Lincoln

by David Herbert Donald

  That many Republicans of all factions were ready to court-martial the President at the first safe opportunity was evident in the early months of 1863. When Richard Henry Dana, Jr., the Massachusetts author and lawyer, went to Washington in March, he found “the most striking thing is the absence of personal loyalty to the President. It does not exist.” Conservatives like Murat Halstead, editor of the influential Cincinnati Commercial, thought the President “an awful, woeful ass,” and protested, “If Lincoln was not a damn fool, we could get along yet.” Radicals were equally censorious. One Michigan resident thought the President “so vacillating, so week [sic] ... so fearful... and so ignorant... that I can now see scarcely a ray of hope left.” Another predicted that “the administration of Abraham Lincoln will stand even worse ... with posterity than that of James Buchanan.”

  While Moderate Republicans sought to make Seward or the Blairs the dominant force in Lincoln’s cabinet, Radical Republicans pressed for the elimination of Conservatives from the administration. The chief object of their attack continued to be Secretary of State Seward, whose “perverse, unfaithful and insidious policy” Radicals blamed for the failures of the Union armies. Zachariah Chandler, the outraged Radical senator from Michigan, was almost convinced that Seward was “a traitor out and out.” James W. White, a zealous anti-Seward judge in New York, launched a petition drive for the removal of the Secretary, and it received the endorsement of Radicals like Trumbull and Thaddeus Stevens, though Sumner, who hoped to succeed Seward in the State Department, declined to sign it. At one point in January, Stevens contemplated introducing a resolution expressing a lack of confidence in the Lincoln administration, and the Republican congressional caucus considered sending another delegation to the White House demanding the removal of Seward.

  When the Radicals found they could not revolutionize the administration, they tried to reform it. One of their targets was military leadership. They charged that the principal officers in the army were, or had been, Democrats, who were suspected of lacking enthusiasm for the Union cause and, more particularly, of sabotaging emancipation. Just as Moderates kept pressing the President to reinstate McClellan, so Radicals insisted that he give another command to General Benjamin F. Butler. This paunchy, cross-eyed Massachusetts politician, a staunch Democrat before the war, was a recent ardent convert to Radicalism. During his command of captured New Orleans he had vigorously suppressed pro-Confederate sentiment in that rebellious city, helped to emancipate the slaves, and enlisted freedmen in the Union army. But he had also tolerated—and perhaps participated in—fraud and peculation, and Lincoln had felt compelled to replace him. Now, pressed by Sumner, whom he needed to appease, Lincoln considered sending Butler back to the lower Mississippi Valley to help recruit black troops, but the appointment was not prestigious enough for the ambitious general, who preferred to be near the center of power in Washington. Butler had to be content with an invitation to an informal dinner at the White House.

  Radicals did not fare much better in promoting the elevation of Frémont, who was dear to them because of his early attempts to emancipate the slaves in Missouri. But Frémont carried much baggage with him. His administration of the Department of the West was scandal-ridden, and he had there made mortal enemies of the powerful Blair family. Subsequently he had served without distinction in the Shenandoah Valley but had resigned in a huff. Under Radical pressure Lincoln conferred with the general during the winter of 1862–1863 and planned to authorize him to recruit a great Negro army, which he hoped would soon be 10,000 strong, but, probably because of the opposition of Halleck, who favored West Pointers, the appointment was never made. Disgruntled, Frémont retreated to New York.

  Increasingly, Radical Republicans came to feel that it was the President, and not just his cabinet members or his generals, who ought to be replaced. Early in the year a group of Radicals met with Vice President Hamlin to offer their support if he declared himself a presidential candidate for 1864. Privately believing that Lincoln was “a good man if there ever was one—But God did not make him of such stuff as these times demand,” Hamlin rebuffed the offer, saying, “I am loyal to Lincoln, and it is our duty now to lay aside our personal feelings and stand by the President.”

  Though some Radicals hoped to bring General Butler, “who is always equal to the emergency (which Mr. Lincoln and the Cabinet never is),” into the administration and give him “almost dictatorial powers,” most came to think that the logical successor to the unsuccessful President was his Secretary of the Treasury. Chase had lost credibility with some senators during the cabinet crisis, but he still had a reputation for being a dynamic leader, a strong administrator, and, above all, an ardent antislavery man. He would be, the veteran abolitionist Joshua R. Giddings predicted, “the only Republican Candidate” in the next election, and there could “be no serious opposition” to him. Chase did nothing to discourage such speculation. Even before the December cabinet crisis he had been writing sympathizers about the need for “a new organization of parties,” which should be “really democratic and really republican,” whose leader would be a former Democrat who was now an earnest Republican. The description exactly fit Chase himself.

  VI

  Battered from all sides, Lincoln grew deeply despondent. In February a close observer, noting that “his hand trembled... and he looked worn and haggard,” felt that the President was “growing feeble.” Admiral John A. Dahlgren, a frequent visitor to the White House, recorded in his diary on February 6, “I observe that the President never tells a joke now.” When the Massachusetts abolitionist Wendell Phillips spoke of Lincoln’s chances for a second term, the President replied, “Oh, Mr. Phillips, I have ceased to have any personal feeling or expectation in that matter,—I do not say I never had any,—so abused and borne upon as I have been.”

