But when it came to defending specific provisions of the conscription act, which exempted a man from the draft if he provided a substitute or paid a commutation fee of $300, Lincoln’s language became murky and his reasoning tortured. Confusingly, he termed the commutation clause a boon to poor men because without it the price of substitutes might skyrocket, “thus leaving the man who could raise only three hundred dollars, no escape from personal service.” He also had trouble defending the draft quotas allocated to states and districts, arguing that absolute equality was unattainable and adding, somewhat feebly, that “errors will occur in spite of the utmost fidelity.”
It was not a satisfactory document and, probably because he realized he was trying to defend the indefensible, Lincoln shelved it. If he was going to reach out directly to the people, he needed a stronger case.
V
No letter, public or private, could help Lincoln resolve the tangle of problems in Missouri. Still close to the frontier stage of development, with a heritage of violence from the antebellum struggles over Kansas, Missouri was a constant source of difficulty to the Lincoln administration. After General Samuel R. Curtis’s major victory at Pea Ridge, Arkansas, on March 7–8, 1862, organized Confederate military operations in the state ceased, but Southern troops continued to lurk along the border in Arkansas, encouraging and assisting numerous bands of bushwhackers and guerrillas, the most notable of which was the murderous band of William C. Quantrill. The depredations of these pro-Confederate groups were matched by the raids staged by “Jayhawkers” from Kansas, who sought revenge for the destruction wrought by the Missouri “Border Ruffians” during the Kansas imbroglio. As a result, civilian life and property was at risk throughout the state. The sparsely settled western counties became a war zone, and throughout the state there was security only in sight of federal troops or state militia.
After Governor Claiborne F. Jackson fled Missouri in 1861, a state convention named Hamilton R. Gamble, a conservative former Whig, provisional governor, and he continued to hold this office until 1864. Gamble and General John M. Schofield, whom Lincoln appointed to succeed Halleck in Missouri, got along well enough, but after September 1862, when Curtis replaced Schofield, relations between the governor and the military deteriorated. Curtis began to listen to Missouri antislavery men, who complained that Gamble was motivated only by “hunkerism, and a wish for political influence.” Presently the governor and the general were locked in controversy, and both appealed to the President for help.
When the rival factions in Missouri presented clear-cut issues to the President, he had no hesitation in choosing his course—though he sometimes had difficulty in getting his subordinates to follow his orders. In December 1862 when federal troops arrested the Reverend Samuel B. McPheeters, pastor of the Pine Street Presbyterian Church in St. Louis, for “unmistakeable evidence of sympathy with the rebellion,” Lincoln warned General Curtis “that the U. S. government must not... undertake to run the churches” and ordered him to “let the churches, as such take care of themselves.” After an interview with the minister the President was convinced that McPheeters was, at heart, a rebel sympathizer, but so long as he committed no overt act, Lincoln did not want him punished “upon the suspicion of his secret sympathies.” Then, having taken the high ground, he made the mistake of leaving the final decision to General Curtis. Hearing no further complaint, Lincoln supposed that his wishes had been carried out—only to learn, nearly a year later, that Curtis had prohibited McPheeters from preaching in his own church. Exasperated, the President repudiated the military order, making his position explicit: “I have never interfered, nor thought of interfering as to who shall or shall not preach in any church; nor have I knowingly, or believingly, tolerated any one else to so interfere by my authority.”
More complicated Missouri issues the President tried to decide on a case-by-case basis, giving a free hand neither to civilian authorities nor to the military. Pressed by Gamble to rule whether the new militia companies he was raising were going to be under the authority of the governor or the federal commander, Lincoln declined to give an opinion on the abstract merits of the question and demanded to know the consequences of whatever action he might take. “I ... think it is safer,” he wrote Attorney General Bates, with characteristic pragmatism, “when a practical question arises, to decide that question directly, and not indirectly, by deciding a general abstraction supposed to include it, and also including a great deal more.”
