In the message the President urged Congress to adopt a joint resolution declaring “that the United States ought to co-operate with any state which may adopt gradual abolishment of slavery, giving to such state pecuniary aid, to be used by such state in it’s discretion, to compensate for the inconveniences public and private, produced by such change of system.” Such a declaration, he held, was strictly constitutional because it made no claim of federal authority to interfere with slavery within state limits but allowed each state “perfectly free choice” to accept or reject the proposed offer. He argued for his resolution not on the basis of morality or justice but on the ground that it would remove any temptation for the border states to join the “proposed confederacy.” To congressmen from those states he added the warning that as the war continued it would be “impossible to foresee all the incidents, which may attend and all the ruin which may follow it.”
Lincoln’s careful preparation led to an overwhelmingly positive reception of his proposal. How could anybody object to a proposal endorsed by the Blairs, by Sumner, and by Chase? The San Francisco Daily Alta California pretty well summarized press opinion by calling the message “just the right thing, at the right time, and in the right place.” In New York the Evening Bulletin, the Herald, the World, and the Evening Post all endorsed Lincoln’s plan. “This Message constitutes of itself an epoch in the history of our country,” rejoiced the New York Tribune, often so critical of Lincoln. “It is the day-star of a new National dawn.” The next day the Tribune added, “We thank God that Abraham Lincoln is President of the United States, and the whole country, we cannot doubt, will be thankful that we have at such a time so wise a ruler.”
Lincoln followed press reactions to his proposal closely. When the New York Times, usually a faithful supporter of his administration, complained in an early edition about the cost of compensated emancipation, the President promptly straightened out the editor, Henry J. Raymond. Less than one-half of a day’s cost of the war would pay for emancipating all the slaves in Delaware, he pointed out; and the cost of eighty-seven days of the conflict would free the slaves in all the border states plus the District of Columbia. Raymond, who had been out of the office, had already corrected his newspaper’s slant and published several articles commending the message “as a master-piece of practical wisdom and sound policy.”
But border-state congressmen said nothing. Lincoln sent for Montgomery Blair, who had made brave promises about the extent of emancipation sentiment in the upper South. Blair suggested that the congressmen were waiting for the army to win a victory. “That is just the reason why I do not wish to wait,” Lincoln told him impatiently. “If we do have success, they may feel... it matters not whether we do anything about the matter.”
The next day Blair brought the border-state representatives to receive the same message. Disclaiming “any intent to injure the interests or wound the sensibilities of the Slave States,” Lincoln reminded them that failure to solve the problem of slaves who fled to Union lines “strengthened the hopes of the Confederates that at some day the Border States would unite with them” and thus prolonged the war. Stressing that his plan was voluntary and that it recognized “that Emancipation was a subject exclusively under the control of the States,” he urged them to give it serious consideration. The congressmen haggled with him. Was his plan constitutional? Would Congress appropriate the money needed to put it in effect? Was this a first step toward a general emancipation? Would emancipation be followed by colonization of the freedmen? Lincoln tried to assuage their fears but salvaged nothing from the meeting except John J. Crittenden’s assurance that all the congressmen believed the President was “solely moved by a high patriotism and sincere devotion to the happiness and glory of his Country.”
Congressional debates on Lincoln’s resolution were brief. Several representatives from the border states thought it was unconstitutional. At the other extreme John Hickman, an abolitionist representative from Pennsylvania, sneered that the message was an attempt on the part of the President to compensate for his failure “to meet the just expectation of the party which elected him to the office he holds.” A few abolitionists outside of Congress saw in Lincoln’s plan a design to save slavery. “Every concession made by the President to the enemies of slavery has only one aim,” growled Gurowski; “it is to mollify their urgent demands by throwing to them small crumbs, as one tries to mollify a boisterous and hungry dog.” But such dissents were few, and Congress adopted the resolution by overwhelming majorities.
