Lincoln

by David Herbert Donald

  Arriving about five o’clock at Gettysburg, where David Wills and Edward Everett met his train, Lincoln was relieved to receive a telegram from Stanton: “Mrs. Lincoln informed me that your son is better this evening.” After dinner at Wills’s impressive mansion, Lincoln was called out to respond to a serenade by the Fifth New York Artillery Band. Never happy at extemporaneous speaking, the President apologized that he had “several substantial reasons” for not making a speech, the chief of which was that he had no speech to make. “In my position,” he observed, “it is somewhat important that I should not say any foolish things.” A voice from the crowd said, “If you can help it.” “It very often happens,” Lincoln responded, “that the only way to help it is to say nothing at all.”

  Disappointed at hearing only what the Dutch ambassador scornfully called one of Lincoln’s “pasquinades,” the crowd moved on to serenade Seward, who gave them the kind of speech they wanted, praising the United States as “the richest, the broadest, the most beautiful, the most magnificent, and capable of a great destiny, that has ever been given to any part of the human race.” But Seward’s tone of reconciliation with the rebellious Southerners as friends and brothers and his insistence that the sole objective of the war was to establish “the principle of democratic government” were not exactly in tune with the message that the President proposed to deliver the next day. Perhaps partly for this reason Lincoln, after working for a while in his room at Wills’s house to prepare a clean copy of his remarks, took it over to Seward’s room, where he presumably read it to the Secretary.

  On the morning of the nineteenth Lincoln, after giving the final touches to his address, made a clear copy and appeared at the door of the Wills house at about ten o’clock, dressed in a new black suit, with which the white gauntlets he was wearing sharply contrasted. His stovepipe hat bore a black band, to indicate that he was still mourning the death of his son Willie. After he mounted his horse, which some observers thought too small for so tall a man, there was a considerable delay before the procession got under way, and the President spent the time shaking hands with the well-wishers who crowded about him. Finally the procession began, with four military bands providing music, and the President, along with his three cabinet officers, representatives of the military, and members of the Cemetery Commission representing the various states, made a slow march of about three-quarters of a mile to the burial ground. Recognizing the solemnity of the occasion, the President appeared somber and absorbed in thought.

  At the speakers’ platform, where he was joined by several governors of Northern states, Lincoln had to wait again until Edward Everett appeared. The Massachusetts orator, who was suffering from bladder trouble, knew that the occasion was going to be physically taxing, and he had arranged for a small tent to be erected at one end of the platform so that he might relieve himself before beginning his oration. After an interminable invocation by the chaplain of the House of Representatives, which the irreverent John Hay called “a prayer which thought it was an oration,” Everett began his two-hour address. Contrary to expectations, it was not full of purple passages or rhetorical ornamentation. For the most part, it was a clear exposition, based on information provided by General Meade and others, of just what had happened during those fiercely hot three days in July, when the nation’s life hung in the balance. Everett had committed his long oration to memory, and most in the audience thought he recited it perfectly, though he himself noted that “parts of the address were poorly memorized, several long paragraphs condensed, [and] several thoughts occurred at the moment as happens generally.” Even though many in the audience had been standing for four hours, they listened with absorbed interest, and only toward the end did some break away from the crowd and begin informal exploration of the battlefield. It was a moving address and, according to Benjamin B. French, left “his audience in tears many times during his masterly effort.” When Everett concluded, the President pressed his hand with great fervor and said, “I am more than gratified, I am grateful to you.”

  Then, after French’s unmemorable hymn, hastily composed for the occasion, Lamon introduced the President of the United States. With his high, penetrating voice, in which some listeners detected a strong Kentucky accent, Lincoln began. A little restive after Everett’s long oration, many in the crowd focused on the unsuccessful efforts of a photographer to get his equipment in place to take a picture of the President. Expecting another long speech, most thought that Lincoln was only getting under way when he pledged “that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth” and sat down. So brief were his remarks that those in the audience came away with very different recollections of the occasion—whether Lincoln read his manuscript or relied on his memory, whether he made gestures, whether he inserted the phrase “under God” in his promise of a new birth of freedom, whether he was interrupted by applause.

  Immediately afterward, Lincoln may have felt that his Gettysburg address was not successful. “Lamon, that speech won’t scour!” he is supposed to have said, referring to the plows used on the western prairies that failed to turn back the heavy soil and allowed it to collect on the blade. If he felt disappointment, it may have been because during so short an address there was no time to build up the sort of rapport that a speaker needs with his audience, and its abrupt ending left listeners with a sense of being let down. No doubt his judgment was also affected by his fatigue and by illness, which would prostrate him by the time he returned to the White House.

