Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln

by Richard Brookhiser

  Two days after the Democrats adjourned, Atlanta fell. Finally the direction of the war could be measured in something more dramatic than attrition. The Confederacy had already been severed along the Mississippi. Sherman was now poised to sever it again, between the Carolinas and the Gulf states.

  The tangible victory changed the dynamic of the election even more than the dynamic of the war. In one stroke the administration was transformed from a quagmire to a success. Lincoln tended to every detail that might make success complete. In September, as a sop to the Radicals, he asked Montgomery Blair to resign as postmaster general; the Radicals should have the satisfaction of feeling that, even though they could not lift Chase or Frémont to the White House, they could drive a Blair from the cabinet. The Blairs accepted the dismissal with good grace: their view was, anything to get Lincoln reelected. The following month, Chief Justice Taney went to his reward, age four score and seven years. Chase yearned to succeed him, but Lincoln, who wanted Chase’s support on the hustings, withheld nominating him until after the election.

  Soldiers were an important part of the Republican coalition—McClellan was popular with the troops, but Lincoln, it turned out, was even more popular, mental and moral leadership trumping military command. Everything was done to get out the soldier vote. Since Indiana law did not allow troops to cast absentee ballots, Sherman gave his Indiana regiments furloughs for the bellwether state elections in October.

  Cash flowed to civilian poll workers. Days before the election, Weed, hopeful once more, wrote Lincoln that “every ward” in New York and Brooklyn had been “abundantly supplied with ‘material aid.’”

  Election Day was November 8. Twenty-five states voted. Lincoln won every state he had carried in 1860, except for his share of New Jersey’s electoral votes. Three new states had joined the Union since the 1860 election—Kansas, West Virginia, and Nevada (under the wire, on October 31); Lincoln won these, too. He also carried Missouri and Maryland, for a total of 212 electoral votes. McClellan took Delaware, Kentucky, and all of New Jersey, for 21 electoral votes. Lincoln’s victory in the popular vote was equally lopsided—55 percent to 45 percent (he carried Illinois by nearly the same margin). No one in the Confederacy, of course, participated, which skewed the results. But Lincoln would have won even if every Confederate state had voted and McClellan had carried them all; Lincoln’s popular vote, over 2.2 million, was 350,000 more than he had received in 1860.

  After all the intrigue and jabber of a capital city, and all the fears and qualms of a campaign, Lincoln’s endless White House sessions with ordinary folk, retold by them to the folks back home, and his written and spoken words, often eloquent, always clear, had brought him to this point. He was the symbol of the Union and of its cause. Despite all the distractions and sufferings of wartime, voters recognized it.

  Tradition forbade Lincoln from campaigning himself, though he did make brief remarks to Union regiments that marched to the White House to be reviewed before being mustered out. In these he explained—less resoundingly than at Gettysburg, but no less earnestly—what the Union was fighting for. “Nowhere in the world,” he told the 148th Ohio, was there “a government of so much liberty and equality”; it was the people’s duty to transmit it “to our children and our children’s children forever.” This was a thought he had been turning over in his mind from the Lyceum Address (“the perpetuation of our political institutions”) to the Gettysburg Address (“shall not perish from the earth”). As he had for a decade, he looked back to the founding fathers, for it was their handiwork that Americans had to transmit: “We are striving to maintain the government and institutions of our fathers.” But in these remarks Lincoln also, at long last, included his actual father. Thomas Lincoln had a role to play in the American system, too. “The present moment,” Lincoln said, “finds me at the White House, yet there is as good a chance for your children [to be there] as there was for my father’s. . . . To the humblest and poorest amongst us are held out the highest privileges and positions.”

  His father had given him life, and under the system of the founding fathers, that was opportunity enough for any man to rise as high as he could.

  Lincoln’s reelection and the renewed impetus given to the war effort were stages in the fulfillment of his life’s work. What about death’s work?

