V
Even in the brief honeymoon period after Burnside and Rosecrans assumed command of their armies, there were few uneventful days like the one chronicled by Van Santvoord. Serious problems arose that only a President could decide. During October and November much of Lincoln’s attention had to be given to an uprising among the Sioux Indians of Minnesota. Bureaucratic delays in paying these Indians the annuities promised to them at the time they gave up most of their land left the Sioux desperate and almost starving. During the summer their agent unsuccessfully tried to get food for them, but his supplier announced, “So far as I am concerned, if they are hungry let them eat grass or their own dung.” In August some young Sioux men, raiding an Acton, Minnesota, farm for eggs, broke into the house and killed five white settlers. Quickly violence spread throughout southwestern Minnesota, and before the Indian uprising could be quelled, more than 350 whites had been killed. It was the largest massacre of whites by Indians in American history.
When news of the uprising reached Washington, Lincoln was almost wholly absorbed by Lee’s invasion of Maryland, and he could devote little attention to Indian affairs. He did dispatch General Pope, fresh from his defeat at Second Bull Run, to take charge of military operations against the Sioux. The general accepted the assignment reluctantly. He felt that the President had been “feeble, cowardly, and shameful” in failing to defend him from his critics.
Once in Minnesota, Pope deflected his hostility from the President to the rebellious Indians. Finding “panic everywhere in Wisconsin and Minnesota” and predicting “a general Indian war all along the frontier, unless immediate steps are taken to put a stop to it,” he announced: “It is my purpose utterly to exterminate the Sioux if I have the power to do so. . . . They are to be treated as maniacs or wild beasts.” With the enthusiastic cooperation of Minnesota authorities, who saw an opportunity both to gain revenge and to secure additional Indian lands, Union troops by early October broke the back of the rebellion, and a military commission began to try more than 1,500 Indians, including women and children, who had been captured.
As soon as the news reached Washington, in mid-October, the President told Pope to stage no executions without his sanction. To gain further information and to help restore peace, he sent Assistant Secretary of the Interior John P. Usher (soon to replace Caleb B. Smith in the cabinet) to Minnesota, and he also sought the advice of Episcopal Bishop Henry B. Whipple, who advised “a new policy of honesty was needed” for dealing with this “wronged and neglected race.”
Lincoln admitted that he was poorly informed on Indian affairs. In September, when Chief John Ross had urged him to offer military protection to the Cherokees, who had fallen under Confederate control, the President told him, “In the multitude of cares claiming my constant attention I have been unable to examine and determine the exact treaty relations between the United States and the Cherokee Nation.” He had little acquaintance with Indians. In general, like most whites of his generation, he considered the Indians a barbarous people who were a barrier to progress. The ceremonial visits of Indian chiefs, dressed in their tribal regalia, he welcomed, both because they were exotic and because he rather enjoyed playing the role of their Great Father, addressing them in pidgin English and explaining that “this world is a great, round ball.” Occasionally, as during the following year, he would offer them little homilies on how they could profit by learning “the arts of civilization.” Pointing out the “great difference between this pale-faced people and their red brethren,” he told a group in the White House that whites had become numerous and prosperous partly because they were farmers rather than hunters. Even though he admitted that “we are now engaged in a great war between one another,” he also offered another reason for white success: “We are not, as a race, so much disposed to fight and kill one another as our red brethren.” The irony was unintentional.
Nor did Lincoln know much about the operations of the Office of Indian Affairs in the Department of the Interior. When he had appointed Caleb B. Smith as Secretary of the Interior and William P. Dole as Indian Commissioner, he was rewarding them for political favors, not for interest in or concern for the Indians. In naming their subordinates, the President almost invariably followed the wishes of the Republican members of Congress. A typical note directed Smith: “Please make out and send blank appointments for all Indian places, to serve in Wisconsin, in favor of the persons unitedly recommended by the Wisconsin Congressional delegation.” It was assumed that Indian agents and Indian traders would make profits from their positions, not merely for themselves but for their Republican sponsors.
But what was now going on in Minnesota far exceeded the usual fraud and embezzlement connected with the Indian service. Whites who had been terrified during the uprising were determined to secure vengeance. Republican Governor Alexander Ramsey, calling the Sioux “assassins” and “ravishers of... wives and sisters and daughters,” insisted that whites in his state “will not tolerate their presence... in any number or in any condition.” Many thought the defeat of the Sioux offered an opportunity to drive not merely that tribe but the peaceable Chippewas out of the state and to confiscate their lands.
On November 8, Lincoln received from Minnesota a list of 303 Sioux men the military commission had condemned to die. Promptly the President directed General Pope to send complete records of these convictions, indicating the more guilty and influential of the culprits. Pope responded that the people of Minnesota were so exasperated that if everyone on the list was not executed it would be “nearly impossible to prevent the indiscriminate massacre of all the Indians—old men, women, and children.” Minnesota Senator Morton S. Wilkinson echoed the threat: “Either the Indians must be punished according to law, or they will be murdered without law.” Governor Ramsey added that unless every condemned Sioux Indian was executed “private revenge would on all this border take the place of official judgment on these Indians.”
