Lincoln

by David Herbert Donald

  Much of the dissatisfaction with the Emancipation Proclamation was muted, because the President on September 24 issued another proclamation, which suspended the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus throughout the country and authorized the arbitrary arrest of any person “guilty of any disloyal practice, affording aid and comfort to Rebels against the authority of the United States.” To the President this seemed such a routine matter that he did not even mention it to the cabinet. Stanton, as authorized by the Militia Act of July 17, 1862, had been issuing stringent orders to suppress criticism of the newly instituted draft; enforced by petty officials all across the country, these regulations had resulted in hundreds of cases of violation of civil liberties, when civilians were subjected to arbitrary, and often quite unreasonable, arrests. Lincoln’s proclamation was simply designed to codify these War Department rules, but Democrats like Senator James A. Bayard of Delaware read it to mean that the President was “declaring himself a Dictator, (for that and nothing less it does).” Whatever Lincoln’s intent, the new proclamation had a chilling effect on public dissent. Editors feared that they might be locked up in Fort Lafayette or in the Old Capitol Prison in Washington if they voiced their criticisms too freely, and even writers of private letters began to guard their language.

  II

  However muffled, the voice of the people found expression in the 1862 fall elections for governors and congressmen, in which the President’s party suffered major reverses. The outcome was hardly surprising to Lincoln. After all, he had been elected by a minority of the voters in 1860, and many of the Republican members of Congress chosen that year owed their seats to divisions among their opponents. As the war dragged on, the strength of the Democrats increased. Under Lincoln’s leadership, Union armies seemed on occasion to be successful but never victorious. The cost of the war in lives and suffering was appalling, and the President’s call for 600,000 more men suggested that the endless drain was far from over. Meanwhile the country’s finances were in perilous shape, and the decision to resort to paper currency appeared to be an act of desperation.

  Throughout the early months of 1862 the President had received repeated warnings that his party was in trouble, and he anticipated losses in the fall elections, when, as he wryly predicted to Carl Schurz, Democrats would fail to support his administration because it was too radical and Republicans because it was not radical enough.

  Alarmed by the prospect, influential Republicans urged him to use his influence to strengthen the party. “If only the President could be induced to employ his vast patronage to sustain his friends,” John W. Forney, a Pennsylvania editor, lamented, “this calamity [of Democratic victory] might be averted.” To the chagrin of party leaders, he did nothing. He even refused to endorse his old friend Owen Lovejoy, who was in a fierce battle for reelection in his Illinois district. During the summer of 1862 the President was, of course, preoccupied with directing a vast military operation—but at no other time in Lincoln’s life was he too busy for political management, at which he was so skilled. He held aloof from the congressional contests because there was not much he could do to influence their outcome. As a number of other chief executives have discovered, presidential coattails are of little use in off-year congressional elections. In any case, Lincoln realized that he was not a popular President. Indeed, he told the cabinet members in September, “I believe that I have not so much of the confidence of the people as I had some time since.”

  The President also understood that intervention in a local or state race might involve him in bitter factional quarrels within his own party. In New York, for example, as able Governor E. D. Morgan was about to finish his term, Seward and Thurlow Weed sought to broaden the Republican party into a Union party and favored nominating the stalwart War Democrat General John A. Dix for governor. Constantly suspicious of Seward’s conservatism and intent on pushing the antislavery agenda of the more radical wing of the Republican party, Horace Greeley successfully pressed for the nomination of the earnest abolitionist General James S. Wadsworth. The contest weakened both Republican factions, and Wadsworth entered the fall campaign crippled by disaffection among Republican voters. To oppose him, New York Democrats nominated their ablest and most thoughtful spokesman, Horatio Seymour.

