Lincoln made remarks to delegations of citizens who visited him and to revelers in the streets outside the White House celebrating Union victories. Occasionally he even traveled to nearby Maryland or Pennsylvania for ceremonies—fairs to raise money for treating wounded soldiers, the dedication of a cemetery—at which he would speak briefly. He was invited once to return to Springfield for a Republican rally, but rejected the idea as too time-consuming.
He made good use of an old practice. The founders had occasionally written letters, nominally personal, which they expected to be circulated among interested parties or even published. Jefferson surely knew that something as eloquent as his letter to John Holmes on the “fire-bell in the night” would be widely read as soon as he was dead, if it was not leaked to the newspapers beforehand. Lincoln used the technique to deal with one of his knottiest problems—suspending the writ of habeas corpus.
The US Constitution (Article I, Section 9) allows habeas corpus to be suspended during rebellions and invasions so that alleged wrongdoers can be arrested and tried by military tribunals rather than ordinary courts. In April 1861, to combat saboteurs, Lincoln suspended habeas corpus along the rail line connecting Washington and Philadelphia. In September 1862, to allow the army to arrest anyone interfering with recruitment, he suspended it nationwide.
In 1863 a military tribunal went too far. Clement Vallandingham, a vociferous antiwar Democrat from Ohio, gave a speech denouncing the war as “wicked, cruel and unnecessary,” fought “for the freedom of the blacks and the enslavement of the whites.” The army arrested him for discouraging enlistments—Who would volunteer to fight to free blacks and enslave whites?—which only made him a martyr. Lincoln ordered Vallandingham released and exiled to the Confederacy, but he realized he needed to do more to undo the damage.
He got his chance when a New York Democrat, Erastus Corning, sent him a letter protesting Vallandingham’s treatment. Lincoln’s reply, a copy of which he mailed simultaneously to the New York Tribune, carefully explained the constitutional justification for suspending habeas corpus—something the administration had not yet done at length. He also went after Vallandingham. He used pathos, contrasting the politician’s fate with that of ordinary folk: “Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wily agitator who induces him to desert?” He used humor, comparing rebellion to sickness and military tribunals to medicine, arguing that there was no chance of the remedy outlasting the disease: Would anyone “contract so strong an appetite for emetics during temporary illness as to persist in feeding upon them during the remainder of his healthful life?” The letter, reissued as a pamphlet, sold 500,000 copies and finished Vallandingham as a political leader. The Democrat left the Confederacy to run for governor of Ohio from Canadian soil, and was crushed.
Lincoln’s joke about feeding on emetics was in his best debater’s style: Paine on the platform, winning arguments by getting laughs. As a rule, however, Lincoln as president saved the jokes for personal interactions, to distract and to lighten his own mood. He loved other people’s jokes as much as his own. His favorite humorist was David Ross Locke, a journalist with the Toledo Blade, who wrote under the persona of Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby. Locke’s creation had the opinions of Clement Vallandingham and the vocabulary—elaborately misspelled—of a tavern-keeper. “There is now 15 niggers, men, wimin and children . . . in Wingert’s Corners [Nasby’s fictional hometown], and yisterday another arrove. I am bekomin alarmed, fer if they inkreese at this rate, in suthin over sixty yeres they’ll hev a majority in the town.” Lincoln thought Nasby was hilarious, and he would regale callers and his cabinet with his latest grotesqueries.
For his public pronouncements, however, Lincoln generally wrote and spoke seriously. He held the highest office in the land at the worst moment of its history, and he suited his rhetoric to his place and time. His style was direct, sometimes tinged with poetry; occasionally, when reaching for an effect, he overreached, yet he regularly managed to tap what Seward had called the vein of sentiment.
