The curse against Canaan is described in Genesis 9:21–27: Noah cursed his son Ham for looking at his nakedness, and condemned Ham’s son Canaan to servitude. Genesis goes on to say that Canaan and his descendants lived between Sidon and Gaza—roughly modern Israel—though American slave-owners liked to think they populated Africa, and thus supplied their chattel.
Stephens drew on another Bible verse to wind up his thought: “This stone which was rejected by the first builders ‘is become the chief of the corner’—the real ‘corner-stone’—in our new edifice.” Again the reporter noted “Applause.”
Verses about the once-rejected stone occur throughout the Bible. In the Book of Psalms, the “stone which the builders refused” is King David. In the New Testament the stone is Jesus or His followers. All these stones became cornerstones. David was hunted by Saul, then crowned. Jesus was crucified, then rose from the dead. Christians are tempted and tried, yet win salvation. Similarly, slavery had been viewed by Jefferson and the other founders with embarrassment and dismay, but the Confederacy proudly made it the cornerstone of society.
Stephens’s paean to slavery was the inversion of the Henry Clay paragraph that Lincoln loved so. Clay found the desire for freedom in the human heart, he heard it celebrated by the cannons that mark the Fourth of July, and he saw it working its way in the modern world. Stephens found slavery in nature; it triumphed over Jefferson and his mistaken Declaration, and it formed the basis of Stephens’s new country. With a few brisk arguments, the rhetorical equivalents of a sweep of the hand, Stephens corrected the founding and disposed of all the political foreground of the past thirty years (tariffs, Texas, popular sovereignty, the power of the Supreme Court). What counted was slavery. The founders were wrong about it; later Americans had talked around it; only the Confederacy put it in its proper place.
The “Corner-Stone” speech—it took its name from this masterful passage—was clear, direct, and logical, purged of the rant and sentiment of so much midcentury rhetoric. Lincoln was right to have admired the man who was capable of delivering it. Was Stephens then the towering genius, the new Napoleon that Lincoln had imagined in 1838? John Brown had been outside politics, a crackpot and a terrorist. Stephens was a statesman who had risen to new eminence in a new cause.
But Stephens was no Napoleon. He was hobbled, in the first place, by his office: a Confederate vice president, it turned out, would be no more potent than an American vice president. He would wield power only if his president died, and although Jefferson Davis was plagued with health problems, from malaria to eye trouble, he succumbed to none of them. Stephens could not even offer advice, for he served a president with whom he disagreed. He would clash with Davis on a range of issues, from economic policy to military strategy, and he failed to get his way almost every time. He never imagined getting his way by impeachment or (Napoleon’s method) by a coup. He gave an inspired speech, and left it at that.
The conclusion of the “Corner-Stone” speech was desultory, touching on future prospects and the latest news. As of March there were still eight slave states in the Union, more than the seven that were out of it, but Stephens expected North Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri to join the Confederacy soon.
Stephens discerned the threat of “coercion” in Lincoln’s Inaugural Address, though he allowed that it had not been followed up “so vigorously as was expected. Fort Sumter”—a fort in Charleston Harbor, still held by US troops—“it is believed, will soon be evacuated.” In the meantime, he urged all good Confederates to “keep your armor bright and your powder dry.”
“Enthusiastic cheering” was noted by the reporter.
Lincoln had committed himself in the final draft of his Inaugural Address to holding such government property as was still in its possession. This included two forts on islands off the Confederate mainland—Fort Pickens at the mouth of Pensacola Bay in Florida, and Fort Sumter. Fort Pickens was the more defensible of the two; Fort Sumter could not hold out against determined enemies, and South Carolina was determined to take it.
