Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2

by Michael Burlingame

  Embarrassed by Blair’s indiscretion, Lincoln claimed not to have read the Rockville speech. To John Hay, he explained that he saw little difference between Sumner’s approach to Reconstruction and Blair’s. He deemed the controversy “one of mere form and little else. I do not think Mr Blair would agree that the states in rebellion are to be permitted to come at once into the political family & renew the very performances which have already so bedeviled us. I do not think Mr. Sumner would insist that when the loyal people of a state obtain the supremacy in their councils & are ready to assume the direction of their own affairs, that they should be excluded. I do not understand Mr. Blair to admit that Jefferson Davis may take his seat in Congress again as a Representative of his people; I do not understand Mr Sumner to assert that John Minor Botts may not. So far as I understand Mr Sumner he seems in favor of Congress taking from the Executive the power it at present exercises over insurrectionary districts, and assuming it to itself. But when the vital question arises as to the right and privilege of the people of these states to govern themselves, I apprehend there will be little difference among loyal men. The question at once is presented in whom this power is vested. And the practical matter for decision is how to keep the rebellious populations from overwhelming and outvoting the loyal minority.”172

  Unlike Lincoln, many Radicals viewed the issues raised by Blair’s speech as matters of substance rather than form. Senators Wade and Chandler predicted that if Blair made another such speech “it would kill Lincoln.”173 Thaddeus Stevens complained that Blair’s “vile” remarks were “much more infamous than any speech yet made by a Copperhead orator. I know of no rebel sympathizer who has charged such disgusting principles and designs on the republican party as this apostate. It has and will do us more harm at the election than all the efforts of the Opposition. If these are the principles of the Administration no earnest anti-slavery man will wish it to be sustained. If such men are to be retained in Mr. Lincoln’s cabinet, it is time, we were consulting about his successor.”174 Stevens also denounced Seward, telling Lincoln: “I and ever so many Penn[sylvanian]s went to Chicago to get rid of Seward & after all that trouble & taking you to get rid of him, here we are saddled with both of you.”

  “Well,” replied Lincoln, “I suppose you would be willing to get rid of me to get rid of him.”

  “I don[’]t know, Mr. Pres[iden]t what the people might think if they had the opportunity to speak!!”175

  Another Pennsylvanian, John W. Forney, told Blair in Lincoln’s presence: “if you had made that speech thirty days earlier, you would have lost us the election in Pennsylvania!”

  “Well,” the postmaster general replied, “they were my honest convictions, and I couldn’t express anything else.”

  “What business have you remaining in the Cabinet, then, and loading us down with the weight of your convictions against the policy of the Administration you belong to?” asked Forney.176

  Lincoln observed this sharp exchange in silence.

  Radicals also objected to the postmaster general’s efforts to defeat the candidacy of former Congressman Henry Winter Davis. To them, Lincoln’s reluctance to disavow Blair made it seem as if he were “on the fence, apparently caring little which party wins—the anti-slavery or the pro-slavery.”177 To help defuse such criticism, Lincoln injected himself into the campaign publicly by having Samuel Galloway of Ohio convey a message to a huge Union Party rally at Baltimore in late October: “I am with them in heart, sympathy, in the great cause of Unconditional Union and Emancipation.”178

  Lincoln also tried to promote harmony between Unconditional and Conservative Unionists in Maryland. The army’s practice of recruiting slaves rather arbitrarily, making little distinction between loyal and disloyal owners, had strained relations between the Republican factions. When irate Unionist slaveholders protested, the president told them “that if the recruiting squads did not conduct themselves properly, their places should be supplied by others, but that the orders under which the enlistments were being made could not be revoked, since the country needed able-bodied soldiers, and was not squeamish as to their complexion.”179 He emphasized, however, that he wished to offend no Marylanders. In October, he issued a general order providing that loyal slaveholders would be paid up to $300 for any slave who enlisted, with the understanding that all such recruits would “forever thereafter be free.”180 Any loyal slaveowners unwilling to let their slaves join the army must themselves enter the ranks.

