Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2

by Michael Burlingame

  Reluctantly, other Radicals followed suit, for no alternative candidate—not Ben Butler, or Henry Winter Davis, or Daniel S. Dickinson—seemed viable. “[W]ere it not for the country there would be a poetical justice in his [Lincoln’s] being beaten by that stupid ass McClellan,” Wade told Chandler. “I can but wish the d[evi]l had Old Abe,” but “to save the nation I am doing all for him that I possibly could do for a better man.”102 As good as his word, Wade stumped extensively throughout the Midwest. Chandler shared his friend’s dim view of the president; in the midst of his diplomatic offensive to unite the party, he told his wife: “If it was only Abe Lincoln I would say, [‘]go to _____ in your own way, I will not stop a second to save you[.’]” But he believed that more was involved than Lincoln’s personal fortunes. At stake was “this great nation with all its hopes for the present & future,” and therefore he could not “abandon the effort now.”103 And so he campaigned throughout the East as well as the Midwest.

  Henry Winter Davis said he felt “so disgusted that he cannot talk,” but pledged that he would give a pro-Lincoln speech if he could “get his disgust off sufficiently.”104 When Chandler urged him to follow Wade’s lead, the Maryland congressman “expressed willingness to accept Blair’s displacement as an olive branch and give his earnest support to the Baltimore ticket.”105 His support, however, was far from warm. In late September, he told a Maryland audience “that neither McClellan nor Lincoln were leading men of vigor equal to the place & that the only difference was that each would be what his Congress made him in spite of himself—McClellan would be compelled to peace even if he wished war & Lincoln would be compelled to wage the war & to execute the emancipation policy & [would be] firmly restrained from any ignominious or weak compromises.”106 According to a Radical ally of Davis, “on all occasions he deplores the cruel necessity of voting for him [Lincoln].” His speeches contained a simple message: the president “is neither wise nor honest, good people, but if I can vote for him, it would be rediculous for you to be more squeamish.”107

  Frémont’s withdrawal, accompanied by Blair’s dismissal, did not satisfy all malcontents. On the eve of the election, the abolitionist George B. Cheever feared that Lincoln’s victory would spark riots throughout the North: “Choosing a man whose latest act has been the deliberate refusal to set free three millions of slaves by law, when God commanded, and the Congress in obedience to God, and in answer to the people, ordered the measure—choosing that man, I fear we set ourselves anew against God, and God against us. I fear lest it be followed by a new rebellion, and consequent disintegration of the Northern government.”108

  In addition to cultivating Radicals, Lincoln attempted to placate some Conservatives, including the prominent Peace Democrat, James W. Singleton of Illinois. According to one source, “Lincoln’s immediate friends were working to make the [Democratic] nominee and platform of the party as odious as possible.” In that effort “they were largely assisted” by Singleton, “who was one of the leaders of the anti-McClellan faction in the democratic party and a strong supporter of Vallandigham.”109 On August 4, Singleton presided over a mass meeting in Peoria, where banners proclaimed “Ours is a White Man’s Government, Defile it not with Miscegenation” and resolutions were adopted denouncing the war as unwinnable and unconstitutional.110 Two weeks later, at a similar gathering in Springfield, Singleton threatened to abandon the Democratic Party unless the Peoria resolutions were approved. The meeting ended amid fist-fights and bitter recrimination between the Singleton faction and more moderate Democrats. In September, Lincoln showed Singleton an embarrassing letter written by McClellan. Soon thereafter, Singleton delivered a scathing anti-McClellan speech. Coming from a Peace Democrat, his words carried weight with members of that faction. On October 18, he met at Cincinnati with other Peace Democrats to nominate a new presidential candidate. There he presided over an informal convention and helped draft a platform that defended slavery as a positive good, described the people of the Confederacy as “brothers in blood,” and recommended that “we should make all possible efforts to join them in a mutual policy of unconditional negotiation for the attainment of peace.” When Alexander Long declined to serve as the rump party’s candidate, the convention adjourned without fielding a ticket. Since they could not agree on a standard-bearer, Singleton told the delegates that he was unable to support McClellan and preferred Lincoln. Subsequently, the president told Singleton: “you have done more than any one else to insure my reelection.”111

