Correctly Lincoln suspected a trap. He could not know why the three Confederate emissaries—former Mississippi Congressman Jacob Thompson, former Alabama Senator Clement C. Clay, and Professor James P. Holcombe of the University of Virginia—were in Canada, but his instincts told him that their purpose was not to make peace but to meddle in Northern politics with a view to influencing the presidential election.
He could not reject the proposed negotiations outright, even though he thought Greeley unreliable and mendacious. But this chosen intermediary of the Confederates had the power to shape Northern opinion. The New York Tribune, widely distributed in the West as well as in the East, boasted the largest national circulation of any newspaper. The editor’s letter, which reminded the President “how intently the people desire any peace consistent with the national integrity and honor” and that an offer of fair terms would “prove an immense and sorely needed advantage to the national cause,” thinly masked a threat to go public in case Lincoln turned down this opportunity. If the Tribune portrayed the President as flatly rejecting a reasonable peace negotiation, it could do irreparable damage.
Shrewdly Lincoln solved his problem by naming Greeley himself as his emissary to the Confederates at Niagara and authorizing him to bring to Washington under safe conduct “any person anywhere professing to have any proposition of Jefferson Davis in writing, for peace, embracing the restoration of the Union and abandonment of slavery.” Greeley objected. For all his countrified looks and his shuffling gait, the editor was no fool, and he was unwilling to become “a confidant, far less an agent in such negotiations.” But the President refused to let him off the hook. “I not only intend a sincere effort for peace,” he wrote Greeley, “but I intend that you shall be a personal witness that it is made.” When Greeley continued to delay, the President expressed disappointment: “I was not expecting you to send me a letter, but to bring me a man, or men.” He then ordered John Hay to accompany Greeley to Niagara Falls, bearing a letter that spelled out the terms on which he was willing to deal with the Confederate emissaries.
Lincoln himself drafted the letter, consulting only Seward. Addressed “To Whom It May Concern,” it read: “Any proposition which embraces the restoration of peace, the integrity of the whole Union, and the abandonment of slavery... will be received and considered by the Executive government of the United States.” It also offered safe-conduct to the Confederate negotiators and “liberal terms on other substantial and collateral points.”
The letter reflected Lincoln’s careful balancing of political considerations against military needs. He could best promote his chances in the fall election by requiring only minimal conditions for beginning negotiations with the Confederates. If he announced that reunification of the nation was the sole condition for peace, he would cement the alliance that he had been trying for months to build with the War Democrats, who loyally supported his efforts to restore the Union, even though many of them had reservations about his emancipation policy. If, as he anticipated, Jefferson Davis rejected this reasonable, lenient offer, these Democrats could more easily favor the reelection of a Republican President.
But there was an unacceptable military risk in this approach. Conceivably the Confederates might accept reunion as a condition for discussing peace. If they did, they could propose a cease-fire during the progress of any negotiations, and Lincoln knew that the people were so war-weary and exhausted that it would be almost impossible to resume hostilities once arms were laid down. “An armistice—a cessation of hostilities—is the end of the struggle,” he concluded, “and the insurgents would be in peaceable possession of all that has been struggled for.”
Consequently he had to appear open to peace negotiations while proposing terms that would make them impossible. The first of his conditions, the restoration of the Union, was easy to predict; that was what the war, from the outset, had been about. But the second, requiring “the abandonment of slavery” as a condition for peace talks, was a surprise. It went considerably beyond his own Emancipation Proclamation or any law of Congress. The Emancipation Proclamation had freed slaves only in specified areas and had not ended the institution of slavery itself, and Congress had just failed to adopt the Thirteenth Amendment outlawing slavery. This condition was one Lincoln knew the Confederates would never accept.
Lincoln expected that the Confederate emissaries would spurn his offer. When they rushed to print his “To Whom It May Concern” letter, in order to show that he had torpedoed meaningful peace talks, he countered by publicizing the report he had just received from James R. Gilmore and James F. Jaquess, who had recently conducted their own unofficial peace mission to Richmond. There Jefferson Davis told them: “The war ... must go on till the last man of this generation falls in his tracks,... unless you acknowledge our right to self-government. We are not fighting for slavery. We are fighting for Independence,—and that, or extermination, we will have.” Reasonable people could only conclude that neither President wanted serious peace negotiations.
III
The New York Herald announced that publication of the President’s “To Whom It May Concern” letter “sealed Lincoln’s fate in the coming Presidential campaign.” By making abolition as much a war aim as Union, the President gave new strength to the Democratic party, preparing for its national convention in Chicago at the end of August. Opposition leaders declared the letter proved Lincoln did not really want to end the war “even if an honorable peace were within his grasp.” “All he has a right to require of the South is submission to the Constitution,” Democratic editors announced. They were sure that “the people of the loyal states will teach him, they will not supply men and treasure to prosecute a war in the interest of the black race.”
