But Lincoln tried to be a careful writer and speaker. He generally meant what he said, and said only what he meant. If he had intended to write a blank check at Gettysburg, he would have called for “a birth of new freedom” (or “a birth of new freedoms”). What he did call for was “a new birth of freedom.” His freedom was the old freedom, the freedom of “our fathers.” It was what they had envisioned in 1776, a lifetime ago.
Their freedom needed a second birth because of the slaughter and strain of war. And it needed a second birth because the first birth had left a birthmark—the cancer or wen of slavery. (Lincoln did not say such a thing at Gettysburg, and he said it only from time to time, because of the risk of seeming to criticize the founding fathers, whom he considered helpless in dealing with slavery, rather than negligent or malicious.) What he did say at Gettysburg was that the men of the present should preserve, and revivify, what “our fathers” had done; the men of the present could complete their fathers’ unfulfilled intentions.
This was Lincoln’s final correction of his youthful mistakes in the Lyceum Speech. Then the novice lawyer and closet Paine-ite had honored the fathers, but dismissed them (with poetic regret) as dead. They were still dead—dead as Henry Clay; dead as all the reburied corpses at the battlefield. But if dead men have lived with a purpose, it can live after them; they can live on in it. We the living can share their purpose, which has become ours.
Lincoln closed by referring to the Preamble. He had fit two founding documents into an address of 272 words: neat work. He took the language of his Special Message of 1861—“a government of the people, by the same people”—polished it, and made it the last of the high resolves that end the address: “[Let us] here highly resolve . . . that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” The reporter from the Associated Press who covered the speech noted here that there was “long-continued applause.”
By framing these words in this way, Lincoln drew one more implication from the Preamble. Principles, even great ones, are not self-enacting. If government of, by, and for the people was not to perish, it was up to the people to resolve to sustain it. They had to ordain and establish it, as they had done in the Constitution. But then they had to vote wisely in its elections. They had to fight for it, if necessary. This was the value—the purpose—of pictures of silver: they preserved the apples of gold.
Lincoln often said that he respected the people. He pretended to be one of them, for political effect; and despite his intelligence, pride, and ambition, he remained one of them, roaring over Petroleum V. Nasby and Artemus Ward while auditors who were less easily amused ground their teeth. In the Special Message of 1861, Lincoln had praised “the patriotic instinct of the plain people,” who “understand, without an argument, that destroying the government which was made by [George] Washington means no good to them.” Perhaps Lincoln said too much. Maybe the people did understand, by instinct, their best interests. But they were not always motivated to act on what they knew. They needed arguments; they needed jokes (that were pointed); they needed inspiration. They needed leadership.
Lincoln told Speed that, thanks to the Emancipation Proclamation, he would be remembered. But he would never have been able to issue the proclamation (or defend the Union) if he had not won elections, united a party, made his case. He did it by hard work and dirty work: watching for opportunities, stroking egos, greasing wheels, all the backroom deals and open maneuvers of politics. But he made his mark as a politician mostly by communication. He would never have been able to do anything memorable and right if he had not said so many memorable, true words.
Fourteen
1864–1865: WAR, DEATH
WHEN LINCOLN GAVE THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESS, THE Civil War had lasted two years and seven months, as long as the entire War of 1812, nearly as long as the Mexican War. Gettysburg and Vicksburg had felt like turning points, the beginning of the end, but how long would the end take? What sort of end would it be—a new birth of freedom, or some haggard compromise?
And what of the ongoing cost—in lives, and in scars on the lives of the survivors? In 1864 Lincoln began to speak of “this terrible war,” and it was certainly the most terrible in American history so far.
As Lincoln labored under the shadow of these questions, and tended to his daily military and political tasks, the founding fathers did not vanish—they were by now inseparable from his vision and his program—yet they would shrink, and make way for another Father.
The obvious military course for Lincoln and his generals was the one they in fact followed, the Anaconda plan: squeeze the encircled heart of the Confederacy until it gave out.
There was a setback in September 1863. A Union army, trying to push into Georgia from southeastern Tennessee, was beaten at Chickamauga and forced to retreat to Chattanooga. Ulysses Grant, summoned from his headquarters at Vicksburg to retrieve the situation, was given control of almost all the Union armies west of the Appalachians. At the battle of Chattanooga at the end of November, Grant defeated the Confederates, allowing the Union to resume its forward march.
This was now Grant’s moment. In March 1864 he was called to Washington and given command of all Union armies, east and west. Lincoln told him that “all he wanted or had ever wanted was some one who would take the responsibility and act.” Grant put his longtime comrade William Tecumseh Sherman, whose features were as harsh as Grant’s were satisfying, in his place in eastern Tennessee, and made his own headquarters with the Union army in northeastern Virginia. Grant’s assignment to Sherman was to take Atlanta, a hub of the Confederacy’s railway network; his assignment to himself was to beat the enemy armies defending Richmond.