Then, disappointingly, nothing happened. Because none of the border states agreed to accept the plan Congress had endorsed in general terms, there was no need for any further legislation. The only concrete result of the entire effort was a bill for compensated emancipation in the District of Columbia. It met some of Lincoln’s specifications as a blueprint for freedom in that it provided for paying up to $300 to masters for every slave emancipated and appropriated $100,000 for colonizing “such of the slaves as desired to emigrate.” But this was not the measure Lincoln really wanted. Emancipation imposed on the federal district was very different from abolition voluntarily adopted by the border slave states. “If some one or more of the border-states would move fast, I should greatly prefer it,” he explained to Horace Greeley. But none did so, and he signed the District of Columbia bill on April 16.
VII
Lincoln’s military plans bore equally meager results. After McClellan’s demotion the President and the Secretary of War, neither of whom had any significant military experience, found themselves swamped by administrative detail as they tried to direct huge armies spread over half a continent. Yielding finally to suggestions from both Chase and Bates, Lincoln decided he needed his own military adviser, and he called on the sixty-four-year-old veteran Ethan Allen Hitchcock. The grandson of the Revolutionary hero Ethan Allen, Hitchcock had become a soldier mainly because family tradition demanded it, and, more interested in Swedenborg than in strategy, he retired from active duty in 1855 to devote his time to religious and philosophical investigations. Summoned to Washington in March, he learned from Stanton that the President wanted his assistance. The next day Lincoln told him of the pressures to remove “the traitor McClellan”—as his enemies called him—and explained that as President he was “the depository of the power of the government and had no military knowledge.” In his sickbed, recovering from two hemorrhages, the general thought he was asked to take McClellan’s place as commander of the Army of the Potomac, but he did not perhaps get the message exactly right. The old general was reluctant. He wanted no post, and he recognized that neither Lincoln nor Stanton knew what they would like him to do. Unwillingly he accepted a staff appointment in the War Department, where his advice was of little use to either the President or the Secretary of War.
Left to manage on their own, Lincoln and Stanton received little encouraging news from any front. In the West at Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River the Confederates came close to routing Grant’s army in the battle of Shiloh (April 6–7). The timely arrival of Buell’s forces helped to save the day. In the end, Shiloh was a great Union victory, but the 13,000 Federal casualties marked this as the bloodiest engagement yet in the war. Halleck blamed Grant for the losses, and there was strong sentiment to have him removed. Lincoln overruled the objections with the quiet comment “I can’t spare this man; he fights.” But with Grant’s reputation under a shadow, Halleck now took personal command of the heavily depleted Western army and began a slow and cumbersome march toward Corinth, Mississippi.
In the East progress was no more rapid. Frémont said that he could not move until his newly established Mountain Department received reinforcements and more supplies. The President had little to give him because McClellan was taking most of the Army of the Potomac down the Potomac to use in his Peninsula campaign, in which neither Lincoln nor Stanton had much faith. Stanton circulated reports of McClellan’s disloyalty—only to declare sanctimoniously that of course he did
not believe these imputations on the general. Lincoln said he had no reason to doubt McClellan’s fidelity, yet he told Browning that he was “not fully satisfied with his conduct of the war—that he was not sufficiently energetic and aggressive.” Offering a shrewd thumbnail character sketch, the President judged that McClellan “had the capacity to make arrangements properly for a great conflict, but as the hour for action approached he became nervous and oppressed with the responsibility and hesitated to meet the crisis.”
Harboring such doubts, Lincoln had stipulated that McClellan must not embark on his campaign without leaving behind a sufficient force to make Washington “entirely secure.” That requirement led to an unsolvable conflict between them. Lincoln was never able to make the general comprehend the political importance of the security of the national capital. McClellan, for his part, failed to convince the President that the best way to defend Washington was to attack Richmond.