The fate of Fort Sumter had been a theme of cabinet discussions since the lame-duck days of the Buchanan administration. Buchanan’s position on the slow-motion dissolution of the Union was that states had no power to leave, but neither did the federal government have any power to compel them to remain. As December 1860 wore on, however, unionist hardliners in his cabinet—including the new attorney general, Edwin Stanton, the Ohio lawyer who had snubbed Lincoln during the McCormick patent case—had convinced Buchanan to reinforce Fort Sumter. In January 1861 the administration sent an unarmed supply ship, which the South Carolinians drove off with shore batteries.
The problem became Lincoln’s with his inauguration. Stephens’s prediction, in the “Corner-Stone” speech, that Fort Sumter would soon be evacuated, was not unreasonable: he was responding to the uncertain mood of the new administration, which reflected the mixed counsels of the cabinet and Lincoln’s slowness in deciding what should be done. (Well might Lincoln hesitate; any misstep, and maybe every possible step, meant war.) Seward, who thought a show of mildness would strengthen unionist sentiment in the Upper South and border states, was initially in favor of letting Fort Sumter go. The Blairs were for confrontation. The new administration was hobbled by ordinary confusion, magnified by the extraordinariness of the circumstances. The commander of a ship assigned to resupply Fort Pickens was reassigned to resupply Fort Sumter, but, disbelieving his order—it was signed by Seward, not Lincoln—he sailed for Fort Pickens anyway.
Seward added a political wrinkle with an April 1 memo to Lincoln complaining that the administration was “without a policy either domestic or foreign” and offering to shape one himself. It was Seward’s bid to be an American prime minister, a president-by-proxy. Lincoln in reply reminded Seward who the president was, and the secretary of state never made such suggestions again. Perhaps Seward had unconsciously been looking for some sign of authority from the top.
Early in April, Lincoln decided to resupply Fort Sumter, simultaneously informing the governor of South Carolina that he was sending “only provisions.” This had no more chance of success than Buchanan’s doomed attempt in January, but notifying the rebels ahead of time changed the political dynamics. If there was fighting, it would be on their heads.
On April 12, the Confederates bombarded the fort, which surrendered the next day. The only deaths had been caused by misfiring cannon on each side. “After all that noise,” wrote Mary Chesnut, a South Carolina diarist, “ . . . sound and fury signifying nothing.” Admirers of Macbeth, like Lincoln, knew that after the “sound and fury” line is delivered, many things happen.
PART THREE
Twelve
1861–1863: WAR, EMANCIPATION
LINCOLN HAD SAID WHEN HE LEFT SPRINGFIELD THAT HE faced a task greater than George Washington’s. The fall of Fort Sumter had made his task greater still. Secession had led to an act of war, which would be followed by others. On April 15, 1861, Lincoln issued a proclamation asking for 75,000 militia from the loyal states to suppress the rebellion.
Americans had fought wars before, against Britain, France, Mexico, and Indians, and they had fought each other in various domestic commotions (most recently in Kansas). They knew from Plutarch and Shakespeare of the civil wars of ancient Greece and Rome and medieval England. But an American Civil War—a rebellion of one-third of the country against the rest of the Union—was a new thing in American experience.
Yet even in this strange landscape Lincoln would look to the founding fathers—not for precedents, since there were hardly any, but for principles.
One founder who supplied a seeming precedent was George Washington, who had suppressed a rebellion in his second term.
In July 1794 distillers in southwestern Pennsylvania had balked at paying an excise tax on their whiskey. The crisis came when the federal revenue collector for that part of the state fought a gun battle with a company of local militia, i
n which several persons were killed. The countryside erupted. Angry westerners raised a rebel flag, robbed the mails, and held a protest meeting, 7,000 strong, outside Pittsburgh.
Washington gave the rebels time to cool off while simultaneously mobilizing the militias of four states. In September he sent more than 12,000 men over the Alleghenies. The passage of time and the show of force together stilled the uprising. When the troops Washington dispatched reached their destination, they found no one in arms. About a hundred men were arrested; two were convicted of treason and sentenced to death; Washington pardoned them both.
