Rather than defy the President, Chase successfully entreated Cisco to withdraw his nomination, and he forwarded that news to Lincoln, adding self-righteously that in suggesting appointments he took no consideration of politics and simply tried “to get the best men for the places.” Cisco’s decision ended the present difficulty, he thought, but the stiff tone of Lincoln’s letter made him think that his continued service in the cabinet was “not altogether agreeable” to the President. Once again he submitted his resignation.
Lincoln read Chase’s letter as saying: “You have been acting very badly. Unless you say you are sorry, and ask me to stay and agree that I shall be absolute and that you shall have nothing, no matter how you beg for it, I will go.” In the circumstances he felt he had no choice but to accept Chase’s resignation. “Of all I have said in commendation of your ability and fidelity,” he wrote the Secretary, “I have nothing to unsay; and yet you and I have reached a point of mutual embarrassment in our official relation which it seems can not be overcome, or longer sustained, consistently with the public service.”
Chase was dumbfounded by the failure of tactics that repeatedly worked in the past. It never occurred to him that the Baltimore convention had changed the political landscape. He professed to be unable to understand Lincoln’s letter. “I had found a good deal of embarrassment from him,” he confided to his journal, “but what he had found from me I could not imagine, unless it has been created by my unwillingness to have offices distributed as spoils... with more regard to the claims of divisions, factions, cliques and individuals, than to fitness of selection.”
Chase’s friends rallied to his defense, but Lincoln refused to reconsider his decision. When Governor John Brough of Ohio, who happened to be in Washington, offered to mediate the dispute, Lincoln told him: “This is the third time he [Chase] has thrown this [resignation] at me, and I do not think I am called on to continue to beg him to take it back, especially when the country would not go to destruction in consequence.... On the whole, Brough, I reckon you had better let it alone this time.”
In order to avoid political and financial damage, Lincoln moved swiftly to name a replacement. Without consulting anyone else, he nominated another Ohioan, former Governor David Tod. It was an unfortunate choice, for Tod, as the New York Herald unkindly put it, knew “no more of finances than a post.” He was a hard-money man, opposed to the paper money with which the administration had been conducting the war. Vastly upset, the Senate Finance Committee, headed by William Pitt Fessenden of Maine, came to the White House to urge that Tod’s name be withdrawn, but the President refused. A crisis was avoided when Tod telegraphed his declination, on the grounds of poor health.
The next morning Lincoln nominated Fessenden, who was confirmed in an executive session lasting not more than two minutes. The President had not consulted the senator, who was horrified when he heard the news. Fessenden did not want to leave the Senate, did not want an executive office, and felt physically unable to perform the duties of the job, and he wrote Lincoln a letter declining the appointment. The President refused to receive it. Appealing to Fessenden’s sense of duty, reminding him that “the crisis was such as demanded any sacrifice, even life itself,” he persuaded the senator to reconsider. When Fessenden turned to Stanton for advice, saying that he thought the job would kill him, the Secretary of War responded bluntly, “Very well, you cannot die better than in trying to save your country.” Then telegrams and letters began to pour in, from boards of trade, chambers of commerce, bankers, and public officials, warning Fessenden that he must serve to prevent a financial crisis.
Unhappily he accepted, but not without taking to heart the advice of his close friend, Senator Grimes of Iowa, that he must “make such terms as would prevent you from being slandered and backbitten out of the Cabinet in a few weeks by your associates.” On July 4, Fessenden and the President came to an agreement, which Lincoln put in writing, that the Secretary was to have “complete control of the [Treasury] department.” “I will keep no person in office in his department, against his express will,” the President promised; and Fessenden agreed that in appointing subordinates he would “strive to give his willing consent to my wishes in cases when I may let him know that I have such wishes.”