As the war progressed, Unionists in Missouri divided into bitterly hostile factions called the “Charcoals” (so called because of their concern for blacks and abolition) and the “Claybanks” (named because their principles were thought to be a pallid gray), and both groups demanded presidential support. Lincoln found it hard to choose between them. Temperamentally he felt closer to the Claybanks (or Conservatives), many of whom were, like himself, former Whigs who had been moderate on the slavery question. Gamble and his fellow Conservatives had loyally stood by the Union in the secession crisis. The President said later that they had “done their whole duty in the war faithfully and promptly” and when they disagreed with the President’s actions had “been silent and kept about the good work.” At the same time, he realized that when it came time to cast about for votes the Conservatives were “tempted to affiliate with those whose record is not clear.” The Charcoals (or Radicals), on the other hand, were ideologues, whose dogmatic support of abolition and assumption of moral superiority Lincoln found hard to endure. But he recognized that the Radicals were “absolutely uncorrosive by the virus of secession.” Personally hostile to the President, they were “the unhandiest devils in the world to deal with,” though he admitted that “after all their faces are set Zionwards.”
He refused to back either faction. When the Radicals charged him with favoring their opponents in a controversy over patronage in St. Louis, Lincoln replied firmly, “I have stoutly tried to keep out of the quarrel, and so mean to do.” But it grew harder and harder to maintain his balance. By May 1863 he was writing with a real note of exasperation: “It is very painful to me that you in Missouri can not, or will not, settle your factional quarrel among yourselves. I have been tormented with it beyond endurance for months, by both sides. Neither side pays the least respect to my appeals to your reason.”
By the end of the month he decided to end this “pestilential factional quarrel” by removing Curtis, who had been charged with being too friendly with the Radicals, and reinstating Schofield, who was thought to be more broadly acceptable. He offered the new commander a simple test for success: “If both factions, or neither, shall abuse you, you will probably be about right. Beware of being assailed by one, and praised by the other.”
By that test Lincoln himself was an enormous success. The Conservatives considered him a prisoner of the Charcoals. The Radicals were convinced that the President was supporting Governor Gamble’s plot to restore the slave power with the aid of Schofield, whose odor in the public nostrils they said was “less fragrant than that of a polecat.”
Both factions began to attack Lincoln. The awkwardness of the President’s position became clear in the summer of 1863, when Missourians were debating plans for the gradual emancipation of the slaves, a topic that had long been dear to Lincoln’s heart. “You and I must die,” he told a congressman, “but it will be enough for us to have done in our lives if we make Missouri free.” Aware that emancipation sentiment in a slave state had to be carefully nurtured, he repeatedly warned against those who urged radical steps. A state like Missouri that tolerated slavery, he suggested, was like a man who had “an excrescence on the back of his neck, the removal of which, in one operation, would.result in the death of the patient, while ‘tinkering it off by degrees’ would preserve life.” He let it be known that “the Union men in Missouri who are in favor of gradual emancipation represented his views better than those who are in favor of immediate emancipation.” But he refused to endorse the Conservatives’ plan,
which would not end slavery in Missouri until 1870 and provided for peonage ranging from eleven years to life. This scheme Lincoln found “faulty in postponing the benefits of freedom to the slave, instead of giving him an immediate vested interest therein.”
Angered by the President’s neutrality, Governor Gamble came to Washington in a vain effort to win his support for the Conservative plan, but he got nowhere. Leaving, he attacked Lincoln as “a mere intriguing, pettifogging, piddling politician.”
Lincoln’s position equally infuriated the Radicals. In September they organized a delegation, headed by Charles D. Drake, to go to Washington and demand the removal of Schofield. They intended to present their demands to the President in the strongest possible terms, giving him, as one said, the choice “whether he would ride in their wagon or not.”