  Democratic Attacks

  As usual, Democrats appealed shamelessly to race prejudice. A leading party newspaper alleged that Lincoln was descended from blacks. His peculiar character, “which has led so many to the belief that Mr. Lincoln is insane, is, we suspect, more rationally accounted for by the idea that he is the outcrop of a remote African in his ancestry.” This conclusion was supported by his “physical and physiognomical proportions: his face and hands, and especially his feet, which, like his manners, testify strongly of the plantation.” Moreover, “his buffoonery, his superstition, and his conscientiousness—which takes no cognizance of consequences, except such as are personal, to himself—is of the purest Congo; and his negro logic and rhetoric—which we have heretofore been inclined to attribute to his negro politics—is better accounted for upon the presumption of an earlier origin.”112 Democrats summarized the Republican platform thus:

  Hurrah for the nigger

  The sweet-scented nigger,

  And the paradise for the undertaker!

  Hurrah for Old Abe113

  The issue of interracial sex, long a staple of Democratic campaign rhetoric, was more prominent than usual in 1864. The party’s traditional appeal to anti-black prejudice received a new twist in the campaign. David Goodman Croly and George Wakeman, both of the New York World, coined a neologism for their anonymous anti-Republican pamphlet, Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro, which was sent to leading antislavery spokesmen. (The common term for miscegenation before Croly and Wakeman’s handiwork was amalgamation.) A fraud designed to trap its recipients into endorsing interracial marriage, the tract was purportedly written by an unnamed abolitionist advocating that policy. It was filled with bogus “facts” that shamelessly played on the North’s deep-seated Negrophobia. The most blatant appeal targeted the Irish, whom the document crudely denigrated. It concluded on a rousing note: “Let the Republican party go into the next contest with a platform worthy of itself; worthy of the events which have occurred during the last three years; worthy of the great future. Let the motto then of the great progressive party of this country be Freedom, Political and Social Equality; Universal Brotherhood.” The few gullible abolitionists who fell for the hoax became the butt of Democratic ridicule, but the attempt to inveigle a prominent Republican into supporting it failed, and no branch of the party adopted it as a platform plank.114 (In fact, a handful of abolitionists had spoken out in favor of interracial marriage before 1864.) In some Democratic circles, Republicans were referred to as “nigger fuggers.”115 When asked if he supported miscegenation, Lincoln wryly answered: “That’s a [D]emocratic mode of producing good Union men, & I don’t propose to infringe on the patent.”116

  The Democratic appeal to race prejudice alarmed some Republicans, including an Ohio judge who warned John Sherman: “This love and zeal for the nigger may be carried too far; the prejudice against social equality is just as strong now as ever; the hatred of the rebellion is such that the people, as a war measure, are in favor of emancipation; but this is the extent of their change of opinion, and it arises not from any love of the nigger.”117

  Lincoln could be sarcastic when confronting racist arguments. In August, an ungrammatical Pennsylvanian wrote him saying: “Equal Rights & Justice to all white men in the United States forever. White men is in class number one & black men is in class number two & must be governed by white men forever.” Lincoln wrote a biting reply over the signature
of Nicolay: “The President has received yours of yesterday, and is kindly paying attention to it. As it is my business to assist him whenever I can, I will thank you to inform me, for his use, whether you are either a white man or black one, because in either case, you can not be regarded as an entirely impartial judge. It may be that you belong to a third or fourth class of yellow or red men, in which case the impartiality of your judgment would be more apparent.”118