The President’s letter also undermined his support in his own party. At first, oddly enough, the erosion was most noticeable among the Radicals. Greeley’s animus toward the President increased after his venture into amateur diplomacy became a subject of ridicule. He was not alone. Radicals, who should have been pleased by the President’s firm insistence on abolition, felt they had Lincoln on the run, and they began to express all their pent-up grievances and frustrations at the President’s slowness, his timidity, his indecisiveness, his fence-straddling, his incompetence, his leniency toward the rebels. Chase, though ostensibly out of politics, spent much of the summer in New England conferring with other anti-Lincoln Republicans and spreading the news that there was “great and almost universal dissatisfaction with Mr. Lincoln among all earnest men.” In Boston he frequently conferred with Sumner, who grumbled that the country needed “a president with brains; one who can make a plan and carry it out.” Pomeroy, the original head of the Chase movement, and Wade, coauthor of the reconstruction bill Lincoln had just vetoed, joined them for a conference, which, as a newspaper correspondent shrewdly surmised, “boded no good to Father Abraham.” Radical disaffection was not confined to New England. In Iowa, Grimes concluded: “This entire administration has been a disgrace from the very beginning to every one who had any thing to do with bringing it into power. I take my full share of the... shame to myself. I can atone for what I have done no otherwise than in refusing to be instrumental in continuing it.”
On August 5 this dissatisfaction with Lincoln exploded with the publication of a protest by Wade and Henry Winter Davis against Lincoln’s “grave Executive usurpation” in pocket-vetoing their reconstruction bill. The congressmen found the President’s public message explaining the reasons for his action even more offensive than the veto. “A more studied outrage on the legislative authority of the people has never been perpetrated,” they fumed; it was “a blow at the friends of his Administration, at the rights of humanity, and at the principles of republican government.” Lincoln must know that “the authority of Congress is paramount and must be respected ... ; and if he wishes our support, he must confine himself to his executive duties—to obey and execute, not make the laws.”
Publication of the Wade-Davis �
��Manifesto,” as it was generally called, produced a short-lived political commotion. Democrats, of course, enjoyed the spectacle of prominent congressional leaders attacking the presidential nominee of their own party, and they congratulated “the country that two Republicans have been found willing at last to resent the encroachments of the executive on the authority of Congress.” The manifesto, according to the New York World, was “a blow between the eyes which will daze the President.” The New York Herald, always glad to jab at the administration, called it an acknowledgment that Lincoln was “an egregious failure” who ought “to retire from the position to which, in an evil hour, he was exalted.” But the rhetoric of the proclamation was so excessive and the accusations against Lincoln so extreme that the charges backfired. Most Republican papers criticized Wade and Davis more severely than they did the President.
Lincoln did not read the manifesto. He had no desire to get involved in a controversy with its authors, he told Welles. The attack saddened him, and he admitted to Noah Brooks, “To be wounded in the house of one’s friends is perhaps the most grievous affliction that can befall a man.” But he refused to brood about it. “It is not worth fretting about,” he joked; “it reminds me of an old acquaintance, who, having a son of a scientific turn, bought him a microscope. The boy went around, experimenting with his glass upon everything One day, at the dinner-table, his father took up a piece of cheese. ‘Don’t eat that, father,’ said the boy; ‘it is full of wrigglers.’ ‘My son,’ replied the old gentleman, taking ... a huge bite, ‘let ’em wriggle; I can stand it if they can.’”
Less public, but more dangerous to the President, was a Radical plan to replace Lincoln, already the official nominee of his party, with another candidate who would be more positive and energetic, who would be more deeply committed to equal rights, and who would, presumably, have a greater chance of success. Little groups of Radicals in Boston, Cincinnati, and, especially, New York concocted plans for summoning a new Republican nominating convention. Some of the schemers favored Chase; others, Butler. Few looked to Frémont, whose candidacy was already failing, and they tried to get him to withdraw from the race on the condition that Lincoln did so. Most put their hopes on Grant.
In a preliminary meeting on August 18, about twenty-five Radicals gathered at the house of Mayor George Opdyke of New York. The editors of the major newspapers—Greeley of the Tribune, Parke Godwin of the Evening Post, Theodore Tilton of the Independent, and George Wilkes of the Spirit of the Times—were present, as were Wade, Davis, and Governor John A. Andrew of Massachusetts. Chase sent his regrets, hoping that the deliberations would be “fruitful, of benefit to our country, never more in need of wise words and fearless action by and among patriotic men.” Sumner too stayed away. “I do not as yet see the Presidential horizon,” he explained. “I wait for the blue lights of [the Democratic convention at] Chicago, which will present the true outlines.” Those who did attend—the diarist George Templeton Strong termed them “our wire-pullers and secret, unofficial governors”—decided to send out a circular letter calling for a new convention, to be held at Cincinnati on September 28, which would “concentrate the union strength on some one candidate who commands the confidence of the country, even by a new nomination if necessary.” Less politely Davis said that the convention was intended “to get rid of Mr Lincoln and name new candidates.” To make final arrangements they promised to meet again on August 30.