  In his home state of Illinois the President did interfere, though less by design than by inadvertence. Illinois Republicans, alarmed earlier in the year by the narrowness of their success in defeating a Democratic new state constitution, joined a Union fusion movement, in which, they said, “party lines and partisan feelings should be swallowed up in patriotism.” As part of this strategy they redrew the boundaries of the state’s congressional, districts. Sangamon, Lincoln’s home county, always staunchly Democratic, was now linked with three other counties thought to be predictably Republican. The new district was expected to elect David Davis. But before Davis was nominated, Lincoln let it be known that he intended to appoint his old friend to a vacancy on the United States Supreme Court, a post that Davis coveted. Illinois Republicans were obliged to fall back on Leonard Swett, who, like Davis, had worked for Lincoln’s nomination. To oppose Swett the Democrats named John Todd Stuart, Lincoln’s first law partner.

  Most congressional and gubernatorial nominations were made before Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, but inevitably it became a key issue in all the Northern elections. In New England and in the states of the upper Northwest, the proclamation strengthened the Republican party, bringing back the support of disaffected abolitionists. “It is,” wrote one Vermonter, “a document for an open sea and plain sailing.” But elsewhere, as the President had anticipated, the result was decidedly negative. As a correspondent wrote Secretary Chase, Democrats throughout the North now howled, “I told you so[;] can’t you see this is an Abolition war and nothing else.”

  Expecting to lose Republican votes because of the emancipation issue, Lincoln was evidently surprised by the Democrats’ effective use of a second issue, the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus announced in his proclamation of September 24. Democrats seized on this proclamation as evidence that the President sought to make himself a dictator. The federal government, claimed the Democratic Illinois State Register, was “seeking to inaugurate a reign of terror in the loyal states by military arrests... of citizens, without a trial, to browbeat all opposition by villainous and.false charges of disloyalty against whole classes of patriotic citizens, to destroy all constitutional guaranties [sic] of free speech, a free press, and the writ of ‘habeas corpus.’” This became the main theme of the Democratic campaign in New York when Horatio Seymour pledged that if arbitrary arrests continued after his election he would resist “even if the streets be made to run red with blood.” In Illinois, John Todd Stuart made effective use of the fear inspired by the proclamation to avoid debating his opponent, Swett. Stuart claimed that if either man in the course of a debate too freely expressed what he thought or felt, he might be arrested.

  As the October and November elections approached, the President looked to the outcome with great anxiety. Visitors thought he seemed “literally bending under the weight of his burdens.” “His introverted look and his half-staggering gait,” a Chicago woman wrote, “were like those of a man walking in sleep,” and his face “revealed the ravages which care, anxiety, and overwork had wrought.” Ordinarily the master of his emotions, he let his self-control slip at times during these trying weeks. When Thomas H. Clay, Henry Clay’s son, asked, “as a favor,” that a particular army division be reassigned to Kentucky for rest and relaxation, Lincoln snapped back a refusal: “I sincerely wish war was an easier and pleasanter business than it is; but it does not admit of holy-days.”

  His anxieties were warranted. When the votes were tallied, the President learned that the voters had administered to him and his party a severe rebuff. In state after state that had gone Republican in 1860, Democrats made huge gains: New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. New Jersey, which divided
its electoral vote in 1860, now went Democratic. The Wisconsin delegation, formerly solidly Republican, was split. Major Republican leaders in the House of Representatives, including Roscoe Conkling of New York, John A. Bingham of Ohio, and even the Speaker, Galusha A. Grow of Pennsylvania, went down to defeat. The Democrats carried the President’s home district in Illinois, electing Stuart over Swett. The Republican party retained control of the new House of Representatives in the Thirty-eighth Congress, which would not meet until December 1863, but its majority would be drastically reduced. In state elections New Jersey elected Joel Parker, an able Democrat, as governor. And, most serious of all from the point of view of the Lincoln administration, Seymour was chosen governor of New York. As the New York Times concluded, the elections, taken as a whole, amounted to a “vote of want of confidence” in the President.