  Earlier, Lincoln had instructed General Robert C. Schenck to rein in aggressive army recruiters in Maryland, for he feared that discontent among the loyal slaveholders might jeopardize the Union Party’s chances. Learning that his instructions were not being conscientiously obeyed, Lincoln became angry at Schenck, whom he described as “wider across the head in the region of the ears, & loves fight for its own sake, better than I do.”181 Summoning the general and his chief of staff, Donn Piatt, to the White House, he dressed them down. “I do not care to recall the words of Mr. Lincoln,” Piatt later wrote. “They were exceedingly severe, for the President was in a rage.”182

  Lincoln also sought to curb Schenck’s high-handed interference in the electoral process. The general prescribed a stringent loyalty oath for voters and dispatched troops around the state to intimidate Democrats and Conservative Unionists. Although Lincoln upheld Schenck’s test oath, he modified the general’s order to arrest anyone near the polls who seemed disloyal. In an unapologetic letter to Governor Augustus W. Bradford, who protested against Schenck’s procedures, the president insisted that loyal voters would be protected against violent attempts to intimidate them: “General Schenck is fully determined, and has my strict orders besides, that all loyal men may vote, and vote for whom they please.”183

  Abolitionists applauded Lincoln’s “manly letter to Gov. Bradford,” which allegedly “gave solid encouragement to the Emancipationists of Maryland, and enabled them to elect their candidates.”184 They also cheered his decision to remove some federal officeholders in Maryland who opposed emancipation. The president’s action gave the lie to Conservatives’ claims that he was on their side. In late October, when Maryland Senator Reverdy Johnson informed the president of his constituents’ apprehension about potential military interference, Lincoln “hooted the idea, said that no such purpose was entertained, nor had he received any intimation of any desire to that effect.”185

  On election day, however, Schenck’s forces actively intervened at the polls and helped depress the turnout. At the White House, the returns from Maryland were anxiously awaited. There was great relief when news arrived that Unconditional Unionists won four congressional races, while Representative John W. Crisfield, a Conservative Unionist, lost his reelection bid. Emancipationists also gained control of the legislature. The antislavery forces’ triumph, which paved the way for emancipation the following year, would probably not have occurred without federal interference. With some justification, critics like Reverdy Johnson condemned the behavior of the military in Maryland. Lincoln pledged “to hold to account” any officer who violated his order.186 Congress outlawed the use of troops at election time except “to repel the armed enemies of the United States or to keep peace at the polls.”

  Lincoln’s public letters, most notably the one to James C. Conkling, helped make the crucial electoral victories possible. That document, along with the two letters about Vallandigham and the correspondence with Seymour, was published in pamphlet form and widely distributed. Maine Governor Israel Washburn told the president that the Conkling letter “aided not a little in swelling our wonderful majority” in the September election.187 Lincoln modestly disclaimed credit for the electoral victories, saying he was “very glad” that he had “not, by native depravity, or under evil influences, done anything bad enough to prevent the good result.”188 When congratulated on the outcome, he remarked: “The people are for this war. They want the rebellion crushed, and as quick as may be, too.”189

  Widely Not
ed and Long Remembered: Address at Gettysburg

  Shortly after the elections, Lincoln prepared a brief public utterance that would clinch his reputation as a supremely gifted writer: the Gettysburg Address. In the summer of 1863, David Wills, an aggressive and successful young attorney in Gettysburg, organized an effort to create a national cemetery for the Union soldiers killed there. He and his fellow planners decided to consecrate the site with a solemn ceremony. They agreed that the principal speaker should be Edward Everett, the most celebrated orator of the day, and that Lincoln should also be invited to speak briefly. Everett’s invitation went out on September 23. In accepting, the former Massachusetts senator asked that the scheduled date for the ceremony (October 23) be postponed till November 19 to give him sufficient preparation time. Wills honored this request and waited till November 2 to write an invitation to the president asking him to “formally set apart these grounds to their Sacred use by a few appropriate remarks.” Lincoln had probably been approached earlier, perhaps by Pennsylvania Governor Andrew G. Curtin in late August.