With his cabinet reconstituted, Lincoln turned to asserting his leadership of the Republican party in the Congress. By the end of June 1864 the first session of the Thirty-eighth Congress was drawing to an end, a session marked more by rancorous squabbling than by constructive legislation. Congressional Republicans were now more sharply divided into Radical and Conservative factions, both of which were critical of the President. Congressmen found many grounds of complaint, and most shared a sense that the executive branch had aggrandized itself during the war at the expense of the legislative branch. On no issue was there more hostility to the President than on reconstruction. Support of Lincoln’s 10 percent plan dropped sharply after Banks permitted the reconstructed government of Louisiana to preserve that state’s antebellum constitution, which failed to protect the rights of blacks. To show their disapproval, majorities in both houses of Congress refused to seat persons claiming to represent Louisiana and Arkansas. United in opposing the President’s wishes, the Republican majority in Congress was slow to agree on alternative positive actions. They failed to establish a much needed Freedmen’s Bureau, intended to oversee the transition of African-Americans from slavery to freedom, and they could not muster a sufficient majority to adopt the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, which the President and the National Union Convention had strongly urged.
In the final days of the session, when many members were absent, Republican leaders suddenly realized that they were about to adjourn without having passed any significant legislation concerning slavery, the freedmen, or reconstruction. Hastily they turned to a bill that Henry Winter Davis called “the only practical measure of emancipation proposed in this Congress.” Called the Wade-Davis bill, after the chairmen of the House and Senate committees that sponsored it, the measure asserted congressional, rather than executive control over the reconstruction process. It required, as a first step in the reorganization of any Southern state, the complete abolition of slavery. The bill specified that 50 percent, rather than 10 percent, of the 1860 voters must participate in elections to reconstitute these governments. Further, it imposed on electors of constitutional conventions in the seceded states what was called an “iron-clad” oath of loyalty, requiring them to swear that they had never voluntarily borne arms against the United States or aided the rebellion, rather than the oath of prospective loyalty in Lincoln’s plan of amnesty.
Passed by Congress on July 2, the bill reflected Davis’s personal hostility toward Lincoln for siding with the Blairs, the leaders of the rival Republican faction in Maryland. It also demonstrated the continuing opposition on the part of some Radical Republicans to Lincoln’s reelection, despite his renomination by the Baltimore convention. Looking toward an alternative or third-party candidacy for the presidency, they feared that Lincoln might win reelection through the electoral votes of states under military control, like Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee, which were in effect pocket boroughs.
Faced with a revolt on the part of Republican congressional leadership, Lincoln decided to reassert his authority. Indeed, he had to do so if he hoped to keep together the tenuous coalition of War Democrats and Republicans on which his reelection campaign rested. Rumors spread that he was not going to sign the bill. Two days before adjournment, Representatives Thaddeus Stevens, E. B. Washburne, and John L. Dawson of Pennsylvania descended on the White House officially to ask if the Chief Executive had any further messages to transmit to the Congress but actually to urge Lincoln to approve the Wade-Davis bill. After greeting his visitors, Lincoln sat down at his desk, turned his back on them, and resumed his work, merely tilting his head a little as Stevens read the official message. Dawson thought the President looked “as if he was ashamed of himself, out of place,�
�� and the representatives returned to Capitol Hill suspecting that Lincoln would veto the reconstruction bill. Hearing their news, Representative Jesse O. Norton, a Radical from Illinois and an old friend of the President, rushed to the White House, and he too got the impression that Lincoln would not sign. Lincoln was about to make a great mistake, Norton reported, but there was “no use trying to prevent it.”
As Congress tried to complete its business by noon on July 4, the President was in his room at the Capitol examining and signing numerous measures that had been passed during the final hours of the session. Intensely anxious about the fate of the Wade-Davis bill, Republican senators and representatives gathered about him and watched him push that measure aside. When Zachariah Chandler, the Radical senator from Michigan, came in, he asked the President whether he was going to sign, and Lincoln replied with some impatience, “Mr Chandler, this bill was placed before me a few minutes before Congress adjourns. It is a matter of too much importance to be swallowed in that way.”