  Disgruntled Republicans deluged the President with analyses of their defeats. In Illinois, Republican losses were attributed to an ill-timed order of Secretary Stanton, issued just days before the Emancipation Proclamation, for the resettlement of “contrabands” temporarily housed in Cairo on farms throughout the state; Democrats charged the administration was attempting to “Africanize” Illinois. Many Republicans found it comforting to believe that the Democrats won because so many Republicans of voting age were in the armies, and Lincoln himself argued that “the democrats were left in a majority by our friends going to the war.” But there was little evidence to support this conclusion, since volunteering in Democratic counties was as heavy as in Republican counties.

  Others, like the astute New York lawyer David Dudley Field, attributed the outcome to the administration’s policy of arbitrary arrests. “There was nobody to pronounce them legal,” he told the President, “nobody to consider them expedient, even if they had been legal.” Unless the administration abandoned the practice of arresting citizens without legal process, he warned, “there is every reason to fear that you will be unable, successfully, to carry on the Government.” Lincoln did not publicly admit that violations of civil liberties were responsible for Republican defeats, but the President, who had given little personal attention to the issue of arbitrary arrests even during the worst excesses of 1862, kept a closer eye on them in the following months. Without abandoning or diminishing his claim to extraordinary authority under the war powers, he began to formulate more careful rationalizations for the use of that authority. He told a visitor who was in touch with influential New York Democrats that he would arrange “that by imperceptible (comparatively) degrees, perhaps, military law [which came into effect following the suspension of habeas corpus] might be made to relent.” On November 22 the War Department ordered the release of most prisoners charged with discouraging enlistment or other disloyal conduct.

  Most blamed Republican defeats on what Lincoln called “the ill-success of the war.” That failure they attributed to the President. Carl Schurz scolded the Lincoln administration for admitting “its professed opponents to its counsels. It placed the Army, now a great power in this Republic, into the hands of its enemy’s.” Even more bluntly a New Yorker charged that Lincoln’s “weakness, irresolution, and want of moral courage,” which had kept traitors like McClellan and Buell in command, was responsible for the “disgraceful” outcome of the elections.

  Many prominent Republican politicians agreed. Immediately after the elections several Pennsylvania congressmen came to the White House to report the outcome in their districts, and all blamed “the general tardiness in military movements,” for which they held McClellan and Buell responsible. Since Lincoln insisted on retaining these generals in command, J. K. Moorhead, the representative from the Pittsburgh district, told him candidly, “It was not your fault that we were not all beaten.” Some Pennsylvania Republican leaders, he continued, “would be glad to hear some morning that you had been found hanging from the post of a lamp at the door of the White House.”

  Deeply depressed, the President responded in a subdued voice: “You need not be surprised to find that that suggestion has been executed any morning. The violent preliminaries to such an event would not surprise me.”

  III

  If Lincoln seriously feared violence, it was not from disappointed Republican politicians but from the army. Ordinary soldiers and noncommissioned officers of the Union armies were nearly all loyal supporters of the government, but among officers there was talk of a dictator to oust the marplots in the administration, like Stanton and Halleck, who allegedly failed to support the generals.

  Lincoln received few reports of such a mutinous spirit in the Western armies. He knew he could count on General U. S. Grant, in command of the Army of the Mississippi. Though a former Democrat, Grant expressed no interest in politics and no reservations about the President’s emancipation policies; instead, he concentrated his energies on defeating the Confederates. The battle of Corinth, Mississippi, on October 3–4, in which federal troops from his army, under the immediate command of General W. S. Rosecrans, repelled an attacking Confederate force, gave the President one of the few clear-cut Union victories in the last quarter of 1862.