  Lincoln’s grandfather had been killed by Indians; Lincoln himself had seen the bodies of men who had been scalped in the Black Hawk War. In his domestic life, he had lost a mother, a sister, a fiancée, and a young son to various diseases, all before reaching the White House. Such brushes with death were common enough in early nineteenth-century America.

  The destruction of the Civil War was uncommon. After Lincoln’s death, William Herndon, ruminating on his friend’s intellectual preoccupations, came up with a homely phrase. Lincoln, he wrote, tended to ignore individuals “unless they should concretely appear and tap [him] on the shoulder and say, ‘Here we are again.’” The war gave many taps on the shoulder—especially the shoulder of the commander in chief.

  Lincoln’s former law student Elmer Ellsworth had been killed in Alexandria in May 1861, in one of the first engagements of the war. In October 1861 another Illinois friend, Edward Baker, was killed in the Battle of Ball’s Bluff, a sharp engagement in the lull before the Peninsula Campaign. Baker had been Lincoln’s peer in Illinois Whig politics; he was the namesake of Lincoln’s second son and the man who had introduced the president-elect to the crowd from the podium at his first inauguration. Lincoln said Baker’s death struck him “like a whirlwind from a desert”; at the funeral, he wept “like a child.”

  William McCullough was the court clerk in Bloomington, Illinois, on Lincoln’s old circuit. When the war began, he asked the president to help him join an Illinois cavalry unit. He needed presidential help because he was fifty years old and had lost an arm in a farm accident. Lincoln intervened for his old friend. In December 1862, in the early days of the Vicksburg campaign, McCullough was killed in a cavalry skirmish in northern Mississippi. Lincoln wrote a letter of condolence to McCullough’s daughter Fanny. “In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares. The older have learned to ever expect it.” Only time, he wrote, would ease the pain. But time now brought only more deaths.

  The powers-that-be in Washington were not insulated from battle. Simon Cameron, when he was secretary of war, lost his brother James at the First Battle of Bull Run. William Seward’s third son, William Jr., had a horse shot out from under him during a cavalry battle in Maryland (he escaped with nothing worse than a broken leg). Edward Bates had one son in the Union Army, one in the Missouri militia, one at West Point, and another in the Confederate Army. Deaths in the family crossed political lines. Mary Lincoln lost two half-brothers and a brother-in-law fighting on the Confederate side. When she invited Emilie Helm, her widowed sister, to the White House, Lincoln was criticized for it: in the minds of his enemies, he could be by turns a black man, white trash, and a rebel sympathizer.

  As the commander in chief, Lincoln was exposed to losses beyond those of family and friends. At the end of 1864, he wrote a letter, which has become one of his most famous, to Lydia Bixby, a Boston widow who, he had been told by the military, had lost the shocking total of five sons. There is some dispute about whether the Bixby letter was actually written by Lincoln, or for him by John Hay. Whoever was the wordsmith labored under the futility of his own words: “I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save.” Lincoln, it turned out, had been misinformed. Mrs. Bixby had lost two sons in battle; one was honorably discharged, one deserted, and one either deserted or died in a Confederate prison. But wasn’t the loss of two (possibly three) sons grievous enough? The loss of one?

  Sometimes t
he specter of loss came almost literally close enough to tap Lincoln on the shoulder. Noah Brooks was a young journalist who had met Lincoln in Illinois in the 1850s, then covered his presidency for a California newspaper. One day he accompanied Lincoln on a visit to a soldiers’ hospital in Washington. Ahead of them, as they made their rounds, a “well-dressed lady” was distributing tracts. After she had moved on, “a patient picked up with languid hand the leaflet dropped upon his cot, and, glancing at the title, began to laugh.” When Lincoln and Brooks came up to the man, Lincoln gently reproved him: “That lady doubtless means you well, and it is hardly fair for you to laugh at her gift.” The soldier explained why he could not help it: “She has given me a tract on ‘The Sin of Dancing,’ and both of my legs are shot off.”