Warned by Chandler that the veto “will damage us fearfully in the Northwest,” Lincoln defended his action on the ground that Congress had no authority to abolish slavery in the reconstructed states. When Chandler reminded him that this was no more than what he himself had done, the President testily replied, “I conceive that I may in an emergency do things on military grounds which cannot be done constitutionally by Congress.” He further objected to the bill because he believed incorrectly that it implied that the rebellious states were no longer in the Union. “Now we cannot survive that admission, I am convinced,” he told the little group around him, and he reminded them that the whole war was fought on the assumption that it was not possible for a state to secede. “If that be true, I am not President, these gentlemen are not Congress.”
As he left the Capitol, he was warned that offending the Radicals might hurt his chances in the November election, and he responded with controlled anger: “If they choose to make a point upon this I do not doubt that they can do harm. They have never been friendly to me and I don’t know that this will make any special difference as to that. At all events, I must keep some consciousness of being somewhere near right: I must keep some standard of principle fixed within myself.”
After he had cooled off a little, Lincoln decided to pocket-veto the Wade-Davis bill—that is, to decline to sign it, so that, with the adjournment of Congress, it would fail to become law. He took his case to the people by issuing a proclamation explaining his decision. He was not prepared “to be inflexibly committed to any single plan of restoration,” he wrote; nor was he prepared “to declare, that the free-state constitutions and governments, already adopted and installed in Arkansas and Louisiana, shall be set aside and held for nought, thereby repelling and discouraging the loyal citizens who have set up the same, as to further effort.” He was unwilling to acknowledge “a constitutional competency in Congress to abolish slavery in States.” Then, attempting to paper over differences with the Congress, he declared that he was “fully satisfied with the system for restoration contained in the Bill, as one very proper plan for the loyal people of any State choosing to adopt it,” and he offered assistance to any state that decided to do so. The assurance was virtually meaningless, however, since the terms imposed by Congress were so much harsher than those required under the presidential plan of reconstruction.
Radicals reacted angrily to the defeat of the Wade-Davis bill. The President seemed to be toying with them: first he used a pocket veto, a rare procedure up to this time; then he issued what was in effect a veto message, which was not required for a pocket veto; and finally he suggested that some Southern states might want to accept the conditions laid down in the bill he had just killed. According to a newspaperman, Davis, “pale with wrath, his bushy hair tousled, and wildly brandishing his arms, denounced the President in good set terms.” “I am inconsolable,” Charles Sumner grieved. But other congressmen, who perhaps had not paid careful attention to the debates on the measure, “began to wish that it had never gone to the President.” Resentment continued to smolder against Lincoln, but he remained in control of the field, clearly in charge both of his cabinet and of the reconstruction process.
V
How long he would remain in charge depended on the outcome of military operations, and the prospects were gloomy. By July it seemed that Grant’s campaign—which followed Lincoln’s grand strategy—was a failure. In the West, Banks’s army was demoralized after the failed Red River expedition, and it was months before General Edward R. S. Canby, who superseded Banks, was able to take to the field in a drive against Mobile. In Georgia, Sherman pushed the Confederates under Joseph E. Johnston back toward Atlanta, but the Southerners repeatedly escaped the traps he set for them. Eventually Sherman grew so exasperated that he ordered a direct attack on the entrenched Confederates at Kennesaw Mountain, where on June 27 he met a bloody defeat.
In the East, Butler allowed his Army of the James to be hemmed in on a peninsula between the James and the Appomattox rivers, and there, as Grant remarked acidly, his army was as useless “as if it had been in a bottle strongly corked.” In the Shenandoah Valley, Franz Sigel suffered a serious defeat at New Market on May 15 and had to be removed from command. His successor, David Hunter, began a campaign of devastation in the Valley, but when Lee sent in troops under Jubal A. Early, Hunter retreated into the Kanawha Valley, leaving the Shenandoah an open corridor for the Confederates.