  Lincoln was predisposed to accept the invitation, for he had told White House serenaders on July 7 that the defeat of Lee’s army on the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence was “a glorious theme, and the occasion for a speech.” But, he added, he was not at that moment “prepared to make one worthy of the occasion.”190 His inclination to make such a speech was probably enhanced by suggestions he received from correspondents, among them John Murray Forbes. The Massachusetts railroad magnate and philanthropist told Lincoln that since the Conkling letter had “exhausted (so far as you are concerned) the question of the Negro,” it was now time to direct the public’s attention to “the true issue of the existing struggle,” namely, the worldwide fight for democracy. Forbes suggested that Lincoln “seize an early oppertunity and every subsequent chance to reach your great audience of plain poeple that the war is not North against South but the Poeple against the Aristocrats[.] If you can place this in the same strong light that you have the Negro question you will settle it in men[’]s minds as you have that.”191

  From the outset of the war, Lincoln had regarded the conflict as one to vindicate democracy, not simply to preserve the Union for its own sake or to liberate slaves. As he told John Hay in May 1861, “the central idea” of the war was to prove “that popular government is not an absurdity.”192 In writing his address, Lincoln did not take Forbes’s suggestion to emphasize class consciousness and antagonism, but he did make it clear that the stakes of the war involved more than slavery and the nation’s territorial integrity. Union soldiers died in the effort to prove that self-government was viable for all nations, not just the United States. “Man’s vast future” would be determined by the outcome of the war.

  The president evidently did not share Forbes’s view that the Conkling letter had disposed of the slavery issue. In his speech he would emphasize that the war would midwife “a new birth of freedom” by liberating slaves and thus moving the country closer to realizing the Founders’ vision of equality. Since his Peoria speech of 1854, Lincoln had been stressing the need to live up to the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence.

  It is not clear when and how Lincoln composed his Gettysburg address. He told close friends like James Speed and Noah Brooks that he began composing it in Washington and finished it in Pennsylvania. John G. Nicolay, who accompanied the president to Gettysburg, testified that he saw him revise the address on the morning of its delivery. Nicolay emphatically denied that Lincoln composed or revised it on the train ride from Washington. That seems entirely plausible, for the train jerked and bumped along so vigorously that writing was virtually impossible.

  When drafting his speech, Lincoln doubtless recalled the language of Daniel Webster and Theodore Parker. In Webster’s celebrated 1830 reply to Robert Hayne, the Massachusetts senator referred to the “people’s government, made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people.” Parker, whom the president admired and who frequently corresponded with his law partner, William H. Herndon, used a similar definition of democracy. Lincoln was familiar with at least two of Parker’s formulations. In his “Sermon on the Dangers which Threaten the Rights of Man in America,” delivered on July 2, 1854, the Unitarian divine twice referred to “government of all, by all, and for all.” In another sermon delivered four years later, “The Effect of Slavery on the American People,” Parker said “Democracy is Direct Self-government, over all the people, for all the people, by all the people.” Lincoln, who owned copies of these works, told his good friend Jesse W. Fell that he thought highly of Parker. Fell believed that Lincoln’s religious views more closely resembled Parker’s than those of any other theologian. Lincoln may also have recalled the words that Pennsylvanian Galusha Grow, speaker of the U.S. House, uttered on the memorable 4th of July 1861, as Congress met for the first time during the war: “Fourscore years ago fifty-six bold merchants, farmers, lawyers, and mechanics, the representatives of a few feeble colonists, scattered along the Atlantic seaboard, met in convention to found a new empire, based on the inalienable rights of man.”193 Many newspapers published Grow’s speech.