Before leaving for the Peninsula, McClellan, as directed, held a council of war, and his corps commanders recommended that a force of 40,000 or 50,000 men was needed to protect the capital. McClellan believed he was carrying out this directive by stationing 22,000 men in and around Washington and by posting other troops nearby—at Manassas, at Warrenton, in the Shenandoah Valley, and on the lower Potomac—all in close proximity if the capital should be attacked. But he never explained his thinking to Lincoln and, except for quickly passing a paper under Hitchcock’s nose, did not show anybody his troop disposition before he sailed for the Peninsula. Stanton, still new in his job and always highly nervous, feared for the safety of Washington and asked Hitchcock and General James Wadsworth, commandant of the forces in the capital, to verify that McClellan had followed the President’s order to leave the capital secure. Both agreed that he had not. On April 3, Lincoln ordered McDowell’s corps—approximately one-third of the army McClellan had hoped to muster on the Peninsula—held back for the defense of Washington.
After that there was endless bickering between McClellan and the civilian authorities in Washington. The general found the Confederates entrenched at Yorktown on the Peninsula and, as usual vastly overestimating the enemy’s strength, demanded reinforcement. Without McDowell’s men, he felt unable to carry the Confederate lines and settled down to besiege their fortifications. Impatiently Lincoln reminded him that, even after McDowell’s corps was held back, he had 100,000 troops at his command and suggested: “I think you better break the enemies’ line... at once.” Furious, McClellan wrote his wife, “I was much tempted to reply that he had better come and do it himself.”
Lincoln told Browning that he was “dissatisfied with McClellan’s sluggishness of action,” but he tried to soothe the general’s feeling with a fuller explanation why McDowell’s troops had been detained. For all his charity, he could not refrain from adding a word of self-justification: “You will do me the justice to remember I always insisted, that going down the Bay in search of a field, instead of fighting at or near Manassas, was only shifting, and not surmounting, a difficulty—that we would find the same enemy, and the same, or equal, intrenchments, at either place.” The President assured the general that he would do his best to sustain the army, and he ended with a warning: “But you must act.”
Relations between the general and his commander-in-chief were strained but not broken. After reevaluating the forces left to defend Washington, Lincoln detached Franklin’s division from McDowell’s corps and sent it to reinforce the army on the Peninsula. Grateful for this evidence of the President’s “firm friendship and confidence,” McClellan told Montgomery Blair that he was now convinced “that the Presdt had none but the best motives.” He promised soon to report a success that would be “brilliant, although with but little loss of life.”
On May 3, when the Confederates withdrew from Yorktown and McClellan began his long-planned advance up the Peninsula, Lincoln decided to move closer to the scene of operations. Accompanied by Chase and Stanton and escorted by General Egbert L. Viele, he boarded the Treasury Department’s new revenue cutter, the Miami, sailed down the Potomac, and the next day arrived at Fort Monroe, where seventy-eight-year-old General John E. Wool commanded the garrison. After learning that McClellan would not join them because his army had just defeated the Confederates at Williamsburg and was pushing them back toward Richmond, the President and his associates decided that the time had come to liberate Norfolk, on the south side of the James estuary, where the hulking Merrimack was sheltered, still a threat to the Union navy.
Though the professional soldiers in General Wool’s command advised that it was impossible to land troops anywhere near Norfolk because shoals would prevent boats from getting closer than a mile to the shore, Chase was determined to see for himself and, using the Miami and a tugboat, got very near to land. He reported his finding to Lincoln, who had been studying the maps and thought he had discovered another landing site nearby. Under a bright moon Lincoln and Stanton sailed in the tugboat right up to the shore, while Chase aimed the long-range guns of the Miami to protect them if they were attacked. The President insisted on climbing out on what Virginians called their “sacred soil” and, in bright moonlight, strolled up and down on the beach.
After showing that a landing was possible, Lincoln did not participate in the invasion the next day but remained at Fort Monroe attending to other business. That evening he heard how Chase had gone ashore, led the Union troops, and received the surrender of Norfolk. A huge explosion told the President’s party that the Merrimack, abandoned by the Confederates, had been blown up. “So,” Chase wrote to his daughter, “has ended a brilliant week’s campaign of the President, for I think it quite certain that if he had not come down, [Norfolk] would still have been in possession of the enemy and the Merrimac as grim and defiant and as much a terror as ever.”