But the President, greatly influenced by Bishop Whipple and Commissioner Dole, refused to be stampeded. He consulted Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt about a way of avoiding a decision, by allowing state authorities to determine which Indians should die. When Holt told him firmly, “The power cannot be delegated,” the President deliberately went through the record of each convicted man, seeking to identify those who had been guilty of the most atrocious crimes, especially murder of innocent farmers and rape. He came up with a list of thirty-nine names, which he carefully wrote out in his own hand: “Te-he-hdo-ne-cha,” “Tazoo” alias “Plan-doo-ta,” and so on. Wiring the list to the military authorities, he warned the telegraph operator to be particularly careful, since even a slight error might send the wrong man to his death.
On December 26 the thirty-eight men (one more man was pardoned at the last minute) were executed—the largest public execution in American history. Few praised Lincoln for reducing the list of condemned men. On the contrary, his clemency lighted a brief firestorm of protest in Minnesota, which did not die down until the Secretary of the Interior promised the white settlers “reasonable compensation for the depredations committed.” Even so, considerable resentment remained against Lincoln and his administration, so that in 1864, Republicans lost strength in Minnesota. Senator (formerly Governor) Ramsey told the President that if he had hanged more Indians he would have had a larger majority. “I could not afford to hang men for votes,” Lincoln replied.
VI
The Indian uprising in Minnesota was but one of the many subjects that the President had to address in his annual message to Congress on the state of the Union. Indeed, preparing that message, which was due on December 1, took up so much of his time that he felt obliged to limit his public receptions to two hours each day during November.
The message offered Lincoln an opportunity to reformulate the basic goals of his administration. He knew that it would be addressed to a highly critical audience. Congressional Democrats, cheered by the outcome of the recent elections, which would incre
ase their membership in the next House of Representatives from forty-four to seventy-two, could be counted upon to be more partisan than usual, less inclined to follow the lead of a Republican President. Republicans in both houses would likely be more restive, too. Many of the more conservative Republican representatives, especially those from New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, were now lame ducks, and their influence was diminished. The Radical members had a growing sense of desperation. Many feared that Lincoln, after studying the election returns, would fall under conservative influences. Signs of a retreat were discovered in his appointment of Burnside, instead of a Radical general like Joseph Hooker, and they worried that he might renege on his promise to issue a final emancipation decree on January 1. Thaddeus Stevens thought it was urgent to commit the President to a Radical program “before the Locos [i.e., the Democrats] came in.” All expected the message to define the President’s position.
Lincoln did not deliver his message in person to the Congress. Instead, as was customary, his secretary, Nicolay, took the document to Capitol Hill, where a clerk read it aloud. Much of the message was entirely routine in nature, summarizing the work of the departments, usually in words supplied to the President by members of the cabinet. It began with a long account of foreign relations that concluded with a balanced sentence written by Seward: “If the condition of our relations with other nations is less gratifying than it has usually been at former periods, it is certainly more satisfactory than a nation so unhappily distracted as we are, might reasonably have apprehended.” The President then claimed the congressmen’s “most diligent consideration” of financial affairs, and, in passages supplied by Secretary Chase, called for “a return to specie payments ... at the earliest period compatible with due regard to all interests concerned” and urged the creation of a national banking system. The message went on to discuss the condition of the Post Office Department, which reported “much improved” efficiency; of the Department of the Interior, including a summary of the Sioux uprising; and of the newly created Department of Agriculture (which was headed by a commissioner and was not represented in the cabinet).
Lincoln then turned, rather surprisingly, to a restatement of the physical impossibility of separating the United States into two republics and quoted a long extract from his inaugural address on this point. Rather puzzlingly he next paid tribute to the upper Mississippi and Ohio Valley region, which he said was “the great body of the republic.” Having no seacoast, this region could never consent to a partition of the Union that would deprive it of either its Eastern or its Western outlets.
As the clerk droned on, congressmen must have felt that they were listening to a fairly conventional, if not especially well-organized, presidential message, but it came alive when Lincoln reached the topic that really interested him: compensated emancipation. The subject came as a surprise to many, who thought the Emancipation Proclamation had settled that question. But by referring to the Emancipation Proclamation only in passing, Lincoln was expressing his continuing doubts about the efficacy of his decree. In private conversations, even more than in his public message, he was pessimistic, predicting that the Proclamation “would not make a single negro free beyond our military reach.” About this time he entertained a group of clergymen who visited the White House with an anecdote about a case in a Western court where a lawyer tried to establish that a calf had five legs by calling the tail a leg. “But,” said the President, “the decision of the judge was that calling the tail a leg, did not make it a leg, and the calf had but four legs after all.” So, he reminded his guests, “proclaiming slaves free did not make them free.” The President was aware that neither the preliminary proclamation nor the final decree promised on January 1 affected slavery in the border states and in the states of the upper South. Moreover, he recognized that the Emancipation Proclamation had a legal basis only as an act of war. Once peace came, the courts might declare it unconstitutional, or a new administration might retract it.