Their efforts were bloody and for a long time fruitless. Starting in early May at a point near Chancellorsville, Grant fought a month-long campaign—with major battles at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Courthouse, and Cold Harbor—which left him a few miles east of Richmond without, however, breaking the Confederate line. In June he crossed the James River and moved south to attempt a siege of Petersburg, a railway junction vital to the Confederate capital’s communication and supply. Meanwhile, Sherman fought a series of battles from May through the end of the summer that took him from the northwest corner of Georgia to the outskirts of Atlanta.
The pressure of two simultaneous campaigns was designed to prevent the Confederacy from shifting troops to reinforce either. The fighting bled the enemy, but the Union bled even more: by the beginning of September, Sherman had lost 4,000 killed, Grant more than 7,000. (“I have always regretted that the last assault at Cold Harbor was ever made,” Grant would write tersely in his memoirs.) Grant had nevertheless kept a Union army in Virginia despite its losses, not retreating north to lick its wounds, while Sherman had gained a foothold in the Confederacy’s largest state.
Lincoln encouraged his commanders’ aggressive temperaments. In a note to Grant in August he urged him to “hold on with a bull dog grip, and chew and choke as much as possible.”
Politically, Lincoln sought to achieve the Republican Party’s goals, to manage its feuds, and to lead it to victory.
By 1863 Republicans had shifted from a policy of containing slavery to dismantling it. The most tangible step toward the new goal was the enlistment of black men in the armed forces. This had been happening on the sly since 1862, in Kansas and South Carolina. “This must never see daylight,” Stanton warned the Union general who was doing the enlisting in South Carolina, “because it is so much in advance of public opinion.”
But by January 1863 Lincoln felt that public opinion had advanced sufficiently to enable him to declare, in the Emancipation Proclamation, that freed slaves could be “received into the armed service of the United States.” The announcement encouraged free blacks in the North to sign up; the war was now manifestly their fight, too. Lincoln defended the policy in a letter he sent to be read to a Republican rally in Springfield in September 1863. Addressing a hypothetical critic of black soldie
rs, he used his best platform sarcasm: “You say you will not fight to free negroes. Some of them seem willing to fight for you; but no matter . . .” With a straight face he said the opposite of the truth, for it mattered a great deal. Black soldiers performed every task, from humdrum guard duty to desperate combat. By the end of the war, about 10 percent of all the men who served in Union ranks were black.
George Washington had commanded black soldiers in the Revolution, and one icon of his career recorded the fact. Emanuel Leutze’s grand painting, “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” which had been exhibited in New York City and the Capitol Rotunda in the 1850s, showed a black oarsman in the main boat (probably from the 14th Massachusetts, a regiment recruited from Marblehead sailors, mostly white but including blacks and Indians as well). When Washington fought for liberty at Trenton, there were free black men at his side.
But the military soon thereafter became all white: the Militia Act of 1792 specified that its provisions applied to “free able-bodied white male citizen[s].” Andrew Jackson had enlisted blacks to help him defend New Orleans, but that was an emergency measure.
Black soldiers in the Union Army from 1863 on would serve under white officers in segregated units. Still, they earned one of the highest marks of citizenship—fighting for the common defense.
In tandem with the national rebellion, little rebellions broke out continually in the Republican Party—trivial by comparison, but requiring Lincoln’s attention and care to snuff out. The Republicans who were most unhappy most of the time were the Radicals. Everything that Lincoln did they wished he had done the day before, and they were certain that if they themselves had been in a position of authority they could have done it.
Perhaps they would get their chance in the 1864 election. Five of the first seven presidents (Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Jackson) had served two terms. But since Jackson left office in 1837, no president had. It was not for lack of trying: Van Buren and Pierce had sought reelection, and Tyler and Fillmore, the two vice presidents promoted by death, had tried to be elected in their own right. But all had failed. The presidency seemed to have fallen into a pattern of rotation.
The Republican most eager to replace Lincoln was Salmon P. Chase. He had a political machine ready-made: 10,000 Treasury Department employees, who could be turned into campaigners, augmented by the 2,500 salesmen who reported to Jay Cooke, the financier in charge of selling war bonds. But Chase moved too soon. In February a committee of his supporters sent a circular condemning Lincoln and praising Chase to one hundred leading Republicans. It was supposed to be confidential, but there is no such thing as a confidential message with one hundred recipients. The main effect of its public exposure was to stimulate a rash of endorsements for Lincoln.
John Frémont, the first Republican presidential candidate, lent himself to another Radical rebellion in the spring. He and Lincoln had clashed three years earlier over his premature emancipation order in Missouri and allegations of corruption, and Frémont cherished their disagreements as grievances. A convention of four hundred Radicals met in Cleveland at the end of May and nominated Frémont for president.
Lincoln, mindful of the political limitations of both men—Chase was tone-deaf, Frémont self-infatuated—watched their efforts but chose to let each fall of its own weight. He did not even bother to be vengeful. When Chase offered his resignation after his circular had been exposed, Lincoln refused to accept it, just as he had after Chase’s failed cabinet intrigue in 1862. Lincoln’s response to the Cleveland convention, when a friend spoke to him of it, was to read aloud a passage from the Bible describing David, the future king of Israel, hiding from the wrath of Saul, the king he would replace, in a cave: “And every one that was in distress, and every one that was in debt, and every one that was discontented, gathered themselves unto him; and he became a captain over them: and there were with him about four hundred men” (1 Samuel 22:2). Four hundred men might be enough for a king on the run; not enough for a presidential campaign.