  But responses to his address quickly made it clear that, however his words affected his immediate audience, they reached the general public. Most newspapers reporting the Gettysburg ceremonies properly devoted most of their attention to Everett’s oration, but praise for the President’s address mounted. “The dedicatory remarks by President Lincoln will live among the annals of man,” announced the Chicago Tribune, in one of the earliest expressions of appreciation. In the Washington Chronicle, John W. Forney wrote that Lincoln’s address, “though short, glittered with gems, evincing the gentleness and goodness of heart peculiar to him.” The Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican carried a more extensive evaluation, probably written by Josiah G. Holland, who called Lincoln’s “little speech ... deep in feeling, compact in thought and expression, and tasteful and elegant in every word and comma.” “We know not where to look for a more admirable speech than the brief one which the President made,” declared the Providence Journal, asking whether “the most elaborate and splendid oration [could] be more beautiful, more touching, more inspiring, than those thrilling words of the President.” “The few words of the President were from the heart to the heart,” wrote George William Curtis, the editor of Harper’s Weekly, who called the address “as simple and felicitous and earnest a word as was ever spoken.”

  The impact of the speech could be measured in the number of times that the President was asked to provide autograph copies of his Gettysburg address. There are at least five copies in Lincoln’s own handwriting—more than for any other document Lincoln wrote—and doubtless others have been lost.

  Another measure of its significance was the criticism that opponents leveled against it. The earliest attacks simply condemned “the silly remarks of the President,” but abler critics recognized the importance of Lincoln’s argument. Accusing the President of “gross ignorance or willful misstatement,” the New York World sharply reminded him that “This United States” was not the product of the Declaration of Independence but “the result of the ratification of a compact known as the Constitution,” a compact that said nothing whatever about equality. Similarly Wilbur F. Storey of the ultra-Democratic Chicago Times recognized that in invoking the Declaration of Independence Lincoln was announcing a new objective in the war. Calling the Gettysburg address “a perversion of history so flagrant that the most extended charity cannot regard it as otherwise than willful,” Storey insisted that the officers and men who gave their lives at Gettysburg
died “to uphold this constitution, and the Union created by it,” not to “dedicate the nation to ‘the proposition that all men are created equal.’” The bitterness of these protests was evidence that Lincoln had succeeded in broadening the aims of the war from Union to Equality and Union.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Greatest Question Ever Presented to Practical Statesmanship

  Lincoln returned from Gettysburg with a fever, and his doctor put him to bed, diagnosing varioloid, a mild variant of smallpox. For the next three weeks he remained under quarantine in the White House, seeing few visitors and transacting little public business. But he remained in good spirits, and newspapers reported that he was able to joke that his illness gave him an answer to the incessant demands of office-seekers. “Now,” he is supposed to have said, “I have something I can give everybody.”

  His convalescence gave him an opportunity to reflect on the tasks that still lay ahead of him. The most immediate of these was the drafting of his annual message to Congress, which assumed great importance because it would deal with the thorny question of the terms on which the rebellious Southern states could be restored to the Union. This, the President believed, was “the greatest question ever presented to practical statesmanship.” Intertwined with this issue was rivalry over the next Republican presidential nomination. And affecting all were the operations of the Union armies. If the armies continued to be victorious and if the President could secure the united backing of his party, the prospects for his reelection and for his program of reconstruction were good.

  I

  In the fall of 1863, Lincoln occupied a commanding political position. His recent public letters had done much to rally public opinion behind his administration. The fall elections demonstrated the strength of his popular following and the resilience of his party. In military affairs, too, things were looking up. In November decisive Union victories of Grant, Sherman, and George H. Thomas at Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge pushed the rebels out of most of Tennessee and opened the way for a drive into Georgia, the heartland of the Confederacy. In foreign affairs as well the administration scored victories. In September the decision of the British government to seize the formidable rams being built for the Confederacy in the Laird shipyards ended the last major threat to the Union blockade and vindicated Lincoln’s and Seward’s diplomacy. That same month the arrival of Russian fleets at Atlantic and Pacific ports, sent in reality to keep them from being bottled up in the Baltic in the event of a likely war with Great Britain, suggested to most Americans that the Czar’s sympathy for the Union cause would lead him to block any British or French intervention in the American Civil War. To celebrate this unlikely liaison between the most autocratic and the most democratic rulers in the world, the Lincolns gave a reception for the Russian visitors, who, as John Hay commented, were “fiendishly ugly,” and demonstrated “vast absorbent powers.”