  The story has the shape of a joke—one of Lincoln’s, perhaps. But this joke was on Lincoln himself. And on the legless soldier, of course.

  Joshua Speed witnessed one of Lincoln’s close encounters with the war, not involving death, only military justice and the helplessness of those caught in its meshes. But Speed was acute enough to understand its impact.

  Late in the war, Speed came to Washington to see the president. Lincoln asked him to sit in his office until he was done with visitors. At last only “two ladies in humble attire” were left. One was the wife of a man who had been arrested for resisting the draft in western Pennsylvania, the other the mother of another resister. “They both commenced to speak at once,” and Lincoln asked for their written petition.

  “We’ve got no petition,” the older one said. “We couldn’t write one, and had no money to pay for writing one. I thought it best to come and see you.”

  Lincoln called for the relevant administrator and told him that, after thinking over the matter—it was evidently an ongoing case—he had decided to pardon all the accused. (“I believe I will turn out the flock,” was how he put it.)

  The younger woman fell to her knees in gratitude, but Lincoln told her to get up. “Don’t kneel to me, thank God and go.” Then the older woman bade him farewell: “Good-bye, good-bye, Mr. Lincoln. I shall never see you again till we meet in Heaven.”

  Lincoln “instantly took her right hand in both of his and following her to the door . . . said, ‘I am afraid with all my troubles I shall never get there. But if I do I will find you. That you wish me to get there is the best wish you could make for me.’”

  Finally the two old friends were alone. “Lincoln,” said Speed, “with my knowledge of your nervous sensibility, it is a wonder that such scenes as this don’t kill you.”

  Lincoln answered that that scene was the only thing he had done all day that had given him any pleasure.

  Lincoln and Speed had been the closest of friends twenty-five years earlier. Marriage and distance had parted them, then politics had parted them still more: in the 1850s, Speed could not understand Lincoln’s vehemence in opposing the expansion of slavery, while Lincoln could not understand Speed’s failure to understand. Once the Union fell apart, their differences shrank away; Speed and his brother James were Lincoln’s eyes and ears in problematic Kentucky. In December 1864, after Edward Bates had resigned as attorney general, for reasons of age and ill health, Lincoln picked Speed’s brother to replace him.

  One of the bonds uniting Lincoln and Speed at the height of their friendship had been women and distress—women they had distressed, women who distressed them. Here, in the president’s office, was another tableau of Lincoln, Speed, and two distressed women, purged of any question of sex or marriage. It could have been a sentimental scene rendered by a period artist—a print by Currier and Ives, or one of John Rogers’s mass-produced statuary groups—with a title such as “Mercy in War-time,” or “The President’s Good Deed.”

  And surrounding the entire scene, like the throb of steam engines, was each man’s awareness, Lincoln’s especially, that this drama of mercy was an eddy in a rush of conquest, resistance, liberation, injury, imprisonment, illness, and death. A fatalist, such as Lincoln professed to be, must have smiled at the tininess of the pleasures that even he, the commander in chief, could snatch from the torrent.

  Alongside the war and its inspiring, lurid, brutal movements of men and ideas, Lincoln’s domestic troubles seem inconsequential. Yet they troubled him. In February 1862 his third son, Willie, had died of typhoid fever, age eleven. Mary Lincoln despaired, convinced that God had taken Willie as punishment for her political ambition. Lincoln believed that he communed with his dead son in dreams; Mary tried to contact him through spiritualist mediums.

  Before and after her child’s death, Mrs. Lincoln was an unfortunate first lady. Yearning to cut a figure in Washington society, she splurged on clothing and furniture, ran into debt, and had to be bailed out by Congress. Washington society, unimpressed by her accoutrements, rejected her as an anxious parvenu. More serious were her migraine headaches—a torment that only those who suffer from them can comprehend. In a memorable image, she compared hers to an Indian pulling the bones out of her face. These daily burdens added their weight to the burdens that came with Lincoln’s job.