  Constantly surrounded by bureaucrats, civilian and military, job applicants, and sightseers, he was the loneliest man in Washington. After Browning was defeated for reelection to the Senate, Lincoln had no personal friends in the Congress. Of the cabinet members he most enjoyed Seward, with whom he liked to exchange stories, but these two men, who first met when they were both adults and prominent politicians, never confided their deepest feelings to each other.

  From Mary he no longer received much emotional support. Still dressed in mourning, she grieved for Willie, and on the anniversary of his death in February, she again felt brokenhearted. “Only those, who have passed through such bereavements, can realise, how the heart bleeds at the return, of these anniversaries,” she wrote Mrs. Gideon Welles. Refusing to let Willie’s memory go, she consorted with spiritualists, notably one Nettie Colburn, who she thought put her in communication with her son’s spirit. Perhaps as many as eight séances were held in the White House itself. Lincoln attended one, but he was not convinced. Presently Mary began to feel that she herself, without the intercession of a medium, could lift the veil that separates the living and the dead and conjure up the spirits of both her dead sons. “Willie lives,” she told her half sister. “He comes to me every night and stands at the foot of the bed with the same sweet adorable smile he always has had.... Little Eddie is sometimes with him.”

  With Mary moving like a cloud of doom, the White House was a depressing place these days. She no longer took much interest in the expensive furnishings and elaborate ornamentation with which she had redecorated the Executive Mansion. The formal receptions, once a source of great pleasure, she now considered a trial, especially when vandals snipped off pieces of the lace curtains or damask draperies as souvenirs or even, as the newspaper correspondent Noah Brooks reported, cut out “small bits of the gorgeous carpet, leaving scars on the floor as large as a man’s hand.” Mary managed to bring herself to attend the huge New Year’s Day reception, but her heart was clearly not in it, and she greeted her guests mechanically.

  There were few entertainments or diversions at the White House now. An exception was a hastily arranged reception for “General Tom Thumb
” (Charles Sherwood Stratton) and his bride, who had just been married on February 10 in New York. Mary apparently staged the affair out of a sense of duty, but the President thoroughly enjoyed it, bending down from his six-foot-four-inch height to talk gravely with his three-foot-four-inch guest.

  In her distraught state Mary seemed unaware that her husband needed relief from the ordeal he was undergoing, and Lincoln, protective of his wife’s fragile mental health, did not burden her with his problems. In any event, it was doubtful that she could have been much help. Her sensitive political antennae, which had served them both so well in Springfield, functioned badly in the nation’s capital. Classifying politicians as friends or foes, Mary hated anyone who might be considered a rival to her husband. From the beginning she distrusted Seward and wanted him to resign. She became aware of Chase’s presidential aspirations perhaps earlier than Lincoln himself. From her point of view her husband mishandled the cabinet crisis, because he ought to have used it as an excuse to purge every member except Montgomery Blair, whom she thought loyal to Lincoln. Her eccentric judgment troubled Lincoln less than her habit of making her views public in conversation or in letters. She never understood that every action of a President’s wife is judged in political terms. Thus she did not see that she was making a political statement when she chose Rhoda White as one of her closest friends; Mrs. White was an unexceptionable lady, but her husband, Judge James W. White, was leading the petition drive to oust Seward from the cabinet. In the circumstances, Lincoln found it best not to confide much in his wife.

  Lincoln drew much comfort from Tad, to whom he became even more attached after the death of Willie. He spent much time playing with the boy, and he helped him raise his kitten and train his dog, “a very cunning little fellow,” according to Leonard Swett, who “runs about the house,... Barks and stands straight up on his hind feet—holds his fore feet up.” Bright and affectionate, Tad was also wholly undisciplined. The nine-year-old boy could still not dress himself, and, despite the efforts of a series of tutors, he could neither read nor write. Lincoln refused to worry over his slowness in such matters. “Let him run,” said his father; “there’s time enough yet for him to learn his letters and get pokey.” Because of his speech defect most people could not understand Tad, but his father always could—and he knew how frustrated the child became when he could not express himself. Consequently even when Tad burst in on cabinet meetings, jabbering something to “Papa-day,” as he called his father (perhaps he meant to say something like “Papa dear”), the President interrupted everything to give the lad his full attention. In turn, Tad adored his father, and he would often hang around the President’s office until late at night, sometimes falling asleep on one of the couches or chairs. When Lincoln got ready to retire, he would pick the boy up and carry him off to his big bed, where Tad now mostly slept.