  Nor did Lincoln doubt the loyalty of General Buell, who commanded the Army of the Ohio in central Tennessee. But he was often exasperated with that general, who was nearly as slow as McClellan, and he fumed when Buell resolutely ignored directives to invade mountainous eastern Tennessee, where Union loyalists lived under a Confederate reign of terror, and insisted on remaining in the Nashville region. In the fall his unhappiness increased after two Confederate armies, under Braxton Bragg and Edmund Kirby-Smith, launched an invasion of Kentucky, timed to coincide with Lee’s raid into Maryland, and forced Buell to retreat to Louisville. His patience exhausted, Lincoln gave General George H. Thomas the command of the army unless, at the time Thomas received his orders, Buell was actually preparing to fight. The indecisive battle of Perryville, Kentucky (October 8, 1862) temporarily saved Buell from removal.

  But the officer corps of the Army of the Potomac was another matter. The principal generals and most of the headquarters staff were Democrats, and many felt no special loyalty to a Republican President who seemed bent on changing the nature and scope of the war. These high-ranking officers had developed an intense loyalty to their commander, and they generally shared McClellan’s view that warfare was for professionals and that civilian property—including slaves—should not be touched by the armies. Most of them attributed McClellan’s failure on the Peninsula to ill-advised and politically motivated meddling by civilian authorities. Pope’s humiliating defeat at the second battle of Bull Run and Lincoln’s vacillation over restoring McClellan to command strengthened their contempt for the President. Just before the battle of Antietam members of McClellan’s staff were reported to have seriously discussed “a plan to countermarch to Washington and intimidate the President,” so that he would abandon his attempt to interfere with slavery and the war could be ended. The President’s Emancipation Proclamation, reported General Fitz-John Porter, “was ridiculed in the army—causing disgust, discontent, and expressions of disloyalty to the views of the administration, amounting... to insubordination.” Among the “Potomac Army clique,” General Pope reported, there was open talk “of Lincoln’s weakness and the necessity of replacing him by some stronger man.”

  After the battle of Antietam, Lincoln moved with great delicacy to determine whether McClellan was involved in these schemes. The general, for his part, was equally curious whether he still held the President’s confidence. Because Lincoln sent him only meager congratulations after the battle of Antietam, which McClellan considered “a masterpiece of [military] art,” the general feared the President had fallen under the sway of his opponents. Consequently he sent Allan Pinkerton, his chief of intelligence, who was presumably an expert in ferreting out information, to the White House. In Pinkerton’s long interview with the President on September 22—the day the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, though that document was never mentioned—McClellan was using
his chief detective to spy on the President, and the President was using the detective to spy on his commanding general.

  From Pinkerton, Lincoln learned a great deal more than the detective thought he was revealing. Employing the techniques for cross-examining a witness he had perfected during his years at the bar, he expressed himself, so Pinkerton wrote McClellan, as humbly “desirous of knowing some things which he supposed from the pressure on your mind, you had not advised him on or that you considered was of minor importance, not sufficiently worthy of notice for you to send to him.” Then, using language so deferential that Pinkerton did not realize he was being grilled, the President asked a series of telling questions: Why had McClellan failed to come to the rescue of the Union garrison at Harpers Ferry, which had been forced to surrender to Stonewall Jackson just before Antietam? What was the relative strength of the Union and Confederate forces at Antietam? (He appeared to accept McClellan’s and Pinkerton’s preposterous estimate that the Confederates had 140,000 men, when in fact Lee’s effective troops numbered about 52,000.) Why did the Union army not renew the attack the day after the battle? How were the Confederates able to slip back unhindered across the Potomac River?

  Lincoln impressed the detective as entirely friendly toward McClellan. He was not at all suspicious when the President used uncharacteristically effusive language to express the nation’s “deep debt of gratitude” to McClellan for his “great and decisive victories” at South Mountain and Antietam. Lincoln told him he had no doubt that McClellan had fought the battle of Antietam skillfully—“much more so than any General he knew of could have done”—and said that he was “highly pleased and gratified with all you had done.” “I am rather prejudiced against him,” Pinkerton concluded his report, “but I must confess that he impresses me more at this interview with his honesty towards you and his desire to do you justice than he has ever done before.”