Exasperated by a problem that was taking up too much of his time and attention and angered by Radical attacks on General Schofield, against whom no charge of dishonesty or incompetence had ever been raised, Lincoln gave the Missourians a frosty reception when they came to the White House on September 30. He rejected their demands that he remove Schofield, put the entire state back under martial law, decree immediate emancipation, and authorize the recruitment of Missouri blacks into the army. Informing the Radicals that he understood the causes of the chaos in Missouri as well as they did, he observed that in time of war “blood grows hot, and blood is spilled.... Confidence dies, and universal suspicion reigns. Each man feels an impulse to kill his neighbor, lest he be first killed by him. Revenge and retaliation follow.... But this is not all. Every foul bird comes abroad, and every dirty reptile rises up. These add crime to confusion.” The circumstances required harsh measures to preserve order, and General Schofield had effectively carried those measures out. Bristling, he bluntly declined to remove Schofield and stoutly announced: “I... shall do what seems to be my duty. . . . It is my duty to hear all; but at last, I must... judge what to do, and what to forbear.” The Radicals went home his permanent enemies.
Lincoln no longer believed that he could solve the Missouri question to anyone’s satisfaction, including his own. He had, he told Attorney General Bates, “no friends in Missouri.” The whole issue reminded him of a lesson he had learned as a boy when he was plowing. “When he came across stumps too deep and too tough to be torn up, and too wet to burn,” he said, “he plowed round them.”
VI
Never at his best when dealing with factions within his own party, Lincoln welcomed opportunities to rally behind him all of the Republicans, as well as those Democrats who endorsed his war policies. The approach of the fall elections gave him the opportunity to show that he was still a master politician.
The 1863 elections were crucial for Lincoln and his party. At stake were important local offices throughout the North and, especially, governorships in Maine, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Kentucky, and Iowa. If the strong Democratic resurgence manifest in the fall elections of 1862 continued, Republican chances of winning the next presidential election would be in peril. “All the instant questions will be settled by the coming elections,” reported a White House intimate. “If they go for the Democracy, then Mr. Lincoln will not wind up the war [and] a new feeling and spirit will inspire the South.”
Lincoln watched all these races closely, monitoring frequent reports from Republican workers in the field. Convention prohibited him from taking an active part in most of the canvasses, but, with or without the President’s explicit approval, his aides did whatever was necessary to ensure the defeat of the Democrats. In Kentucky, General Burnside proclaimed martial law, and the imprisonment of Democratic candidates and voters helped secure the election of Governor Thomas E. Bramlette, a “Union Democrat” favored by the Lincoln administration. In Pennsylvania, Republican Governor Curtin was in a close battle for reelection against Pennsylvania Chief Justice George W. Woodward, whose court held preliminary hearings on the constitutionality of the conscription act in September. Secretary Chase rallied banker Jay Cooke and all the others who had benefited from the financial policies of the administration by warning, “Gov. Curtin’s reelection or defeat is now the success or defeat of the administration of President Lincoln.” To strengthen the Republican vote, the President acceded to Curtin’s request and authorized a fifteen-day leave so that government clerks from Pennsylvania could go home to vote, and Secretary of War Stanton permitted commanders to furlough Pennsylvania troops, who could be counted on to vote Republican.
Ohio was a source of special worry to Lincoln, for the Democrats had nominated Vallandigham for governor. The President found it hard to believe that “one genuine American would, or could be induced to, vote for such a man as Vallandigham,” yet he recognized that his opponents saw this election as a means to repudiate his administration. Consequently he watched the Ohio election, he told Gideon Welles, with “more anxiety... than he had in 1860 when he was chosen,” and he encouraged his friends and the members of his administration to work for the election of the Republican candidate, John Brough. In Ohio, as in Pennsylvania, government clerks and soldiers were furloughed so that they could go home to vote. Secretary Chase stumped his home state for Brough, and Governor Yates of Illinois and Governor Morton of Indiana also campaigned for him.