The conclusion of his second Annual Message to Congress, given in December 1862, showed him finding his range. His topic was how the end of the war might be hastened by ending slavery; Lincoln wanted to impress Congress with the magnitude of the question and the weight of their shared responsibility, and he finished with three rhetorical strokes, like chimes. “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.” This was an attempt at loftiness—a failed attempt. There was a little too much horsehair stuffing in it. After a few beats, Lincoln tried again: “We cannot escape history.” This was better, a statement as simple as it was sweeping. Then, after a few more beats, bull’s-eye: “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best, hope of earth.” This was as lofty as Henry Clay at his most eloquent; it was sweeping, surveying all of history; the cluster of monosyllables, varied by only two adverbs, seems as plain as dirt, but there is gold dust in it: the sliding ls, the very intonations of loss, are stopped by the sharp almost-rhyme of last/best.
Words alone do not win wars or lead men, but what words could do, Lincoln’s would.
Lincoln’s task as the Civil War unfolded was twofold: to preserve the Union and to fulfill the goals of the Republican Party.
Preserving the Union was his duty under the Constitution. The oath of office, prescribed in Article II, Section 1, bound him to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Fulfilling the goals of the Republican Party was the condition under which he had won his office. Although the founding fathers professed to dislike parties—Madison, in the Federalist, called them “factions,” and Washington in his Farewell Address warned against them—they themselves created the first two-party system (Republicans vs. Federalists) almost as soon as their Constitution went into effect. In seventy-one years of presidential elections, parties large and small had come and gone, and in one case changed names (Jefferson’s Republicans becoming Jackson’s Democrats). But parties themselves had become an inescapable feature of American political life—the mechanisms by which leaders acquired office and the people expressed their will.
Lincoln might have saved the Union immediately after his election simply by abandoning the principles on which he and the Republican Party had run. There were various efforts to urge him to do just that. One compromise proposal, floated in December 1860 by John Crittenden, an old Whig senator from Kentucky, would have pushed the Missouri line to California by constitutional amendment, and made this amendment unchangeable. Lincoln had begun his rise to the White House by fighting to restore the Missouri line—but that was the old line, dividing slavery from freedom in the former Louisiana territory. An extended line, crossing the continent and graven into the Constitution, would be an incentive, Lincoln wrote, to grabbing “all [territory] south of us, and making slave states of it”—Central America, the Caribbean, whatever might be won in a new Mexican War. “A year will not pass,” he predicted, “until we shall have to take Cuba” to satisfy slaveholders. Indeed, expansion into the subtropics was the only way an outnumbered South could recover parity in the Senate. But Republicans, as Lincoln wrote Alexander Stephens, thought slavery was “wrong and ought to be restricted.” On any proposal to let it grow into new territories, Lincoln was “inflexible.”
Lincoln’s first task, saving the Union, was simultaneously military and political.
The Confederacy had reason to think it could win on the battlefield. Its subculture was more bellicose than that of the North. This bred an arrogance that Montgomery Blair, who partook of it, defined when he wrote that southerners believed that any one of them equaled half a dozen Yankees. But even arrogance could work to the Confederacy’s advantage, since attitude and audacity often do carry the day. The situation of the Confederacy was favorable. Like the United States during the Revolution, it would be fighting a protective war, repelling the incursions of invaders. The defensive always has a natural advantage in war.
T
he Union had advantages of its own. Unlike Britain in the Revolution, it did not have to send attacking armies across an ocean. The enemy was always a few marches away. The Union would be better armed than the South, thanks to its superiority in manufacturing, and it would be better served by its more numerous railroads. Most important, it was more populous. Lincoln had made this point in 1859 in a speech in Cincinnati, addressing the Kentuckians who lived just across the Ohio. “Why, gentlemen, I think you are as gallant and as brave men as live; . . . but man for man, you are not better than we are, and there are not so many of you as there are of us.”
The grand strategy devised by the aged Winfield Scott, known as the Anaconda plan, proposed to blockade southern ports, split the Confederacy into two unequal parts by taking control of the Mississippi River, and press in from the perimeter of the larger portion on different fronts simultaneously. Scott knew his business; this is in fact what the Union would do over the next four years.
