly averse to permitting a man to be executed for anything except a clear-cut criminal cause. He sought desperately for excuses to pardon, often delaying a case until he could think of a good reason for granting amnesty. He admitted to his more sternly minded colleagues that he was pigeon-hearted. He agreed cheerfully with Stanton and Bates that he was demoralizing the army. But he went right on granting pardons.
GETTYSBURG
The Lincoln of legend and sentiment reaches its height during 1863. 1862 belongs to McClellan; 1864 to Grant; for these were years of complicated military maneuvers. But 1863 was a year in which the two chief military movements came together at the same time in the Union victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg. And Gettysburg belongs to Lincoln even more than to the men who fought there. Lincoln was never more mistaken than when he said: “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.”
The year began inauspiciously enough. Burnside, who had made such a pathetic failure at Fredericksburg, was replaced by Joseph Hooker. Desertions from the army were heavy, and recruits were almost impossible to get. Hooker, who was known as “Fighting Joe,” managed to reinvigorate the tired and apathetic soldiers. However, he had his own ideas on national administration and army policy which were at variance with Lincoln’s beliefs in the free methods of a democracy. When he appointed Hooker to his command on January 26, 1863, Lincoln wrote to him saying: “I have heard, in such a way as to believe it, of your recently saying that both the army and the government needed a dictator. Of course it was not for this, but in spite of it, that I have given you the command. Only those generals who gain successes can set up dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship.”
The general who was celebrated for his fighting abilities and his favoring of strong-arm methods lasted for just one battle—Chancellorsville—which was fought early in May on the outskirts of Fredericksburg, and which ended in the loss of 18,000 men and the full retreat of the Union army.
The South had won both Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, but she needed more than these victories to help her cause. The inexorable laws of economics were working to defeat her. Food was terribly scarce; there had been a bread riot in Richmond early in April; inflation was under way, and the food that could be had brought enormous prices. Butter sold for $4 a pound; tea for $10 a pound; brown sugar—white was unobtainable—for $1.50 a pound; eggs for $1.50 a dozen.
Lee, after consulting with Jefferson Davis, decided on a bold course of action. The Confederacy would carry the war into the North, invade Pennsylvania, relieve the hard-fought soil of Virginia, and press forward with a smashing drive against the Northern cities which had yet not tasted warfare. Early in June he started his armies on their journey north. Rumors of Lee’s intended invasion reached Washington and measures were taken to forestall it, but Hooker was too slow. Lee’s army, stretched out in a dangerously long line, passed up the Shenandoah Valley, crossed the Potomac and Maryland, and entered Pennsylvania. An advance guard pushed north while the main army gathered just beyond the border. Confederate troops seized York and compelled the city to ransom itself with clothing and money. Some of the t
roops approached within four miles of Harrisburg and the people there could hear the sound of gunfire. The whole North was thrown into consternation. Refugees fled before the marching army; Eastern Governors desperately tried to raise volunteers for defense and pleaded with the authorities at Washington to put McClellan in charge again; citizens purchased arms; Philadelphia and New Jersey prepared themselves against invasion.
The Union army was rushed forward to meet the invader. Lincoln was afraid to trust his dictator-loving general at such a moment of crisis. He sought for some one else. McClellan was out of the question; almost every Northern commander of note had already been tried. At the last moment Lincoln decided upon an unforeseen choice. He picked General George G. Meade, a Corps commander in the Army of the Potomac. Meade had quarreled with the irascible Hooker a few hours before his notification of appointment arrived. “Am I under arrest?” he asked sleepily as he was awakened on the early morning of June 28, to be told that he had been made commander of the Army of the Potomac.
Meade hurried his forces into Pennsylvania. On July 1, the two armies, groping for each other, met almost accidentally at Gettysburg. The most spectacular battle of the war ensued. The widely dispersed forces were quickly concentrated, facing each other on the outskirts of the little town. The Confederates carried the first day, and were still supreme on the second. On the third day of battle, Lee issued orders for a tremendous assault on the Union lines. An artillery duel began at one o’clock in the afternoon. Then fifteen thousand Confederates led by General Pickett moved across the long valley separating the armies. They walked into a concentrated volley of cannon and musketry fire that cut them down like wheat. This was the high-water mark of the Confederacy. Lee’s army, broken and defeated, started south the next day. The rain that so often follows a great battle came down in torrents as the Confederate army, transporting its wounded in wagons, headed back to the Shenandoah Valley.
On this same day, July 4, the fortified city of Vicksburg, which had been under siege for months, surrendered to General Grant. The last important Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi was in Federal hands. Lincoln said in picturesque phrase: “The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea.”
Had the War been fought by two countries it would probably have ended at this time. But it was a War between two divisions of the same people—determination was equal on both sides. The Confederacy, lacking in ammunition, money, supplies and men for her armies, nevertheless grimly decided to continue what seems to us now a hopeless struggle. It did not seem quite so hopeless then. Gettysburg, which might have been a decisive and final victory, turned out to be only a repulse of the invading Southern army. Lincoln tried to force Meade to follow up his success with a strong attack that would annihilate Lee, but the pursuit was not carried out efficiently. It was Antietam all over again, with Meade playing the part of the dilatory McClellan. Lee reached Central Virginia, where he remained quietly throughout the fall and winter.