Consequently his State of the Union address suggested a way of permanently getting rid of slavery throughout the land. In an unusual attempt at executive leadership, the President proposed three amendments to the Constitution. The first authorized the payment of United States bonds to any state that abolished slavery by January 1, 1900; the second guaranteed the freedom of all slaves who “enjoyed actual freedom by the chances of the war” but authorized payment to their masters if they were not disloyal; and the third authorized congressional appropriations for “colonizing free colored persons, with their own consent, at any place or places without the United States.”
The package was new, but the proposals were similar to those the President had put forward in his March message to Congress, and the whole plan was much like the one he had vainly entreated the border-state congressmen to accept in June. Most who were allowed to preview the President’s message judged the plan impracticable. Though touched by the “noble sentiments and admirable language” of the message, Chase advised against including the specifics of the plan, since “there is no probability that a vote of two thirds can be commanded for any amendment of the constitution touching slavery or that any such amendment can obtain the sanction of two thirds of the States.” Browning judged that the President was suffering from a “hallucination” in proposing a scheme which, even if unopposed, would require at least four years to be adopted.
Aware of the difficulties, Lincoln argued for his plan with a passion and eloquence not shown in his public addresses since the Lincoln-Douglas debates. “Mr Lincoln’s whole soul is absorbed in his plan of remunerative emancipation,” David Davis reported, “and he thinks if Congress dont fail him that the problem is solved.” Feeding his uncharacteristic optimism were rumors that Maryland and Kentucky might now be ready to accept compensated emancipation. Moreover, the President thought there was a good possibility—though he was careful not to mention this to Congress—that some of the Southern slave states, or parts of them, would be back in the Union before the end of the year.
Throughout the fall Lincoln had been actively encouraging both Southern Unionists and army officers stationed in the South to bring about what was, in effect, a secession from the Confederacy through the election of loyal representatives and senators, who would ask for their rightful seats in the United States Congress. He had some hope that these elections would take place in the occupied areas of Tennessee, Arkansas, and the Norfolk region of Virginia, but he pinned his hopes on Louisiana, where, he hoped, “gentlemen of character, willing to swear support of the constitution, as of old, and known to be above reasonable suspicion of duplicity,” would take the lead in restoring their state to the Union so as “to have peace again upon the old terms under the constitution of the United States.” “All see how such action will connect with, and affect the proclamation of September 22,” he added significantly. In other words, if the Southern states, or parts of them, set up loyal governments and sent representatives to Congress, they would be exempt from the final proclamation of emancipation.
Elated that he might be able to bring some of the rebellious states back into the Union, and confident that if Burnside or Rosecrans or Grant could inflict a crippling blow on the enemy others would follow, Lincoln foresaw the possibility that by January the war might be nearly over and the Union might be restored—but the United States would still be a slaveholding nation.
This was not a prospect that troubled him for the long run, because he was convinced that slavery was doomed. “He thinks the foundations of slavery have been cracked by the war, by the Rebels,” a visitor reported in November. Consequently the main task now was to plan for a transition from slavery to freedom. Such a plan had to be acceptable to the whites of the border states, whose support Lincoln now needed even more because of Republican defeats in the recent elections, and it had to be attractive to whites in the Deep South, if their newly restored loyalty was to prove genuine. But what concerned him most, the interviewer recorded, was “to provide for the bla
cks—he thinks still that many of them will colonize, and that the South will be compelled to resort to the Apprentice System.” He was confident his plan would meet all these goals.
But if the plan was to work, it would have to be adopted immediately. Time was short because he was firmly committed to issuing his final Emancipation Proclamation on January 1. “From the expiration of the ‘days of grace,’” he told a visitor, “the character of the war will be changed. It will be one of subjugation and extermination.” The prospects for voluntary emancipation in the border states would be diminished. Lost, too, would be the President’s most powerful hold on whites in the Confederacy: the possibility that they could retrieve something from their “peculiar institution” if they returned to the Union.
Behind Lincoln’s urgency was another, less clearly articulated purpose. There had been grave erosion of support in the coalition on which he depended. During the past six months necessity and—as Lincoln thought—Providence had pushed his administration, though in uncertain spurts and starts, in a more radical direction. The Emancipation Proclamation and the removal of McClellan were the most obvious examples. These moves had cost him much of his support from Moderates yet did little to win the support of Radical Republicans. If the President was to survive politically, he had to assert his leadership by moving back toward the center.
That need gave to the State of the Union message what Lincoln himself admitted might seem a tone of “undue earnestness.” Ardently he urged the Congress to unite behind his plan, which “would restore the national authority and national prosperity, and perpetuate both indefinitely.” “The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present,” he reminded the legislators. “The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall our selves, and then we shall save our country.”
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