  Lincoln told James Speed that “he was anxious to go” to Gettysburg, but as the ceremony date drew near, he worried that he might not be able to do so, for he was reluctant to leave the bedside of his son Tad, ill with scarletina.194 In addition, Benjamin Perley Poore of the Boston Journal reported on November 14 that even though “it has been announced that the President will positively attend the inauguration of the Gettysburg soldiers’ cemetery, it can hardly be possible for him to leave at this time, when his public duties are so pressing.”195 (Among other things, Lincoln was paying close attention to military developments at Chattanooga and was busily composing his annual message to Congress, due to be delivered in early December. To carve out time to do so, he restricted his office hours and admitted callers in groups rather than individually.) But four days later, Poore wrote that “[s]uch had been the pressure exerted on the President that he will probably go to Gettysburg tomorrow.”196 The president did in fact depart for Pennsylvania on November 18, even though Tad’s health remained questionable.

  Accompanying Lincoln to Gettysburg were cabinet members (Seward, Usher, and Blair), personal secretaries (Nicolay and Hay), a body servant (William Johnson), diplomatic representatives, Edward Everett’s daughter and son-in-law, and Pennsylvania politician Wayne McVeagh. Also aboard the four-coach train were bodyguards, journalists, and musicians. Stanton had originally arranged for the president to leave on the morning of November 19, but Lincoln, fearing that was cutting it too close, insisted on departing the day before.

  Arriving in Gettysburg in the late afternoon of November 18, Lincoln, flanked by a cheering crowd, proceeded to the home of David Wills, where he was to spend the night. Everett observed that at supper, the president was as gentlemanly in appearance, manners, and conversation as any of the diplomats, governors, and other eminenti at the table. Thus did Lincoln belie his reputation for backwoods social awkwardness. After the meal, when serenaders regaled him at the Wills house, he asked to be excused from addressing them: “I appear before you, fellow-citizens, merely to thank you for this compliment. The inference is a very fair one that you would [like] to hear me for a little while at least, were I to commence make a speech. I do not appear before you for the purpose of doing so, and for several substantial reasons. The most substantial of these is that I have no speech to make. [Laughter.] In my position it is somewhat important that I should not say any foolish things.” An irreverent voice rang out: “If you can help it.” Lincoln replied good-naturedly: “It very often happens that the only way to help it is to say nothing at all. [Laughter.] Believing that is my present condition this evening, I must beg of you to excuse me from addressing you further.”197 The crowd cheered enthusiastically and then moved next door to the home of Robert G. Harper, where Seward was staying. The secretary of state obliged them with more exten
sive remarks, strongly endorsing the Emancipation Proclamation and emphasizing that the war was fought to vindicate the principle of majority rule. This probably represented the formal speech that Seward would have delivered at the ceremony in case Lincoln had remained in Washington. (A journalist objected to Seward’s egotism, pointing out that he used the first-person singular pronoun ten times.)

  Later that evening, Lincoln greeted guests at a reception for an hour, after which he retired to work on his speech. Around 11 o’clock he stepped next door to confer with Seward and returned after less than half an hour. It is not known what, if any, suggestions the secretary of state may have made. Lifting the president’s spirits was a telegram from the First Lady announcing that their son might be “slightly better.”198

  The next morning, well before dawn, all roads to Gettysburg became clogged with wagons, buggies, horseback riders, and pedestrians eager to attend the well-publicized ceremony. Others came pouring out of the uncomfortable trains that chugged into the local station. Quickly, visitors overflowed the town’s streets. According to one reporter, most “were fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters, who had come from distant parts to look at and weep over the remains of their fallen kindred, or to gather up the honored relics and bear them back to the burial grounds of their native homes—in relating what they had suffered and endured, and what part their loved ones had borne in the memorable days of July.” An elderly Massachusetts gentleman remarked, “I have a son who fell in the first day’s fight, and I have come to take back his body, for his mother’s heart is breaking, and she will not be satisfied till it is brought home to her.” A Pennsylvanian explained, “[m]y brother was killed in the charge of the Pennsylvania Reserves on the enemy when they were driven from Little Round-top, but we don’t know where his remains are.”199