Even in the summer of 1863, when the North was in the full flush of victory, many of its own people were doing their best to defeat its cause. Copperheadism was on the increase. Disaffected areas were rife with opposition to the Northern war policy; treason became commonplace. Recruiting had fallen off so badly that men had to be offered large bounties for enlistment. Even this did not help. Men had to be drafted into the army, and the resistance to this measure became so great that in New York City it flared out into open violence only ten days after Gettysburg.
An attack was made on an office where names were being drawn for the draft. The building was burned, and police and soldiers were assaulted. The mob then surged through the city for four days terrorizing the populace, burning a Negro orphan asylum and running down and killing Negroes wherever they could be found. Nearly one thousand people were killed or wounded, and property damage ran into several millions of dollars.
Copperheadism in New York and in certain sections of the Middle West was, of course, not truly representative of Northern opinion. The victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg did restore the confidence of many Northern people in their own cause, and they had a great influence on the elections held in the fall of 1863. These elections were for state officers, but the results could be taken as an indication of public attitude on the administration’s handling of the War. In Illinois the election was regarded as so important that the President was asked to come to Springfield to address a Republican meeting that was to be held there. Lincoln could not leave Washington during such critical days, so he wrote instead a remarkable letter of policy to James C. Conkling, a Springfield lawyer who was his personal friend. In this letter, dated August 26, 1863, Lincoln put forth his views on the War, Emancipation and the Negro. His message was effective in shaping sentiment in favor of the administration which was under heavy attack from both Radical Republicans and Democrats, but what really decided the issue was an almost unnoticed ground-swell of public opinion. Intellectuals had stood with the President almost from the first, and even those who had held back at first were now being won over. And the people of the Northern states, by some strange kind of intuitive judgment, were making up their minds that Abraham Lincoln was a good man and an honest one despite everything that was being said about him by his enemies.
Citizens who had visited the President at the White House went to their far-scattered homes to tell their neighbors what “Old Abe” was really like; soldiers carried the word home when they returned on furlough or were sent back from the front wounded; wives and widows of soldiers helped to spread the gospel—all over the country the voice of the people was speaking, but as has often happened, the politicians were too busy listening to the sound of their own voices to hear it. They heard it when the votes were counted. The country went for Lincoln and elected the men who had supported him.
Shortly after the elections, a ceremony was held for the dedication of a national cemetery for the men who had died at Gettysburg. After the battle, the bodies of the dead had been hastily buried in shallow graves. These bodies were now being recovered and were slowly being reinterred in the new cemetery. Various celebrated people were invited to attend the ceremony, the President among them. The chief oration of the day had been assigned to Edward Everett, a noted speaker in the great classic tradition then popular. At the last moment it was decided to ask the President to deliver “a few appropriate remarks” after Everett had finished.
The request for these few appropriate remarks was received at the White House on November 2, hardly more than two weeks before the scheduled date of the dedication ceremony, November 19, 1863.22 But it was naturally expected that the President would say only a few words that would need no especial preparation. Everett’s speech was the main event of the day, and anything that came after it would necessarily be anti-climactic.
Lincoln went to Gettysburg by train, but he had no opportunity to work on his speech during the journey. He had already completed the first half in Washington; he added the last few lines in Gettysburg on the morning of the day on which the ceremony was to be held. Shortly before eleven o’clock in the morning he left the town on horseback to go to the new cemetery on its outskirts. An official procession accompanied him across the battlefield which still showed marks of the terrible struggle that had taken place there only four months before. Dead horses were still lying on the field and the sick sweet odor of decay tainted the crisp November air. The graves in front of the speakers’ stand were only partly filled; the audience stood scattered among them, and many of its members became impatient and wandered away to see the famous battleground while Everett delivered his two-hour discourse. Everett was late in beginning and he did not finish until two o’clock in the afternoon. By that time the audience was hungry and restless. After Everett’s oration, a funeral dirge was sung. Then Ward Lamon stepped forward to introduce the President of the United States.
Most of the people were more eager to see what the President looked like than to hear what he had to say. They applauded
him dutifully. The tall angular man on the platform adjusted his spectacles and shuffled the two bits of paper in his hands. A photographer in the crowd leisurely prepared his camera in order to take a picture of the President while he was speaking.
The thin high voice rose over the field of Gettysburg where the dead were lying in their temporary graves. The crowd was still taking the President’s measure, paying little attention to his words.
“Fourscore and seven years ago,” he began, “our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We are met to dedicate a portion of it as the final resting-place for those who have given their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our power to add or detract.”
There was a polite burst of applause, but the President went on. “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work that they have thus far so nobly carried on. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation shall, under God, have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”23
The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln Page 18