Most serious of all were the reverses of the Army of the Potomac, over which Grant personally presided. Failing to overwhelm Lee’s army either in the Wilderness or at Spotsylvania, Grant ordered the senseless and doomed charge at Cold Harbor. After this defeat he no longer talked about fighting it out on this line, because he had learned a lesson: “Without a greater sacrifice of human life than I am willing to make, all cannot be accomplished that I had designed.”
In a shift of strategy, on June 14 he began moving the Army of the Potomac through the swamps of the Chickahominy River, where McClellan’s troops had fought in 1862, to the south side of the James River. There the Army of the Potomac, joining with Butler’s army, could be supplied by sea, and there—in a return to Grant’s original strategic plan—it could cut the rail lines that connected Richmond to the South. Grant’s change of base was brilliantly executed, so that Lee had no certain idea of his whereabouts. Once his army had crossed the James, Grant launched an immediate assault on the heavily fortified city of Petersburg, through which three of the key railroads ran. Repulsed, he settled down for a siege. Now, for the first time, he contemplated a campaign of attrition; he would pin Lee’s army down so that no reinforcements could be sent to fight against Sherman.
In six weeks of incessant fighting the Union armies lost in killed and wounded nearly 100,000 men—more than the total number in Lee’s army at the beginning of the campaign. The people of the North, who had been overly optimistic when Grant assumed command of the armies, were slow to realize what was happening. Their newspapers, controlled by War Department censorship, told them that Grant had “won a great victory,” that the Army of the Potomac “again is victorious,” that the troops had been “skillfully, and bravely handled,” and that Grant had “succeeded, if not in defeating Lee, certainly in turning his strong position and forcing him to retreat step by step to the very confines of Richmond.” But then the daily black-bordered newspaper columns listing the dead brought home the enormity of war. So did the stories from newspaper correspondents and the letters from soldiers describing the suffering of the maimed and wounded. As thousands of the injured poured into the hospitals around Washington, it was no longer possible to conceal the costs of the campaign. The country shuddered with a sickening revulsion at the slaughter. Grieving for “our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying country,” Horace Greeley wrote the President of the widespread dread of “the prospect of fresh conscriptions, of further wholesale devastations, and of new rivers of human blood.”
Lincoln himself was sensitive to
the suffering. His friend Isaac N. Arnold recorded that during these days he was “grave and anxious, and he looked like one who had lost the dearest member of his own family.” One evening, after riding past a long line of ambulances carrying the wounded to the hospital, he turned to Arnold in deep sadness and said: “Look yonder at those poor fellows. I cannot bear it. This suffering, this loss of life is dreadful.”
The Lincolns did what they could to mitigate the hardships. Mary Lincoln regularly visited army hospitals, bringing the wounded flowers from the White House conservatory and comforting words. For his part the President set aside a morning of nearly every week to review the court-martial sentences of soldiers who had found the stress of battle more than they could bear. One week he examined the records in sixty-seven cases; in another, seventy-two cases; in yet another, thirty-six cases. Whenever possible he found excuses to release the prisoners and allowed them to return to duty. He was, he explained, “trying to evade the butchering business lately.” But all his exertions could not erase the knowledge that in the final analysis he was responsible for all this suffering.
Increasingly he brooded over the war and his role in it. “Doesn’t it seem strange to you that I should be here?” he once asked Representative Daniel Voorhees of Indiana. “Doesn’t it strike you as queer that I, who couldn’t cut the head off of a chicken, and who was sick at the sight of blood, should be cast into the middle of a great war, with blood flowing all about me?” Often, when he could spare the time from his duties, he sought an answer to his questions in the well-thumbed pages of his Bible, reading most often the Old Testament prophets and the Psalms.
He found comfort and reassurance in the Bible. He was not a member of any Christian church, for he was put off by their forms and dogmas, and consequently he remained, as Mary Lincoln later said, “not a technical Christian.” But he drew from the Scriptures such solace that he was prepared to forget his earlier religious doubts. One evening during this dreadful summer of 1864, his old friend Joshua Speed found him intently reading the Bible. “I am glad to see you so profitably engaged,” said Speed.
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