  For more mature companionship Lincoln did not look to his oldest son, Robert, who was off studying at Harvard College most of the year. In his own way he was proud of Robert and he bragged to visitors that his son was getting “the best of educations,” even if “it was hard for him to afford it.” But in an obscure way he viewed his eldest as a competitor. “Bob was brighter than himself, he had never had but one year of education,” he remarked, “but he guessed Bob would not do better than he had.” When Robert spent his holidays in the White House, Washingtonians thought him a good-looking young man with excellent manners and, in private conversation, a good sense of humor. But he felt stiff and awkward around his father, and the two never seemed to find anything to say to each other. It was rather a relief to everybody when Robert had to go back to Cambridge.

  In his two secretaries Lincoln found the sons that Robert could never be. Working side by side for long hours with John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Lincoln came to know these young men extremely well and to enjoy their company. Because they lived right in the White House, he got in the habit of dropping in on them at night to chat and review the day’s news. Once at midnight he came in, laughing, to read them an amusing poem by Thomas Hood, “seemingly utterly unconscious,” Hay noted in his diary, “that he with his short shirt hanging above his long legs and setting out behind like the tail feathers of an enormous ostrich was infinitely funnier than anything in the book he was laughing at.”

  He valued their absolute loyalty. They, in turn, watched him grow into the presidency, and admired the skill with which he operated the levers of power. They revered him as “a backwoods Jupiter” who wielded “the bolts of war and the machinery of government with a hand equally steady and equally firm.” His secretaries were among the first to recognize Lincoln’s mastery of the English language. As a graduate of Brown University, Hay felt he had to deplore “some hideously bad rhetoric—some indecorums that are infamous” in Lincoln’s public papers, yet he recognized these documents would take their “solid place in history, as a great utterance of a great man.” Bonding to the President, they resented anyone else who tried to get close to him. A fierce rivalry developed between the two secretaries and Mrs. Lincoln. Ostensibly their clashes had to do with the management and refurbishing of the White House, but at base they stemmed from jealousy over the President’s affections.

  VII

  Aware of his unpopularity during these early months of 1863, Lincoln thought he understood the cause. When a group of New England abolitionists descended on the White House to complain that the Northern people believed the Emancipation Proclamation was not being honestly carried out by the generals and soldiers in the field, the President replied: “My own impression... is that the masses of the country generally are only dissatisfied at our lack of military successes. Defeat and failure in the field make everything seem wrong.”

  During this time, when his generals and admirals were concerting plans for a new assault upon the Confederacy, he did what he could to ensure success. It was his job to see that the commanders had everything they required in the way of men and weapons. Manpower now posed a real problem. There had been severe losses in a contest that had now lasted nearly two years. The terms for which many regiments had enlisted were about to expire, and soldiers wanted to go home. Thousands were absent without leave, and Lincoln’s offer of amnesty to those who returned to their regiments had only limited success. There were almost no new volunteers. It would be months before the new conscription act could bring in recruits.

  Reluctantly, and after great hesitation, Lincoln turned to the one source of manpower he had vowed he could never use: African-Americans. It was a move that many abolitionists and black leaders had been urging since the beginning of the war. Frederick Douglass demanded, “Let the slaves and free colored people be called into service, and formed into a liberating army, to march into the South and raise the banner of emancipation among the slaves.” But powerful conservative voices opposed the idea. Some maintained that Negroes would never fight, so that arms given to them would simply be seized by the Confederates; others predicted that armed blacks would rise against their masters and make of the South another Santo Domingo. Though the Confiscation Act of July 1862 specifically authorized Negro enlistments, the President was averse to pursuing so revolutionary a policy. When General David Hunter, in the Department of the South, attempted to raise black regiments in South Carolina, the President overruled him, stating that he “would employ all colored men as laborers, but would not promise to make soldiers of them.”

  Lincoln’s resistance to using Negro troops persisted even after he issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. That proclamation was designed to persuade Confederates to return to the Union within one hundred days or else lose their slaves; it would have been illogical and counterproductive at the same time to announce that those slaves who were successful in escaping from their masters would be organized into regiments of the Union army. From Lincoln’s point of view it made more sense to talk of colonizing the blacks out of the country than to plan on making them soldiers. But the movement to enlist black troops had become
irresistible. Even before the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, Stanton, without Lincoln’s knowledge, but also without his disapproval, authorized General Rufus Saxton to enlist blacks in South Carolina; General Benjamin F. Butler began mustering in free men of color in Louisiana; and in Kansas, James H. Lane’s Jayhawkers welcomed recruits of any race.

  Under continuous pressure, especially from Sumner, whose support, or at least neutrality, was needed during the cabinet crisis, Lincoln began to shift his position on Negro troops. Perhaps he was influenced by several talks with Vice President Hamlin, who brought to the White House a delegation of young army officers, including one of his sons, to volunteer for command of colored troops. Surprised and moved that these promising young men were willing to risk their careers in a cause that aroused strong racial prejudice, Lincoln told them, “I suppose the time has come.” Recognizing that the Emancipation Proclamation had “in certain quarters” worked against recruitment for the Union armies, he concluded he ought to “take some benefit from it, if practicable” by enrolling black soldiers.