But political accident gave northeastern Virginia special prominence. After Virginia seceded, a grateful Confederacy moved its capital from Montgomery to Richmond. Virginia was no longer the largest state in the Union, scarcely the largest in the Confederacy. But it was the oldest, the most eminent, the nursery of presidents and of liberty. By moving to Richmond, the Confederacy appropriated Virginia’s luster.
The proximity of Richmond and Washington—the two capitals were only ninety-five miles apart—made voters and politicians on both sides avid for quick victories. The proximity was deceptive, because many winding rivers lay between the two cities. The proximity was doubly deceptive, because the primary goal in war is not the conquest of capitals, but the destruction of the enemy’s ability and will to fight. Yet since losing a capital necessarily entails a loss of morale and prestige, focusing on Washington and Richmond made some sense after all, especially since both the Union and the Confederacy were republics, in which popular sentiment and the election calendar always had to be considered. If people and politicians thought the capitals were important, then they became so. Thus the Virginia theater was crucial for both sides.
From its site on the Potomac, Washington stared Virginia in the face. A rebel flag flying over the Marshall House, a hotel in Alexandria, could be seen from the White House with a spyglass. In May 1861 Union troops took Alexandria; one of their officers, Elmer Ellsworth, a dashing young Illinoisan who had studied law under Lincoln in his Springfield office, and accompanied him on his preinaugural train trip, sprang up the hotel stairs to tear down the disloyal banner. The manager shot him dead (and was killed in turn by a Union man). Lincoln wrote Ellsworth’s parents: “In the untimely loss of your noble son, our affliction here is scarcely less than your own.”
Everyone knew there would be more deaths to come, though no one suspected how many. What came at the end of July was a full-dress battle twenty-five miles southwest of Washington. The Union called it Bull Run, after the nearest stream, the Confederates Manassas, after the nearest crossroads. If Scott had been even ten years younger and fifty pounds lighter, he might have led the Union troops himself. Instead the Union advance was commanded by Irvin McDowell, one of his former staff officers. After initial setbacks, the Confederates rallied. The Union retreat became a rout, with exhausted, disorderly soldiers straggling back to Washington. A total of almost 900 men from both sides were killed, and almost 3,000 wounded—small numbers compared to the hecatombs of Napoleon or Marlborough. But the battle was one of the bloodiest fought so far in North America. (By way of comparison, 24 men had died altogether at the Battle of Trenton, and just over 300 at the Battle of New Orleans.)
The war in Virginia became a series of offensives and counteroffensives. The names of the major engagements were once known to every schoolchild and are still sacred to reenactors, history buffs, and patriots: Seven Days’, Second Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville. They were, with one exception, a procession of Union defeats incurred by a rotating cast of commanders.
Scott retired at age seventy-five in November 1861, and was succeeded by George McClellan, forty years his junior, who had won plaudits by defeating the rebels in Virginia’s Appalachian northwest (the future state of West Virginia). McClellan’s plan for winning the war was to land on the Virginia coast and approach Richmond from the southeast, moving up the long peninsula between the York and the James rivers—hence the name by which his effort is known, the Peninsula Campaign. McClellan was an excellent organizer who was always popular with his men. But in the Seven Days’ Battles (June 25–July 1, 1862), the Confederates, though they lost more men than he did, managed to stop him short of Richmond.
The Confederates then made their own move north, nearly destroying an army under John Pope at the Second Battle of Bull Run (August 28–30). They decided to swing northwest into central Maryland, but McClellan, restored to grace after his stalemate on the peninsula, stopped their advance at Antietam (September 17).
McClellan’s failure to pursue the enemy after this near-victory ended his period of grace, and the Union’s next efforts to take the war south again were led by other commanders, disastrously. Ambrose Burnside (whose whiskers were the model and namesake of sideburns) got as far as Fredericksburg on the Rappahannock River, where he suffered fearful casualties (December 11–15). The next spring, at Chancellorsville (May 1–4, 1863), only a few miles from the site of Burnside’s defeat, Joseph Hooker was beaten by Confederate forces half as strong as his.