  Democrats abused the president roundly, calling him “a miserable failure, a coarse, filthy joker, a disgusting politician, a mean, cunning and cruel tyrant and the shame and disgrace of the Nation.”119 Congressman S. S. Cox ridiculed Lincoln as an “executive trifler,” a “retailer of smutty stories,” and a “tyrant over men’s thoughts, presses, letters, persons, and lives.”120 Samuel F. B. Morse called Lincoln an “illiterate,” “inhuman,” “wicked,” “irreligious” president “without brains,” and a “coarse, vulgar, uncultivated man, an inventor or re-teller of stories so low and obscene, that no decent man can listen to them without disgust.”121 A Democratic newspaper in Connecticut bestowed the sobriquet “Old Smutty” on Lincoln, while the Cincinnati Enquirer scornfully remarked that if “there ever was a man who has become an object of detestation, that man is Lincoln. Since the days of the French revolution no such monstrosity has been elevated to the head of affairs.”122 Hysterically, that paper bemoaned “the threatened extinguishment of the experiment of free government,” predicted that the fall elections might well be the last “to receive the votes of freemen,” and declared that under “Abraham the First,” the United States had become “the Russia of the Western Hemisphere.”123 A former mayor of Cincinnati was sure that Lincoln and his party “will proclaim themselves in power during the war. … I believe that Lincoln will not give up the idea of accomplishing the great idea of the war, though he may be compelled to resort to the levy en masse.”124 In Ohio’s capital, Samuel Medary asserted that “everybody not crazy with ‘negro on the brain’ ” knew that “Lincoln is running our country to perdition—destroying ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ ” as he sought to make himself a king.125

  A New York magazine literally demonized Lincoln while praising his opponent: “McClellan is for adhering scrupulously to the rules of civilized warfare. Lincoln is for practicing to the extremest limits the brutal customs of savage warfare. McClellan is a Christian and a gentleman. Lincoln is a barbarian and a buffoon. McClellan is humane and tolerant in all his instincts and rules of action. Lincoln is infernal and implacable in every feeling and purpose. The difference between them may defined to be precisely that between a human being and a fiend; for Lincoln is an infernal. His face is a faithful chart of his soul; and his face is that of a demon, cunning, obscene, treacherous, lying and devilish. Gen. McClellan is the reverse of all this.”126 The New York Daily News called Lincoln an “[i]nsenate destroyer,” a “bloody minded fanatic,” a “thrice accursed agent of the destruction that has swept over this land, more terrible than the plagues of Egypt,” and a “miserable demagogue” who “sits amid the ruin he has provoked with the leer of a satyr chuckling over the gratification of unnatural passions.” The editors declared that they “know not what most to loathe in him, whether his coarseness and obscenity, his ruthless fanaticism, or his unscrupulous ambition.”127

  Some newspapers suggested that Lincoln be killed. In late August, the La Crosse, Wisconsin, Democrat declared that if the president were reelected, it would be well if someone assassinated him: “The man who votes for Lincoln now is a traitor. Lincoln is a traitor and murderer. He who, pretending to war for, wars against the constitution of our country is a traitor, and Lincoln is one of those men. He who calls and allures men to certain butchery, is a murderer, and Lincoln has done all this. … And if he is elected to misgovern for another four years, we trust some bold hand will pierce his heart with dagger point for the public good.”128 Similarly ominous was an editorial in the Albany Atlas and Argus paraphrasing a sentence from Patrick Henry’s 1765 “treason” speech: “Caesar had his Brutus, Charles I his Cromwell … and we the People recommend Abraham Lincoln to profit by their example.”129 The Chicago Times darkly proclaimed that it was necessary to “ourselves and to posterity to relieve the nation in some way of a most intolerable weight of tyranny.” If Lincoln could not be voted out of office, “then the next step is plain and inevitable. We leave its character to the development of the future.”130 In Pennsylvania, the Greensburg Argus declared that Lincoln’s “defeat or his death is an indispensable condition to an honorable peace.” When the editor heard of petitions calling for the suspension of the draft, he said: “Go one step further, brethren, and suspend Old Abe—by the neck if necessary to stop the accursed slaughter of our citizens.”131 The New York Daily News wished that Heaven would “direct its vengeance openly against the man who has drenched this fair land of ours with blood.”132

  Less sanguinary Democrats called for Lincoln’s impeachment rather than his assassination. Others deplored his alleged indifference to the troops’ suffering. Ex-Governor William Allen of Ohio maintained that the people “don’t want a cold blooded joker at Washington who, while the District of Columbia is infested with hospitals, and the atmosphere burdened by the groans and sighs of our mangled countrymen, when he can spare a minute from Joe Miller’s Jest Book looks out upon the acres of hospitals and inquires ‘What houses are those?’ ”133 Such charges reached a peak when the New York World alleged that Lincoln had asked Ward Hill Lamon to sing a popular ditty while they were accompanying McClellan on a tour of the corpse-strewn Antietam battlefield. According to that flagship Democratic journal, the president said: “Come, Lamon, give us that song about Picayune Butler; McClellan has never heard it.”