  To be sure, the President would have to work with reduced majorities in the Thirty-eighth Congress, scheduled to assemble in December, whose membership reflected Republican defeats in the 1862 elections, but it was possible that a smaller group of Republicans might give him more consistent support than the unwieldy majorities of the previous Congress. Throughout the fall Lincoln closely monitored the preliminary steps toward the organization of the new Congress. Warned that Emerson Etheridge, the clerk of the House of Representatives, was planning to take advantage of a technicality and refuse to accept the credentials of Republican congressmen, thus throwing the organization of the House into the hands of the Democratic minority, the President urgently wrote Republican leaders in all the Northern states to make sure that representatives arrived in Washington with impeccably correct credentials. He insisted that all Republican members should be present on the day the House was organized. If Etheridge persisted in his scheme, the President remarked grimly, he would “be carried out on a chip,” and he promised to have a troop of soldiers ready to assist.

  With that danger, real or imaginary, averted, the President turned his attention to the election of a new Speaker of the House. The leading candidate was Schuyler Colfax of Indiana, whom Lincoln considered “a little intriguer,—plausible but not trustworthy.” In addition, the President remembered that Colfax had been the special protégé of Secretary Chase, Horace Greeley, and other Radical Republicans. For a time he put his hopes on Frank Blair—the brother of Postmaster General Montgomery Blair—who had recently been reelected to Congress from Missouri as a Conservative Republican but had strong ties to War Democrats throughout the North. The selection of Blair would give Lincoln a Congress controlled by a centrist coalition. It would, in effect, ratify the transformation of the Republican party into a National Union party, a change that the President’s strongest supporters had for some time been advocating.

  The problem was that Blair was also a major general in Sherman’s army in Tennessee. Lincoln urged him to “come here, put his military commission in my hands, take his seat, go into caucus with our friends, abide the nominations, help elect the nominees, and thus aid to organize a House of Representatives which will really support the government in the war.” If elected Speaker, Blair would preside over a House majority that would strongly back the President’s policies; if defeated, he could resume his commission and rejoin the army. But when Blair, who was in hot pursuit of the Confederates in eastern Tennessee, did not arrive in Washington in time for the organization of Congress, Lincoln quietly began to campaign for the selection of his old friend Illinois Representative E. B. Washburne as Speaker. After Washburne’s candidacy failed to take off, the President invited Colfax to the White House and secured from the slippery Indiana congressman what was not exactly a pledge of support but a promise of neutrality in the upcoming fights in Congress between Radicals and Conservatives.

  Those contests, it was clear, would center on how to restore the Southern states to the Union. This was not a new problem for Lincoln. In a sense he had been dealing with it since the outbreak of the war. Early in the conflict his use of federal troops to hold Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri in the Union had brought about a reorganization of the governments of those states and a change in the relationship between local and national authorities. In 1862 he had taken a further step toward reconstruction by appointing military governors for Tennessee, Louisiana, Arkansas, and North Carolina. But these had been essentially military measures, designed primarily to end the war. Now, after the decisive Union victories at Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga, when the collapse of the Confederacy seemed imminent, pressure grew for a clear statement of the terms of reconstruction.

  Lincoln was aware of three possible plans. The first was advocated by Democrats ranging from the pro-Confederate Fernando Wood of New York to the staunchly Unionist Reverdy Johnson of Maryland; it called for the President to withdraw the Emancipation Proclamation and to offer a general amnesty to the rebels. The Southern states, which had never legally been out of the Union, would simply send new congressmen to Washington, and the war would be over.

  Conservative Republicans made Liberty as well as Union their war aim. Apart from insisting on the Emancipation Proclamation, they favored generous terms for the conquered South. Seward let it be known that he hoped that no conditions, beyond the emancipation of the slaves, would be imposed on the returning rebels, and his powerful friend Thurlow Weed believed that Southern planters, mostly former Whigs like himself, would recognize the impending defeat of the Confederacy and lead their states back into the Union. Montgomery Blair wanted the President to appeal to the small farmers of the South to overthrow their slaveholding leadership and return to the Union. The Postmaster General also favored the compulsory deportation and colonization of the freed blacks.

  Radical Republicans sought to add Equality as a third war aim. Most called for a drastic reorganization of Southern social and economic life before the rebellious states could be readmitted. Thaddeus Stevens, the powerful head of the House Ways and Means Committee, favored
treating the South as a conquered province, wholly subject to the legislative will of the Congress. In a more elaborate argument, Charles Sumner maintained that the rebellion had vacated all government in the South and the region now fell under the exclusive jurisdiction of Congress, like any other national territory. It followed that slavery, which could not exist without the protection of positive law, was abolished in the entire region—not merely in the more limited areas designated in Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. It was the duty of the Congress to ensure that all citizens in the South, regardless of race, were guaranteed the equal protection of the law. Moreover, Sumner argued, “as a restraint upon the lawless vindictiveness and inhumanity of the Rebel States,” Southern lands should be “divided among patriot soldiers, poor whites, and freedmen.”