Lincoln did have allies, and they labored for his renomination with his blessing. Simon Cameron got all the Republicans in the Pennsylvania state legislature to sign a letter urging Lincoln to run again—an important endorsement in the nation’s second-largest state. So Lincoln’s magnanimity to his disgraced former secretary of war was repaid.
The Republican convention, meeting in Baltimore June 7–8, nominated Lincoln on the first ballot (22 of out 506 votes were cast for Grant, against his wishes, but they switched to Lincoln at the end of the roll call to make the choice unanimous). The convention assumed the name National Union Party in the hope of attracting war Democrats. With the same end in mind, it tapped former Democratic senator Andrew Johnson, the military governor of Tennessee, to run with Lincoln, instead of his incumbent vice president, Hannibal Hamlin.
Lincoln seems to have been indifferent to the switch in running mates. Even without the benefit of foreknowledge, this was an odd thing to treat casually. Two presidents (Harrison and Taylor) had already died in office. Lincoln had supported both of them, and the misbehavior of one of their successors (Tyler) had crippled Lincoln’s old party, the Whigs, in the moment of its first great success.
Johnson was a patriot and a brave man, and by 1864 he had abandoned his support of slavery in favor of emancipation, but he boiled with resentments. A conversation he had with Charles Francis Adams Jr., another of the diplomat’s sons, as the South was seceding, in which Johnson discussed his rebellious Senate colleagues, captured his tone. He began with David Yulee of Florida: “Miserable little cuss! I remember him [when I was] in the House—the contemptible little Jew—standing there and begging us—yes! begging us to let Florida in as a state. Well! We let her in, and took care of her, and fought her Indians; and now that despicable little beggar stands up in the Senate and talks about her rights.” He moved on to Judah Benjamin, of Louisiana: “There’s another Jew—that miserable Benjamin! He looks on a country and a government as he would on a suit of old clothes. He sold out the old one; and he would sell out the new if he could in so doing make two or three millions.” This was an old anti-Semitic trope: the shiftiness of Jews, epitomized by the fact that many of them were tailors, a profession that follows fashion. Yet Johnson had been a tailor himself: hatred was fueled by self-hatred. He finished with Louis Wigfall of Texas: “a damned blackguard” who “hadn’t a cent.” (Wigfall was a bankrupt. But Johnson himself had been poor once—more self-hatred.) “The strongest secessionists never owned the hair of a nigger.” This was the man who was now supposed to help Lincoln lead the Union to victory and then, if that happened, help him bind the nation’s wounds.
Yet men rarely count on their own deaths; the vice presidency was (and remains) a constitutional oddity—necessary, but most of the time, inconsequential. So the ticket of Lincoln and Johnson would face the voters.
Lincoln’s worst political problem was not Republican infighting, but war fatigue. The hopes roused by Grant’s ascent had shriveled in the months-long stalemate.
In August, Thurlow Weed wrote Seward that a Lincoln victory was “an impossibility.” Republicans considered desperate scenarios: If Lincoln lost New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois, he could still win by three electoral votes; if Nevada, which was enjoying a silver rush, became a state in time for the election, his margin would be six votes.
Late in August Lincoln wrote a brief memo to himself sketching what he would do if he lost: since he believed it would be impossible, with a Democratic administration, to save the Union, he would try to work with the Democratic president-elect to save it in the four months before the inauguration. It was a desperate thought—Why would the victor cooperate with his defeated opponent? But it salved Lincoln’s honor—I will have done all I could—and allayed his fears of approaching impotence—I will try to do something. He brought the memo, folded, to a cabinet meeting and asked his secretaries to sign it, unread, so that he could prove his intentions later on. Lincoln was a master of s
mall-group theatrics, but the tone of melodrama and self-pity in this little show suggests his alarm and foreboding.
The Democratic convention, which met in Chicago from August 29 to 31, gave the Republicans their first sign of hope. The nomination went to George McClellan on the first ballot. The Little Napoleon seemed like a good candidate: he had always been popular with his troops, taking good care of them everywhere but on the battlefield. He also had ample reason to dislike Lincoln. But McClellan wanted to win the war. The convention, however, was dominated by peace Democrats who cheered when the band in the hall played “Dixie.” The platform they wrote called for “immediate efforts” to end the fighting. McClellan refused to run on it, though he accepted the nomination. In attacking Lincoln from different directions at once, the Democrats gave the impression of fighting each other.
One thing on which war Democrats and peace Democrats could agree was racism. Democratic campaign pamphlets called Lincoln “Abraham Africanus,” whose first commandment was, “Thou shalt have no other God but the negro.” One Democratic cartoon showed white Republican men dancing with fleshy black women in low-cut gowns (the reader knew what would happen next). Racial manners and mores were different then: the letters and casual conversation of every white politician of the day, the most Radical Republicans included, could be culled for racist remarks and expressions. But the Democrats said theirs in public; they were proud to say them. Racism was both a campaign plank and a policy position; the Democrats were the party of negrophobia.
Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln Page 26