Inevitably reports of these plans reached Lincoln’s ears. He was neither surprised nor worried by most of the schemes to replace him as the nominee of the Republican party, but he was alarmed when he heard that the dissidents were thinking of running Grant. He did not think the general had political aspirations but, concluding that he ought to sound him out again, he asked Colonel John Eaton, who had worked closely with Grant in caring for the freedmen in the Mississippi Valley, to go to the Army of the Potomac and ascertain his views. At City Point, Eaton told Grant that many people thought he ought to run for President, not as a party man but as a citizens’ candidate, in order to save the Union. Bringing his hand down on the arm of his chair, Grant replied: “They can’t do it! They can’t compel me to do it!” He went on to say that he considered it “as important for the cause that [Lincoln] should be elected as that the army should be successful in the field.” When Eaton reported the conversation to the President, his relief was obvious. “I told you,” he said, “they could not get him to run until he had closed out the rebellion.”
IV
Lincoln was more troubled by the effect that his “To Whom It May Concern” letter had on the conservative elements of his following. It hit the War Democrats hardest. Charles D. Robinson, Democratic editor of the Green Bay (Wisconsin) Advocate, best expressed their views. Up to now, despite sharp criticism from other Democrats, he had sustained the President’s war policy as the only method of putting down the rebellion. He had even accepted the Emancipation Proclamation, because he believed that depriving the Confederacy of its laborers weakened the rebels. But now, he lamented in a letter to Lincoln, the requirement of the abandonment of slavery as a condition for peace talks “puts the whole war question on a new basis, and takes us War Democrats clear off our feet, leaving us no ground to stand upon.”
Recognizing that Robinson spoke for large numbers of War Democrats, whose support for the National Union ticket was central to his reelection strategy, Lincoln felt compelled to draft a reply. Had he failed to insist on abolition as a condition for peace negotiations, he explained, he would be guilty of treachery to the hundreds of thousands of African-Americans who had “come bodily over from the rebel side to ours.” Such a betrayal could not “escape the curses of Heaven, or of any good man.” Apart from the moral issue, there was the practical consideration that without “the physical force which the colored people now give, and promise us,... neither the present, nor any coming administration, can save the Union.”
But recognizing the genuineness of Robinson’s concerns, the President also sought to soften his policy. “Saying re-union and abandonment of slavery would be considered, if offered, is not saying that nothing else or less would be considered, if offered,” he suggested. “If Jefferson Davis wishes ... to know what I would do if he were to offer peace and re-union, saying nothing about slavery, let him try me.”
The President’s apparent willingness to modify his peace terms in order to hold the allegiance of the War Democrats was echoed the next day in the New York Times: “Mr. Lincoln did say that he would receive and consider propositions for peace,... if they embraced the integrity of the Union and the abandonment of Slavery. But he did not say that he would not receive them unless they embraced both these conditions.”
Lincoln decided to hold his letter to Robinson until he could discuss its contents with former Governor Alexander W. Randall and Judge Joseph T. Mills, both, like Robinson, from Wisconsin. As he talked to them, his impatience with the War Democrats became increasingly evident. If they really wanted to end the war without interfering with slavery, “the field was open to them to have enlisted and put down this rebellion by force of arms... long before the present policy was inaugurated.” But now, if he followed their advice, he would have to do without the help of nearly 200,000 black men in the service of the Union. In that case “we would be compelled to abandon the war in 3 weeks.” Practical considerations aside, there was the moral issue. How could anybody propose “to return to slavery the black warriors of Port Hudson and Olustee to their masters to conciliate the South”? “I should be damned in time and in eternity for so doing,” he told his visitors. “The world shall know that I will keep my faith to friends and enemies, come what will.”
That same afternoon Lincoln tried his letter out on Frederick Douglass, the great African-American spokesman whom he considered “one of the most meritorious men in America.” When Douglass heard that the President would be willing to consider a peace plan that did not include abolition, his eyes flashed in anger and he strongly obj
ected to the letter. “It would be given a broader meaning than you intend to convey,” he warned. “It would be taken as a complete surrender of your antislavery policy, and do you serious damage.”
Touched by Douglass’s earnestness and, no doubt, affected by his own eloquence in the interview with Randall and Mills, Lincoln put aside the letter to Robinson and never sent it. In effect, he gave up on winning the support of the War Democrats, most of whom quietly returned to their allegiance to the Democratic party in the fall elections.
Even more serious was the erosion of the President’s support among Conservative Republicans. These moderates did not form a cohesive group, either in the Congress or in the country, and their opinions on issues like emancipation and reconstruction covered a broad range. Most recognized that the end of slavery was inevitable but were distressed that Lincoln had now chosen to make abolition a necessary condition for peace negotiations. Claiming to speak for “the great body of the respectable part of the country,” the New York merchant prince William E. Dodge wanted a peace that “would be honorable to the North and so liberal to the South as to give the lie to the assertion that the North hated them and wished to destroy them.” Lincoln’s peace terms suggested that he was “so fully committed to the entire abolition of slavery as a condition of peace that he will use all the power of the Government to continue the war till either the South is destroyed or they consent to give up the slaves.” Many of the Moderates were sure that the President’s policy would strengthen the Confederate will to resist; more were troubled because the President’s policy opened them to attack as abolitionists, miscegenationists, and amalgamationists.
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