The affair acquired a faintly comical name—the Whiskey Rebellion. But Washington took it seriously—the force he sent over the mountains was four times larger than the one he had led across the Delaware for the Battle of Trenton. Sixty-seven years later, Lincoln took the Whiskey Rebellion seriously enough to echo Washington’s language in his own call for militia on April 15. Washington and Lincoln defined rebellion in the same way: “The laws of the United States . . . are opposed and the execution thereof obstructed . . . by combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.” They both urged rebels “to disperse and retire peaceably to their respective abodes.” These were phrases lifted from the Militia Act of 1792, which had defined when and how the president could summon state militias for federal duty.
More important was the similarity of what Washington and Lincoln thought was at stake and what they hoped to accomplish: Washington said he was acting to uphold “the essential interests of the Union” and “the very existence of Government”; Lincoln said he was defending “the existence of our National Union, and the perpetuity of popular government.”
Yet the resemblances between Washington’s response and Lincoln’s only highlighted how unalike their respective rebellions were. Washington faced armed resistance in a corner of one state. Lincoln took office with seven states missing. In 1794 the passage of time had worked in Washington’s favor. In the spring of 1861 it seemed to be running against Lincoln. On April 17, two days after his call for militia, Virginia passed an ordinance of secession. Over the next month, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina followed, making eleven out of thirty-four states that had left the Union.
Lincoln would have to find his own way through an immensely greater problem than Washington’s.
Like any president, Lincoln brought a mixture of skills to the task before him.
Some thought he had no skills at all. After Lincoln won the Republican nomination, the New York diarist George Templeton Strong wrote that his only qualifications for high office seemed to be that “he cut a great many rails, and worked on a flatboat in early youth; all of which is somehow presumptive evidence of his statesmanship.”
And who could say that Strong was mistaken? Lincoln was indeed one of the unlikeliest executives ever to reach the White House. Most of his predecessors had had some experience managing men before they became president: Washington, Jackson, Harrison, and Taylor had been generals; Jefferson, Monroe, Van Buren (briefly), and Polk had been governors; all the southern presidents were plantation owners. Lincoln’s few political offices had been legislative. He had never managed anything larger than a two-partner law firm, and he had done that by stuffing papers in his hat. His aides and the mere pressure of business imposed some order on him, but he rebelled against every attempt to make him act with more system. “He would break through every regulation as fast as it was made,” wrote John Hay, who devised many.
This style of management—or anti-style—suited a nature that was self-directed, self-willed, solitary. Everything Lincoln had learned, and much of what he had done, he had learned and done by himself. So why submit to the schedules and strictures of other men?
As with management, so with advice. Lincoln listened to everyone, then went his own way. “I have sometimes doubted,” wrote Leonard Swett, one of his Illinois cronies, “whether he ever asked anybody’s advice about anything.” Humor and anecdotes helped him deflect anyone who became too pressing. Swett left a succinct description of how Lincoln turned people aside: “He told them all a story, said nothing, and sent them away.”
Lincoln’s political skills, however, were of the highest order, and the presidency is, after all, primarily a political office. The Constitution describes it as the repository of “the Executive power.” But politics is older than all constitutions and works its way into every branch of government—executive, legislative, and judicial.
Lincoln was adept at sensing the mood of the country (at least that part of it that had not seceded). He did this by attending to his correspondents and to his callers. He might ignore their suggestions and refuse their requests, but he noted what they said. The hordes of petitioners, favor-seekers, well-wishers, would-be counselors, old ladies, clergymen, and disgruntled military officers who wrote him or trekked to the White House to see him were a four-year immersion in popular sentiment. There were no pollsters then to ask people questions; people came straight to Lincoln, by mail or in person, and spoke their minds.
He kept tabs on his team of rivals, observing their rivalries with each other and with himself. He might not take their advice, but he took their temperature. He always knew better what they were thinking than they knew what he was thinking; if they schemed against him, he generally had a better sense of their chances of success than they themselves had.