  He could think of the death and destruction of the war as being in the service of a cause. Still it was terrible (“this terrible war,” he called it in an 1864 letter to Eliza Gurney, a Quaker who visited him in the White House). Lincoln had compared slavery to a disease in his Peoria speech. The founding fathers had hidden it “away in the Constitution, just as an afflicted man hides away a wen or a cancer, which he dares not cut out at once, lest he bleed to death.” Now that it was being cut out, many Americans were bleeding to death.

  There are two wrong ways to write about war. One is to treat it as wholly glorious, noble, or purposeful. Propagandists embrace this error, and orators are tempted by it; even a text as chaste as the Gettysburg Address could be so misheard—not, presumably, by many in its first audience, in a newly made cemetery where coffins were still stacked, but by those removed from the event by time or lack of imagination.

  The other wrong way to write about war is to treat it as wholly meaningless—empty carnage. One of the modern pioneers of that error was Lord Byron, who devoted a canto of Don Juan to the battle for Ismail, an Ottoman town captured by Russia in 1790:

  Thus on they wallowed in the bloody mire

  Of dead and dying thousands, sometimes gaining

  A yard or two of ground, which brought them nigher

  To some odd angle for which all were straining;

  At other times, repulsed by the close fire,

  Which really poured as if all hell were raining,

  Instead of heaven, they stumbled backwards o’er

  A wounded comrade, sprawling in his gore.

  Each error speaks for a truth—noble causes sometimes require the last full measure of devotion, and war is hell—but the truths are only true when held simultaneously in the mind. Lincoln’s intellectual and rhetorical gifts showed him the purpose of the war; his nervous sensibility (Speed was more right about Lincoln’s sensitivities than Herndon) showed him the horror.

  As 1864 drew to a close, Grant was still investing Petersburg, trying to encircle it. Six days before the election, Sherman had begun to march from Atlanta to Savannah and the Atlantic coast.

  Two political dramas played out over this military one. In 1861 the newly elected Lincoln had indicated that he favored a proposed Thirteenth Amendment declaring that the federal government had no power to end slavery in the states. (Lincoln believed that was implied constitutional law, so why not put it in the Constitution?) A last-ditch compromise proposal, it crumbled along with the country. Now, as the war finally seemed to be ending, there was a push, from abolitionists and Radical Republicans, for a different Thirteenth Amendment, one which would end slavery by constitutional mandate.

  Charles Sumner proposed a text based on the French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen: “All persons are equal before the law, so that no person can hold another as a slave.” The Senate Ju
diciary Committee, wiser than he was, instead echoed the Northwest Ordinance, the founding document that had shaped the lives of millions of Americans, including the Lincolns: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime . . . shall exist within the United States.” The amendment did not forbid holding “persons . . . to labor,” it forbade “slavery”: the institution was first named in the Constitution as it was being ushered out of it. The Senate approved the Thirteenth Amendment by the necessary two-thirds margin in April, and the Republican (or National Union) convention endorsed it in early June. But on June 15, the amendment fell short in the House.

  The November elections gave the Republicans increased majorities in Congress, but they would take their seats no earlier than March 1865 (and then only if Lincoln called a special session). A renewed push for a Thirteenth Amendment came in the lame-duck session of the same Congress that had failed to approve it.

  The wen or cancer of slavery was being cut out by war. Everywhere the Union armies penetrated—Sherman took Savannah just before Christmas—slaves were being freed under the provisions of the Emancipation Proclamation. No conceivable replacement for Chief Justice Taney (least of all Salmon P. Chase, who finally got the job in December) would lead the Court in undoing the proclamation with some Dred Scott–like decision.

  Yet the Emancipation Proclamation was a war measure only. Legal challenges and delays could proliferate in peacetime. Slavery still lingered in the loyal border states (though Maryland had abolished it in November 1864, and Missouri was moving to do the same). Anyone with a legalistic mind, which included Lincoln, would want the matter resolved, before the war ended, if possible.