  “Not now, if you please,” McClellan purportedly remarked. “I would prefer to hear it some other place and time.”134

  This bogus story inspired some Democratic doggerel:

  Abe may crack his jolly jokes

  O’er bloody fields of stricken battle,

  While yet the ebbing life-tide smokes

  From men that die like butchered cattle;

  He, ere yet the guns grow cold,

  To pimps and pets may crack his stories.135

  When Lamon wrote a blistering denial, Lincoln advised him not to release it: “I would not publish this; it is too belligerent in its tone. You are at times too fond of a fight. There is a heap of wickedness mixed up with your usual amiability. If I were you, I’d state the facts as they were. I would give the statement as you have it without the cussedness. Let me try my hand at it.”136 Taking pen in hand, Lincoln carefully and slowly composed a long letter for his friend’s signature. After drafting it, Lincoln told Lamon: “You know, Hill, that this is the truth and the whole truth about that affair; but I dislike to appear as an apologist for an act of my own which I know was right. Keep this paper, and we will see about it.”137 The document was not released to the press.

  When Democrats charged that Lincoln received his salary in gold while other government employees were paid in greenbacks, the treasurer of the United States, Francis E. Spinner, denied it, explaining that by law the president’s salary was issued in monthly warrant drafts, minus income tax. Rather than drawing money on those drafts, Lincoln left them sitting in his drawer for long periods (in one case eleven months) without receiving any interest. Several times Spinner urged him to cash the warrants, pointing out that he was losing hundreds of dollars in interest. When Lincoln asked who gained thereby, Spinner said the U.S. Treasury. “I reckon the Treasury needs it more than I do,” the president replied. By failing to cash his warrants, Lincoln had in effect contributed $4,000 to the treasury.138

  More responsible criticism of the administration came from former Whigs like Robert C. Winthrop, whose oration at New London, Connecticut, was (in Lincoln’s view) the best pro-McClellan speech of the campaign. Winthrop deplored what he considered violations of the Constitution and attempts to overthrow the so
cial structure of the South. Senator Reverdy Johnson of Maryland, who had supported Lincoln in 1860, four years later deplored his “utter unfitness for the presidency” and accused him of employing the “most unscrupulous and unexampled abuse of patronage and power.”139 Ex-Whig friends in Illinois like John Todd Stuart and Orville H. Browning had grown disenchanted with Lincoln. “I am personally attached to the President, and have faithfully tried to uphold him, and make him respectable,” Browning wrote on September 6, “tho’ I never have been able to persuade myself that he was big enough for his position. Still, I thought he might get through, as many a boy has got through College, without disgrace, and without knowledge, but I fear he is a failure.”140 Browning nonetheless told Lincoln he could campaign for him, and he did, though lukewarmly.

  The First Lady under Attack

  Democrats also attacked Mary Lincoln. According to the New York World, when she ordered $800 worth of china from E. V. Haughwout & Co., she tried to hide other purchases, amounting to $1,500, by having the total bill ($2,300) applied to the china alone; when Interior Secretary Smith raised questions, the merchant reportedly acknowledged that the overcharge was made to disguise the unspecified items. Haughwout & Co. denied the allegations in a letter to Manton Marble, editor of the World. In turn, Marble defended the story, and rather than retracting it, threatened to “expose what I know about Mrs. Lincoln’s practices in her New York purchases—her silver service—the champagne[,] manure bills etc. etc. to say nothing of wallpaper, seed commissions, shawls, contracts, etc. etc. etc.”141 Commenting on these scandals, a New York Democratic matron remarked: “It is humiliating to all American women who have to economize and struggle and part with their husbands, sons, and brothers in these sad times, to see this creature sitting in the highest place as a specimen of American womanhood.”142