Union generalship on the Virginia front was certainly inadequate. (One Union general knew it: Burnside, a modest man, had refused two offers to take a commanding role before—unfortunately—accepting.) At the same time, the Confederates could not mount a successful offensive of their own, and they, too, were bleeding.
The Anaconda plan worked better in the West. By the spring of 1862 the Union had managed to clear western Tennessee, with victories at Fort Henry (February 6), Fort Donelson (February 16), and Shiloh (April 6–7). At the southern end of the Mississippi, New Orleans, the largest city and greatest port in the Confederacy, fell on May 1.
In faraway London, Charles Francis Adams’s son Henry, who had accompanied his father as his personal secretary, found himself surrounded by Confederate sympathizers: the light-headed and the fashionable, always willing to shed tears for distant underdogs. The Union capture of New Orleans fell on them, Henry wrote, like a “blow in the face on a drunken man.”
Lincoln had poked fun at his meager military experience for years; it was one element of his rube/boob persona: “[I never] saw any live fighting Indians,” he said of his days in the Black Hawk War, “but I had a good many bloody struggles with the mosquitoes.” Now he took his responsibilities as commander in chief seriously. He borrowed a textbook from the Library of Congress entitled Elements of Military Art and Science, by Henry Halleck, an officer who would later become chief of staff for the entire army, and studied it. He followed his generals’ actions minutely and corresponded with them anxiously, careful to couch most of his ideas as advice rather than orders. Sometimes his advice was worthless. He ended the letter in which he congratulated Hooker on replacing Burnside with this imitation gemstone: “Beware of rashness, but with energy, and sleepless vigilance, go forward, and give us victories.” It was like telling an investor to buy low and sell high. In fairness to Lincoln, his opposite number, Jefferson Davis, despite far greater experience (colonel in the Mexican War, secretary of war under Franklin Pierce), gave orders and advice that were consistently worse.
The longer arc of Lincoln’s relationship with his commanders was sound: he supported them until they failed unignorably, then he sought new ones.
Supporting them often required a vast patience. The egos of military men (never small) had been piqued by the career of Napoleon. Perhaps they could win as many victories as he had. Perhaps they could, as he had, become more than military men. McClellan, who was nicknamed the Little Napoleon—he was of average height, but youth, slimness, and attitude gave him
a bright, bristling appearance—wrote early in the war: “I almost think that were I to win some small success now I could become Dictator or anything else that might please me.” Hooker, on the eve of his elevation, said that “nothing would go right until we had a dictator, and the sooner the better.”
McClellan made his remark about a dictator in a letter to his wife; Hooker spoke his to a reporter. Lincoln knew about Hooker’s remark, and knew McClellan well enough to know his frame of mind (it was not hard to discern). He correctly judged that their talk was bluster, not actual disloyalty—these were not towering geniuses—and he let them try to do their jobs. “I will hold McClellan’s horse,” he said, “if he will only bring us success.” He joshed Hooker about his dictator talk in a letter: “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.”
And yet once these men failed, Lincoln cast them aside and looked for others. When he found generals who won, he stuck by them. The first Union victories in western Tennessee were won by Ulysses Grant, a thirty-nine-year-old whose early military career had been marred by drinking. But the two-day Battle of Shiloh was almost lost through his overconfidence: not believing the enemy to be near, he had not ordered his men to entrench, and the Confederates nearly drove them from the field. On the second day, he saved all with a ferocious counterattack. The casualties on both sides, however, were terrible (over 1,700 Union soldiers were killed, and more than 8,000 wounded; Confederate losses were similar). A storm of criticism beat on Grant, but Lincoln would not dismiss him: “I can’t spare this man; he fights.”
Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln Page 22