The episode was of no particular importance except perhaps to confirm the distrust of professional military men that both Lincoln and Stanton shared. But the President would not allow his little adventure to be used to McClellan’s discredit. Afterward, over dinner at General Wool’s headquarters, when someone made a slurring reference to the commander of the Army of the Potomac, Lincoln rebuked him: “I will not hear anything said against Genl. McClellan, it hurts my feelings.”
But McClellan, feeling victory almost within his grasp, was not so generous, and he insisted on reversing some of Lincoln’s recent decisions. He had never liked the corps arrangement that the President had forced him to accept and now, claiming that it “very nearly resulted in a most disastrous defeat” at Williamsburg, planned to remove “incompetent commanders” of corps and divisions. Reluctantly Lincoln allowed McClellan to suspend the corps organization, though he reminded the general that it was based “on the unanimous opinion of every military man I could get an opinion from, and every modern military book, yourself only excepted.” He warned McClellan that his actions would be perceived “as merely an effort to pamper one or two pets, and to persecute and degrade their supposed rivals” and asked whether he had considered the implications of reducing the rank of Generals Sumner, Heintzelman, and Keyes all at once.
McClellan continued to complain that he did not have enough men to confront the overwhelming Confederate force. He never ceased asking Lincoln for McDowell’s army corps that had been held back to defend Washington (though he did not want McDowell himself, whom he regarded as an enemy who fed the Committee on the Conduct of the War material hostile to McClellan). Unwilling to leave Washington exposed, Lincoln thought he found a way to defend the capital while reinforcing McClellan: he would have McDowell’s corps advance overland toward Richmond in such a way as to connect with the right wing of McClellan’s forces on the Peninsula. But because he retained a residual distrust of McClellan’s judgment, he instructed McDowell to operate not as a part of McClellan’s force but as an independent cooperating army. As he expected, McClellan resisted the plan. He insisted that the reinforcements should be sent by water, and he announced that since
he outranked McDowell that general would, under the sixty-second article of war, have to obey his orders.
To make sure McDowell understood his mission, the President went down to Aquia Creek, accompanied by Secretary Stanton and John A. Dahlgren, a naval officer to whom he had taken a great liking. When they reached the Potomac Creek, McDowell called their attention to a trestle bridge his men were erecting a hundred feet above the water in that deep and wide ravine. “Let us walk over,” exclaimed the President boyishly, and though the pathway was only a single plank wide, he led the way. About halfway across Stanton became dizzy and Dahlgren, who was somewhat giddy himself, had to help the Secretary. But Lincoln, despite the grinding cares of his office, was in fine physical shape and never lost his balance.
His political equilibrium was not so steady. By the end of May 1862 his administration could point to few successes. In neither the East nor in the West had Union armies succeeded in crushing the Confederate forces. Only in faraway Louisiana, where David G. Farragut ran the fortifications on the lower Mississippi River and seized New Orleans, had there been a clear Union success. The Treasury was almost depleted. After exhausting the possibilities of borrowing, Secretary Chase had reluctantly been obliged to ask Congress to issue legal-tender paper money (usually called greenbacks). Like Chase, Lincoln doubted the constitutionality of the measure, but he had no choice but to approve it. In foreign affairs, European powers had nearly exhausted their patience and, as cotton shortages caused massive unemployment and suffering in the textile mills, were coming close to recognizing the Confederacy. In Congress the President had almost no defenders, and a few Jacobin members of his own party criticized almost every action he took. The prospects for Lincoln’s presidency were not good. Edward Dicey, the perceptive American correspondent of the British journals the Spectator and Macmillan’s Magazine, offered what he felt would be the verdict of history: “When the President leaves the White House, he will be no more regretted, though more respected, than Mr. Buchanan.”
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