Illinois was also critical, and, as Lincoln’s home state, it offered the one contest in which propriety permitted the President to participate. Republicans thought his presence was badly needed, because Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg had the paradoxical effect of strengthening peace sentiment. Many voters believed that, with the Confederacy on its last legs, it was time to end the fighting and negotiate peace. On June 17, even before those victories, the antiwar forces held a huge rally in Springfield, presided over by Senator William A. Richardson, the Democrat elected to succeed Browning. After listening to angry antiadministration oratory, the mass meeting demanded “the restoration of the Union as it was” and voted against “further offensive prosecution of this war.”
Lincoln believed such resolutions, which were echoed by other antiadministration gatherings all over the North, rested on fundamentally wrongheaded assumptions. A call for the restoration of the Union as it was meant abandonment of the Emancipation Proclamation and all other measures against slavery. It also meant an end to the recruitment of blacks into the Union armies, just at the time when Negro soldiers were proving their valor at Port Hudson on the Mississippi and in Charleston harbor, where black troops of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Colored Infantry, under Robert Gould Shaw, made a heroic but unsuccessful assault on Battery Wagner.
Equally misguided, in the President’s judgment, was talk of negotiated peace. Gettysburg and Vicksburg indicated that Confederate power was at last beginning to disintegrate, and, as he told John Hay, he anticipated “that they will break to pieces if we only stand firm now.” He was convinced that the Confederate army controlled the South. It was Jefferson Davis’s “only hope, not only against us, but against his own people”; without that military control, the Southern people “would be ready to swing back to their old bearings.” Until the Confederate army was ready to sue for peace, there could be no meaningful negotiation. For this reason Lincoln refused to receive Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens, who asked permission to come to Washington under a flag of truce, ostensibly in order to facilitate exchange of prisoners. Curbing his personal wish to go to Fort Monroe for an informal chat with Stephens, the President allowed his cabinet to persuade him not to have any official communication with the Davis government. Even the appearance of peace negotiations would strengthen the enemy.
Eager to put his views before the public, Lincoln welcomed an invitation from James C. Conkling to attend a huge rally “in favor of law and order and constitutional government” at Springfield on September 3. Doubtless he was tempted by Conkling’s promise “that not only would the thousands who will be here be prepared to receive you with the warmest enthusiasm but the whole c
ountry would be eager to extend to you its congratulations on the way.” Conkling reminded him that party activity in Illinois was already spirited and noted, “The Presidential campaign for your successor (if any) has already commenced in Illinois.”
The President really wanted to go back to Springfield, but he was not able to get away from his duties in Washington because Rosecrans had finally begun his long-awaited campaign to maneuver the Confederates out of Chattanooga. Tied to his desk, Lincoln sent Conkling a carefully composed letter to be read to the assembly. “Read it very slowly,” he urged. He wanted his views to be heard and understood.
The letter was a hard-hitting defense of his administration’s policies. Though it began with a tribute to “all those who maintain unconditional devotion to the Union,” it was a frankly partisan message. He dismissed as “deceptive and groundless” charges that he was preventing peace through compromise. Suppressing any notice of Alexander Stephens’s aborted mission, he assured his listeners that he had “no word or intimation... in relation to any peace compromise” from the rebels. He then turned to a defense of his Emancipation Proclamation, which his opponents condemned as unconstitutional. “I think differently,” he stoutly replied. “I think the constitution invests its commander-in-chief, with the law of war, in time of war.” And, according to the laws of war, property, including slaves, could be taken when needed. As a military measure, he had offered the slaves freedom, and he firmly insisted, “The promise being made, must be kept.” To opponents who said that they would not fight to free Negroes, he replied, “Fight you, then, exclusively to save the Union.” But when peace did come, he predicted, “there will be some black men who can remember that, with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet, they have helped mankind on to this great consummation; while, I fear, there will be some white ones, unable to forget that, with malignant heart, and deceitful speech, they have strove to hinder it.”
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