On one occasion, circumstances forced his hand on a high-level personnel decision: in January 1862, he had to dismiss Simon Cameron for incompetence and waste; the Great Winnebago Chieftain was simply not up to running the War Department. Lincoln replaced him with Edwin Stanton, impressed with his energy and intelligence, despite their awkward personal history. (Stanton would do an excellent job, and become devoted to Lincoln.) In every other controversy over cabinet personnel, whether caused by critics demanding a secretary’s head or by a secretary himself threatening to resign, the man in question stayed or left as Lincoln himself wished.
Another requirement of the presidency almost as important as political skill is that the president should look the part. George Washington, tall, graceful, strong, light-footed on the dance floor—and a centaur when he rode—had set the highest standard for his successors.
Lincoln’s appearance gave his enemies much to work with. His gangliness and his newly hirsute face suggested the higher primates. During the McCormick reaper case Stanton had called him a “long-armed ape,” and after his election critics nationwide took up the theme. A South Carolina newspaper called him “the Ourang Outang at the White House.” George McClellan, commander of the Union armies, called him “a well-meaning baboon” and a “gorilla.” Another Union officer fretted that when Lincoln reviewed the troops, he “grinn[ed] like a baboon.” Ape imagery had political resonance, since it was routinely used to degrade black people. If Lincoln, as an enemy of slavery, was their presumptive friend, it could be used to degrade him too. A century and a half later the African-American writer Toni Morrison would call Bill Clinton the first black president (this was before Barack Obama got the job). But she was wrong: Lincoln was.
Lincoln did have a way of showing himself to advantage, however. That was through the camera’s lens. The day of his Cooper Union address, he had gone to the studio of Mathew Brady, on Broadway, to have his picture taken. Brady was America’s premier photographer, and the image he made—Lincoln standing beside a “pillar” (actually a prop), with his left hand resting on a stack of books—would be the first view most Americans had of him. This was the clean-shaven Lincoln, before Grace Bedell wrote her letter. It was reproduced in lithographs, engravings, and small photographs during the 1860 campaign.
Even after Lincoln grew his beard, cameras looked, as they often do, beyond such an obvious feature to highlight others. The camera loved the bones of Lincoln’s cheeks, and the nose like a prow. But photographs inevitably alighted on his deep-set eyes (“his eyebrows,” wrote Herndon, “cropped out like a huge rock on th
e brow of a hill”). Because he had to hold still for the long exposures of the day, his photographed eyes lacked the sparkle they showed when he laughed. But at rest they conveyed seriousness, sometimes sadness. They were the visible symbol of that strain of his personality that treasured dark poetry and skirted (or plunged into) depression.
Lincoln the mature politician usually guarded his sadness; literature offered a safe and circumscribed outlet for it. But close observers spotted it. Seward noticed this quality in Lincoln even before his inauguration: “The President,” he told a dinner party, “has a curious vein of sentiment running through his thought.” By “sentiment” he meant tender emotion rather than sentimentality. Then Seward added that it was Lincoln’s “most valuable mental attribute.” Valuable not for an executive, but for a leader in time of war.
The way Lincoln reached people who never met him, or who wanted more than his picture, was through his words. Presidents then spoke less often than they do today; the Whig Party in which Lincoln had grown up, ever reacting against the example of Andrew Jackson, believed that presidents should speak even less than they did. But thanks to the troubled times in which Lincoln served, he spoke and wrote for public consumption more than was then normal.
A president typically gave an Inaugural Address and annual messages to Congress (these, unlike modern State of the Union addresses, were delivered in writing, not in person). A president might also send messages to Congress on special occasions. In his proclamation of April 15, 1861, Lincoln called on Congress to assemble for a special session on July 4 to consider the crisis of disunion. When it met, he gave it a lengthy written overview of the rebellion so far and his thoughts on what should be done.
Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln Page 21